About Petroleum Geology and Oilfield Development in Daqing

Petroleum Geology and Oilfield Development in Daqing

Petroleum Geology and Oilfield Development in Daqing is a Chinese-language scholarly journal of petroleum geology and oilfield development, published in Daqing in Heilongjiang Province, northeastern China. Its Chinese title is Daqing Shiyou Dizhi yu Kaifa, and it carries ISSN 1000-3754. Daqing is the home of the Daqing Oilfield, China's largest onshore oilfield, and the journal publishes research on petroleum geology, reservoir characterisation, enhanced oil recovery and oilfield development practice in the Songliao Basin and in other Chinese oilfields. It is indexed in Scopus, and SCImago data record about 125 documents published in the journal in 2025. Articles in the journal are documented from at least the 1980s — a 1984 paper on the conditions for the genesis of subtle oil pools in the Putaohua Formation of the Sanzhao Sag is cited in the geological literature — through volumes in the 2010s and 2020s, including Volume 33 in 2014 and Volume 34 in 2015.

Daqing and the Oilfield That Gives the Journal Its Name

The journal takes its name from Daqing, the oil city in western Heilongjiang built around the Daqing Oilfield. The Songliao Basin experienced massive oil and gas exploration and development in the 1950s, and in 1959 industrial oil flows were obtained successively from wells Songji-3 and Fu-27 in Daqing, an event that commenced the oilfield development of the basin and ushered in a new era in the growth of China's petroleum industry. The Daqing Oilfield was discovered in 1959 and put into development in 1960; it is the largest oilfield in China and one of the few super-large sandstone oilfields in the world. It lies in the mid-western part of Heilongjiang Province, in the northern Songhua-Nenjiang plain, and consists of 52 oil and gas fields — including Saertu, Xingshugang, Lamadian and Chaoyanggou — across an area of some 6,000 square kilometres. The discovery and development of Daqing proved that terrestrial strata could generate oil and give birth to large oilfields, introducing a new domain to the theory of petroleum geology. A journal published in this city, under this title, is therefore the house journal of one of the most studied oilfields on earth.

The Songliao Basin Setting

The journal's principal geological subject is the Songliao Basin, the Mesozoic-Cenozoic basin that hosts Daqing. The basin has a duplex structure: rift development in the Late Jurassic to Early Cretaceous produced thick clastic and volcanic sediments in isolated rift depressions, while sag development in the Upper Cretaceous deposited several kilometres of freshwater lacustrine-deltaic sediments in a giant sag basin. Giant oil discoveries were made by early exploration of structural traps in the Upper Cretaceous strata. With several superimposed petroleum systems, the Songliao Basin is regarded as a super petroliferous basin, with published estimates of some 200 billion barrels of oil and 160 trillion cubic feet of gas in place across its systems. Its principal producing interval is the Upper Cretaceous lacustrine succession, whose source rocks and deltaic reservoirs underpin Daqing's production. Research published in the journal addresses this whole system: the Qingshankou Formation source rocks and tight oil, the Putaohua and other reservoir formations, the deep volcanic gas reservoirs of rift depressions such as Xujiaweizi, and the subtle stratigraphic-lithologic traps toward the basin's distal parts that have offset depletion of the original structural accumulations.

Scope: Geology, Reservoirs and Development Practice

As its title states, the journal joins two subjects that many petroleum journals keep apart: petroleum geology and oilfield development. Its geology coverage includes source-rock evaluation, sedimentary facies, reservoir geology and characterisation, and exploration for new accumulations in mature and frontier parts of the Songliao Basin and other Chinese basins. Its development coverage includes the engineering of producing mature waterflooded oilfields: profile control, polymer and chemical flooding, enhanced oil recovery, residual-oil distribution and the redevelopment of reservoirs after decades of production. The Daqing context makes this second strand distinctive. The Daqing Oilfield produced more than 50 million tons of oil in each of the 27 years after 1976, and more than 40 million tons in each of the eight years that followed — a sustained plateau described as a miracle in the development history of similar oilfields — and by the end of 2009 it had produced 2 billion metric tons of crude, with recovery rates in its major oilfields exceeding 50 per cent, some 10 to 15 per cent higher than comparable oilfields at home and abroad. The techniques that achieved those results — layered waterflooding, infill drilling, polymer flooding and later chemical combination flooding — were developed and documented by the Daqing research community, and this journal is one of the principal Chinese-language records of that work.

Enhanced Oil Recovery and Mature-Field Research

Because Daqing's main fields entered high water-cut production while still holding large volumes of residual oil, enhanced oil recovery is a central theme of the journal. Papers address, for example, the factors influencing deep profile control agents in the thick, heterogeneous reservoirs of the Lamadian Oilfield and their effects on oil production, the evaluation of residual oil distribution in reservoirs such as Gaotaizi, and the application of analytical techniques such as isoparaffin analysis in petroleum geology. In recent years the journal's development coverage has extended to unconventional resources: studies of horizontal-well accurate drilling and geology-engineering integration for continental shale oil in the northern Songliao Basin, and of the tight oil of the Upper Cretaceous Qingshankou Formation, whose total resources in the Daqing exploration area alone are reported to exceed 10 to the power of 9 tons, have appeared in or been cited from the journal. This evolution — from conventional waterflood geology to chemical flooding to shale oil — mirrors the technical history of the Daqing Oilfield itself, and gives the journal a longitudinal value for engineers studying how a super-giant field is kept producing across six decades.

Publication Record

The journal's record in the literature is long. A paper published in 1984, in Volume 3, issue 1, discussed the genesis of subtle oil pools in the Putaohua Formation of the Sanzhao Sag and their exploration — evidence both of the journal's presence in the early 1980s and of how early the Daqing community turned to stratigraphic traps. Citations in international compilations record the journal through the 1990s and 2000s, including isoparaffin-analysis work published in 2000. Volume numbering reached Volume 33 in 2014 and Volume 34 in 2015, consistent with an annual volume sequence. SCImago's journal data, drawn from Scopus, record sustained recent output: about 120 documents in 2024 and about 125 documents in 2025, with an SJR of 0.620 and a Q2 ranking in geochemistry and petrology and geophysics categories in the 2025 data. The journal's h-index in SCImago data stands at 18. Articles carry DOIs in the journal's own series based on ISSN 1000-3754, and are published in Chinese with English abstracts, the standard pattern for Chinese petroleum journals of its generation.

Indexing and International Visibility

The journal is indexed in Scopus, which is the basis of its SCImago presence and of the citation records through which most international readers encounter it. Scopus coverage matters for a Daqing journal because Daqing research is of global interest: the field is one of the world's few super-large sandstone oilfields developed in nonmarine strata, and its production history is a benchmark case in reservoir engineering. The classic international summary of the field, published in the AAPG Bulletin in 1985 by the field's chief geologist, presented Daqing as an example of the geologic and geochemical conditions necessary for a giant field in a basin containing only continental sediments. The Chinese-language journal continues that record at working level, publishing the detailed reservoir, geochemical and development studies on which the field's management rests. Within the WorldNM directory the journal is distinguished from the already-covered Petroleum Exploration and Development and Petroleum Geology and Experiment: those are national titles, whereas this journal is the Daqing-centred title for the Songliao Basin's geology and development.

Readership and Role

The journal's readership is the exploration and development community of the Daqing Oilfield and of China's other mature onshore fields, together with university researchers in petroleum geology and reservoir engineering. Its role is practical as well as academic: papers on profile control, residual oil and shale-oil drilling speak directly to field operations, while its exploration papers extend the basin's life by documenting new plays in deep gas, tight oil and distal stratigraphic traps. For historians and analysts of the petroleum industry, its volumes amount to a continuous technical diary of China's largest oilfield, from the subtle-trap exploration of the 1980s through the chemical-flooding era to the unconventional turn of the 2020s — a record available nowhere else in the same detail.

Identification for Readers and Librarians

The journal should be cited by its full English title, Petroleum Geology and Oilfield Development in Daqing, with ISSN 1000-3754, and its Chinese title Daqing Shiyou Dizhi yu Kaifa. Its place of publication is Daqing, Heilongjiang, and its subject identity is the petroleum geology and oilfield development of the Songliao Basin and comparable Chinese oilfields. It belongs in the magazines category of this directory as a scholarly journal: a Chinese-language, Scopus-indexed periodical whose defining feature is its union of exploration geology with the development engineering of a super-giant, long-lived oilfield.