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Abstract

Despite the upcoming shift in energy sources towards the environmentally friendly and renewable, conventional oil and gas resources should not be neglected. Fossil fuels are the current main energy source worldwide, accounting for over 75 % of the total energy budget. Though considerable investments in renewable energy have been made in recent years the dominance of fossil fuels will remain for many years to come. The long-term availability of fossil fuels depends on both effective production techniques of existing known resources, and on new fossil resource discoveries. As far as conventional resources are concerned the exploitation of fossil fuels is becoming more and more expensive; most of the extreme exploration acreage (deep water, sub-salt, climatically hostile environment) is only economically viable at high prices. This implies that pre-drill prediction of oil vs. gas occurrence and oil quality is Crucial for exploration economics. Unconventional energy coming on stream in the USA, and now under rapid development globally, has brought about a fundamental change in global energy resource distribution. Creative geological thinking and basic geoscientific research is needed to understand the fundamental nature and interdependencies of the processes leading to shale gas formation. The project “Gas Shales in Europe (GASH)” and research carried out within the joint research project GeoEn (funded by BMBF) under the coordination of GFZ are the first major scientific initiatives in Europe that are focussed on exploration and production of shale gas putting major emphasis on the investigation of environmental impacts. At the same time basic research approaches focus on how oil and gas fields are charged, and which natural factors control the petroleum quality, gas concentrations and which methods ease the extraction from shales.