Separata del libro Petroleum provinces of the twenty-first century publicado por la AAPG en la serie Memoir nro. 74 en 2001

Forty-two sedimentary basins are found in southern South America. They include intraplate and orogenic plate-margin types. Only seven of those basins produce commercial oil and gas. Six of them are in the foreland folded trend (the Subandean Belt), and one is an intracratonic basin located on the Patagonian Platform. In most of those basins, commercial production began in the early part of the twentieth century. Since then, exploration and development work has been concentrated mostly in areas with established productive plays, postponing exploration efforts in the rest of the region. Regional surveys have detected potential petroleum systems in more than one-third of the nonproducing basins. Moreover, in those basins with existing production, underexplored frontier areas still wait to be tested by the drill. In this context, we can define three types of areas with exploration potential: (1) basins that are yet to be explored by the drill, (2) nonproductive basins insufficiently explored, and (3) plays in producing basins that have not yet been tested. Giant fields continue to be discovered in provinces such as the intracratonic rifts, fold belts, and subtle stratigraphic traps. This same concept can be applied to the exploration challenge of the virtually untested South Atlantic margin