Reasons for Persian Gulf Oil Abundance

The Persian Gulf area is remarkable for the volume of its oil reserves, the size of individual oil fields, and the productivity of individual wells. The abundance of oil is due not to any single factor but to the coincidence of all the conditions favorable to its generation, entrapment, and preservation. These conditions include a great volume of marine sediments, many of them favorable to the generation of oil; structural and stratigraphic traps which were present during initial migration of the oil; numerous large anticlines; excellent reservoir and cap rocks; and lack of important unconformities in the oil-bearing sediments. Variations in oil gravity may be due to varying amounts of terrigenous source material.