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Abstract Hydrocarbons exist in abundant quantity beneath the earth's surface. These hydrocarbons are generally classified as conventional and unconventional hydrocarbons depending upon their nature, geology, and exploitation procedure. Since the conventional hydrocarbons are under the depletion phase, the unconventional hydrocarbons have been a major candidate for current and future hydrocarbon production. Additionally, investment and research have increased significantly for its exploitation. Having the shift toward unconventional hydrocarbons, this study reviews in depth the technical aspects of unconventional hydrocarbons. This review brings together all the important aspects of unconventional reservoirs in single literature. This review at first highlights the worldwide unconventional hydrocarbon resources, their technical concept, distribution, and future supplies. A portion of this study also discusses the resources of progressive unconventional hydrocarbon candidates. Apart from this, this review also highlights the geological aspects of different unconventional hydrocarbon resources including tight, shale, and coalbed methane. The petrophysical behavior of such assists including the response to well logs and the discussion of improved correlation for petrophysical analysis is a significant part of this detailed study. The variation in geology and petrophysics of unconventional resources with conventional resources are also presented. In addition, the latest technologies for producing unconventional hydrocarbons ranging from fractured wells to different fluid injections are discussed in this study. In the end, the latest machine learning and optimization techniques have been discussed that aids in the optimized field development planning of unconventional reservoirs.
Muther et al. (Wed,) studied this question.