Abstract: Analysis and statistics of the world's oil and gas discoveries is helpful to understand upstream exploration progress and predict future exploration fields. By means of statistical analysis and petroleum exploration theory, 9010 oil and gas discoveries from 1996 to 2016 were analyzed, focused on the discoveries' reserve scale, types and distribution, basin types and operating companies in recent five years. The statistics show that the total recoverable reserve discovered from 1996 to 2016 is 6722 x108 barrels of oil equivalent, and 997 oil and gas discoveries have recoverable reserves of more than 100 million barrels each, accounting for 85% of the total recoverable reserves. Since 2014, the number and scale of new oil and gas discoveries have fallen dramatically, but natural gas discoveries are increasing. Africa boasts for the largest recoverable reserves form 2012-2016 in the world, followed by Latin America, central Asia-Russia, Southeast Asia, North America, Middle East and Europe. Oil and gas discoveries are mainly distributed in passive continental margin basins, rift basins and foreland basins, of which 70% were found in foreland basins by the main international oil companies and national oil companies. Our analysis indicates that newly discovered oil & gas resources become less and less in land, and more and more transfer to deep water and ultra-deep water environment; exploration in frontiers, new types, new depth and new sequence in matured basin is ongoing; and natural gas is becoming more and more important. Since the offshore oil & gas exploration will be an important development trend, Chinese oil companies should strengthen upstream exploration investment and cooperation with international companies to acquire appreciable deep-water assets, pay more attention to offshore exploration target assessment and selection, and advance technical reserve and innovation.

Key words: oil &, gas discovery, exploration progress, development trend, basin type, international oil company