Professor Li’s is a fresh and comprehensive treatise of the distribution of the world’s hydrocarbon reserves. The Atlas highlights the geographical, sedimentary and geological features of the basins, using a combination of maps and stratigraphic diagrams to depict the history, prospectivity and commercial production capacity of the reserves on a continental and country-by-country basis.    The Atlas is an essential reference source for petroleum geologists and reservoir engineers working in hydrocarbon exploration and production. It is also a valuable and original teaching aid for university graduate and postgraduate courses.   The Atlas provides a welcome addition to the global database of the world’s energy resources and is therefore an indispensable source of information for the formulation of future strategies to exploit oil and gas reserves.   Written by one of China’s foremost petroleum geologists, the Atlas provides a rare analysis of the industry from the perspective of the country whose demand for oil and gas is set to become the largest in the next few decades. It is an important and vital scholarly work.