Introduction
As part of a program aimed at estimating the recoverable oil and gas resources of priority basins around the world, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) estimated the undiscovered oil and gas resources of the Levant Basin Province. The Levant Basin Province encompasses approximately 83,000 square kilometers (km2) of the eastern Mediterranean area (fig. 1). The area is bounded to the east by the Levant Transform Zone, to the north by the Tartus Fault (Roberts and Peace, 2007), tothe northwest by the Eratosthenes Seamount, to the west and southwest by the Nile Delta Cone Province boundary, and to the south by the limit ofcompressional structures in the Sinai. This assessment was based on published geologic information and on commercial data from oil and gas wells, fields, and field production. The USGS approach is to define petroleum systems and geologic assessment units and to assess the potential for undiscovered oil and gas resources in each of the three assessment units defined for this study—Plio-Pleistocene Reservoirs, Levant Sub-Salt Reservoirs, and Levant Margin Reservoirs.