www.elsevier.com/locate/ijcoalgeo

International Journal of Coal G

Book review

Insights into Petroleum Geology

Bernard Colletta (Ed.), Editions TECHNIP,

Paris, 2003, 157 pp.

This book was previously published as an issue of

dOil and Gas Science and TechnologyT, the journal

formerly known as Revue de l’Institut Francais du

Petrole (volume 33, issue 2, March–April 2003) and

still has the same page numbering. It is a tribute to

Bernard Tissot, one of the founders of modern

petroleum geochemistry, by several of his Institut

Francais du Petrole (IFP) colleagues on the occasion

of his admission to the French Academie des Sciences.

The book starts off with an dIntroductionT that isreally a description of what Bernard Tissot has been

doing since he left IFP to become President of the

CNE, a short acronym for an organization with a very

long title that is responsible for the separation, storage

and disposal of nuclear energy wastes. This is

followed by a brief biography of Tissot by Montadert

and an English translation of a 1969 paper that he

wrote which laid much of the groundwork for what is

now called basin modelling. The rest of the book

consists of chapters written by IFP colleagues of

Tissot that cover some aspects of petroleum geo-

chemistry from a fairly narrow personal perspective.

There is a history of petroleum geochemistry by

Durand that may strike most people outside of France

as very franco-centric, and a good short chapter by

Alain Huc on bpetroleum geochemistry at the dawn of

the 21st CenturyQ, in which he describes what has

dictated petroleum geochemistry research in the past

and what might do so in the future. Vandenbroucke

discusses kerogen studies made by the IFP from 1965

to 1990 and the structural models of kerogen that

resulted from this work. Ungerer summarizes the

results from research projects that he contributed to

from 1980 to 2002 at IFP and the University of Paris

Sud in a chapter that assumes a good knowledge of

doi:10.1016/j.coal.2004.09.001

physical chemistry, especially the section on statistical

thermodynamics. Prinzhofer and Battani review some

of their recent interesting work on gas isotopes

tracing. Finally, there is a chapter by Schneider that

is concerned with the development and application of

a new IFP basin modelling package (Ceres) that is

designed to handle areas with complicated geology

such as the foothills of the Andes and the Rockies.

This is a curious volume which should more

accurately be called IFP’s Insights into Petroleum

Geochemistry. The publicity for the book states that it is

designed for ball scientists in both academia and

industry who want to understand the methods and

techniques for using geochemistry in the world of

petroleumQ. This is certainly not achieved as there is

little discussion in most chapters of work done

anywhere else other than IFP so that many important

topics are barely mentioned. Thus, while this might be

of some value to people wishing to understand the IFP

philosophy to petroleum geochemistry (a somewhat

limited audience I would hazard to guess), it cannot be

recommended as a textbook. The lack of an index also

negates its use in this respect. An even more significant

problem is the very poor English translation and poor

editing of some chapters. The first sentence of the

Introduction being a good (but certainly not the worst)

example of this, bSearch for today available sources ofenergy and eventually centuries is one of the main

concern of humanityQ. This makes the text very difficult

to read in places.

In summary, the purchase of this book is not

recommended, although some chapters such as that by

Huc deserve to be looked at. In my opinion, a more

suitable tribute to Bernard Tissot would have been the

update of his and Dietrich Welte’s excellent textbook

(Petroleum Formation and Occurrence) by the same

authors that contributed to this book in a similar

manner that Stach’s Textbook on Coal Petrology has

been periodically updated by different people.

eology 61 (2005) 139–140

Book review140

Martin Fowler

Natural Resources Canada/Ressources Naturelles

Canada Geological Survey of Canada Calgary/

Commission Geologique du Canada

3303-33rd St N.W.

Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2L 2A7

E-mail address: MFowler@NRCan.gc.ca.

Tel.: +1 403 292 7038;

fax: +1 403 292 7159.