Oil and gas deposits are found in a wide range of sedimentary basin settings. These include rifts, such as the Gulf of Suez, rift–sag basin couplets, as in West Siberia or the North Sea, passive margins, such as in the Gulf of Mexico or West Africa, passive margin–foreland basin couplets, as in East Venezuela or Alberta, pullapart basins, such as in Sumatra and forearc basins, like Sacramento. Portions of these basins at some time in their histories can become subjected to contractional or transpressional structuring creating a thrustbelt in the context of this book. The structuring may be intimately associated with the continuing basin development, or it may be superposed at some later time, being genetically unrelated. Rift basins can be inverted when subjected to far-field intraplate stress (Lowell, 1995; Macgregor, 1995), deforming not just the rift sediment fill, but also any overlying sag and/or foreland basin strata (De Graciansky et al., 1989). Advancing thrust sheets can entrain proximal portions of the passive margin–foreland basin sediments (Suppe, 1987) as a requirement for maintaining a stable tapered wedge (Davis et al., 1983). In turn, the advance of the thrustbelt, together with crustal loading by erosional debris from the rising thrust sheets, helps to maintain accommodation space in the foreland basin and thus also helps its continued development (Johnson and Beaumont, 1995). Small changes in relative plate motion along active margins may shift transtensional pull-apart basins into a transpressional mode resulting in partial basin inversion (Dooley and McClay, 1997).

Hydrocarbons in thrustbelts are tied directly to the history and characteristics of the sedimentary basins in which they are located, thereby forming a continuum in time and space with that basin.