Abstract: Since commeneing the study of the world's oil-gas distribution launched by Dr. Weng Wen-bo for the purpose of proving the fact that there should exist abundant oil-gas resources within mainland of China, half century has past, and W eng's judgement has been proved and real-ized nowadays. On the basis of global plate tectonics, the petroleum system concept and its studying methods proposed by L. B. Magoon are ap-plied to deal with the data from bydrocarbon-bearing basins around the world. And study shows that the global petroleum or reserves distribution could be searched for in terms of Paleozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic hydrocarbon-bearing system distribution status, distribution relations arong them, including their relations to seven nucleuses on continental crust. It is concluded that the global petroleum system could be divided into such three types or seven domains as China Type, North Global Type (including Asia, Europe and North America) and South Global Type (in-cluding Australia-India, Africa-Arabia and South America) with diversity of features. When approaching their evolutions, the maximum time-rock unit, Era (Erathemn), and other Period and Epoch can be adopted for systernatic studies.

Key words: petroleum system, the world, China, oifield