Research Article Slope Belts of Paleouplifts Control the Pore Structure of Organic Matter of Marine Shale: A Comparative Study of Lower Cambrian Rocks in the Sichuan Basin Pengfei Wang, 1,2 Chen Zhang, 2,3 Aoran Liu , 4,5 Pengfei Zhang, 6 Yibo Qiu, 6 Xin Li, 7 Shanshan Yu, 7 Shuqing Yao, 1 Sanyi Liu, 1 and Zhenxue Jiang 2,3 1 Geoscience Documentation Center of China Geological Survey, Beijing 100083, China 2 State Key Laboratory of Petroleum Resources and Prospecting, China University of Petroleum, Beijing, China 3 College of Geoscience, China University of Petroleum, Beijing, China 4 Hebei Key Laboratory of Strategic Critical Mineral Resources, Hebei GEO University, Shijiazhuang 050031, China 5 College of Geosciences, Hebei GEO University, Shijiazhuang 050031, China 6 Research Institute of Exploration and Development, Sinopec Shengli Oilfield Company, Dongying 257000, China 7 China National Offshore Oil Corporation Research Institute, Beijing 100028, China Correspondence should be addressed to Aoran Liu; aoranliu@cug.edu.cn Received 20 January 2021; Accepted 4 June 2021; Published 29 June 2021 Academic Editor: Henrik Drake Copyright © 2021 Pengfei Wang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Extensive exploration of the marine shale of the Niutitang Formation in south China has been conducted. However, exploration and development results have varied considerably in different areas. For example, the Niutitang shale in Jingyan City (Southwestern Sichuan Basin) produces a large amount of gas with a long period of stable production. In contrast, most development wells in the Niutitang shale in Chongqing City do not produce gas. Scanning electron microscopy images showed that the organic matter (OM) pore development in the Niutitang shale in Jingyan is abundant, large in size, and are well connected. In contrast, OM pores in the Niutitang shale in Chongqing are rarely observed. OM pore development of the Jingyan and Chongqing shales is mainly controlled by thermal maturity as shown by equivalent vitrine reflectance determinations. The moderate thermal maturity has resulted in the development of a large number of OM pores in the Niutitang shale in Jingyan, whereas the high thermal maturity of the Niutitang shale in Chongqing has led to the destruction of most of the OM pores. Due to the existence of ancient uplift, the shale was buried shallowly in the process of hydrocarbon generation evolution, and the shale avoided excessive thermal evolution and retained appropriate thermal maturity. In the Jingyan area, due to its location near the central uplift in the Sichuan Basin, the Niutitang shale deposited nearby avoided excessive evolution, and a large number of OM pores were retained in the reservoir. 1. Introduction The Lower Cambrian Niutitang Formation contains highly to overly mature organic-rich black marine shales with high TOC content and type I kerogen that is widely distributed in south China [1, 2]. However, their exploration and devel- opment potential vary significantly between different areas. For example, the Niutitang shale in Chongqing City (south China) has only a short stable production of gas, low gas vol- umes, or even no gas production at all in some wells, and hence no successful development [3, 4]. However, successful exploration and development of the Niutitang shale has been made in Jingyan City in Sichuan Province (south China), where commercial gas has been successfully produced from the JinYe1 well [1]. The gas produced from shale wells can reach 2.3 m 3 /t, with the daily gas output of 6:0 × 10 4 m 3 /d [5]. Successful exploration and development of the Niutitang shale has been made in Yichang City of Hubei Province (south China) by the China Geological Survey, where com- mercial gas has been successfully produced from the wells Hindawi Geofluids Volume 2021, Article ID 5517655, 18 pages https://doi.org/10.1155/2021/5517655