In times of rapidly growing energy demands petroleum exploration focus has shifted more and more towards unconventional petroleum systems due to increasing difficulties in finding and profitably producing from conventional oil and gas fields but also due to recent increases in gas price and enhanced recovery techniques, such as horizontal drilling and hydraulic stimulation which allow production from these tight low-permeable reservoirs. Based on the successful exploration of and production from U.S. American shale gas/oil plays it was discussed whether similarly successful plays would also be available in Europe. In this context, sedimentary basins in NW-Germany and the Netherlands represent amongst others potential targets for shale gas exploration in Europe due to the presence of Cretaceous (Wealden) and Jurassic (Posidonia) marlstones/shales as well as various Carboniferous black shales.Unlike in conventional reservoirs in which gas is stored primarily as compressed (“free”) gas in the intragranular pore space and fractures, a significant proportion of gas in shales can be stored as “sorbed” gas. The sorption of hydrocarbon gas (mostly methane) in shales provides gas storage capacity in addition to the “free gas” capacity in the pore system. The methane sorption is considered to take place predominantly within the microporous organic matter (kerogen) and is controlled by the Total Organic Carbon (TOC), kerogen type, maturity, water saturation and to some extent by the inorganic constituents (clay minerals).Numerical petroleum system modeling provides the only means to combine results from different geological, geochemical and geophysical analysis methods within the frame of a 4D thermo-tectonic reconstruction of the basin´s evolution. Therefore, the aim of this study is to combine basin and petroleum system modeling approaches with petrophysical as well as petrographic methods in order to substantiate former assumptions on the geodynamic evolution of the study area providing a reasonable assessment of the ...