Abstract: East China Sea shelf basin,consisting of Tertiary oil-bearing strata and great in thickness,is an important Cenozioc oil-bearing basin in China. A great success was made in its petroleum investigation, but uncertainties on the petroleum geological elements within the basin such as distribution of source rocks put the petroleum investigation of the basin under a disadvantage condition. On the basis of above, high-resolution sequence stratigraphy is applied to the predictions of the petroleum elements in the basin, such as the distributions of base-level cycles related to good reservoirs,horizons and areas of potential source rocks and favorable strata in different areas for petroleum explorations.