The Pannonian Basin complex has approximately 13 billion BOE cumulative production to date. As to the remaining resources, various estimates place the combined conventional and unconventional hydrocarbon potential in this very mature basin complex in the >5 billion BOE range. The Pannonian Basin, as with many other super basins, is characterized by several source rocks, stacked reservoirs, greater than 6-km-thick basin fill, mature infrastructure, established service sectors, large amounts of subsurface data, multiple operators, and direct access to markets.

Due to the removal from the Alpine collision zone, the overthickened lithosphere of the Pannonian region collapsed during the Middle Miocene and evolved to a large and diffuse back-arc basin system. During the Late Miocene–Pliocene, postrift thermal subsidence caused the sedimentation of an unusually thick basin fill locally exceeding 8 km thickness compared to the typically much thinner synrift sequence not more than 2 km thick. The most prolific petroleum systems are found in the Neogene basin fill (65%), whereas the rest were found to date in a precursor Paleogene basin system (7%) and the pre-Cenozoic basement (28%).

Basin-scale inversion commenced during the Pliocene by eastward propagation of shortening across the Pannonian Basin due to the ongoing northward movement of the Adriatic promontory. Since the neotectonic deformation of the Pannonian Basin system is still in its infancy, it provides a well-constrained exploration analogue for other back-arc basins where this process may be in a similar stage. The vast amount of reflection seismic (>200,000 km two-dimensional profiles) and drill hole (>15,000 wells) data acquired by the petroleum industry in the Pannonian Basin complex for more than a century qualifies it as one of the best-studied back-arc basins in the world.