In the past decade, many excellent giant oil discoveries have been made across the world in conventional reservoirs in deep water. Today, three important conventional reservoirs stand out as attracting focused exploration attention along the Atlantic Margin:

1. Lower Tertiary passive margin turbidite reservoirs are being successfully explored on both the US and Mexican deep water areas of the Gulf of Mexico, both outboard of salt and in subsalt areas, as well.
2. Cretaceous Ghana Jubilee abrupt margin turbidite and its equivalents are being explored for in the deep waters of Ghana, Liberia, and across the conjugate margin to French Guiana and equatorial Brazil.
3. Cretaceous microbialite carbonate reservoirs and associated facies are being actively explored for in the deep water presalt basins of Brazil, and along western Africa in Kwanza and Benquela Basins of Angola.

This talk will briefly discuss how plate tectonics is being utilized as an exploration tool for these reservoirs, describe recent exploration successes associated with these three reservoir types, and review their geologic and depositional histories and characteristics.