Future Exploration Plays of the Gulf of Mexico Province

Blickwede, Jon Frederic¹ (1) Statoil Gulf of Mexico LLC, Houston, TX

The Gulf of Mexico (GoM) province, despite being one of the most intensely explored regions of the world, has continued to yield new exploration plays with major hydrocarbon discoveries. A recent example is the Upper Paleocene-Lower Eocene submarine fan complex in the deepwater GoM, where a number of significant discoveries have been made in the US sector since 2001. In the not-too-distant past, few petroleum geoscientists envisioned the presence of any significant Paleogene sands in the deepwater GoM, let alone hundreds of feet of sand spread across a vast area of the present-day lower continental slope and abyssal plain. This history of paradigm-breaking new play development suggests that the GoM will continue to offer new surprises and will remain an important producing province well into the future.

Where will the new GoM plays be located? Some major parts of the province are still virtually unexplored, including offshore Florida, the Yucatan platform, the Sierra de Chiapas, and the Mexican and Cuban sectors of the deepwater GoM. In addition, within the more highly explored portions of the province, new plays are expected to emerge in a variety of areas and age-intervals, possibly including the Triassic-Middle Jurassic synrift section, the unexplored part of the Oxfordian erg on both the US and Mexican sides, Upper Cretaceous, Middle & Upper Eocene and Oligocene submarine fans in the deepwater western GoM, K/T boundary mass-transport breccias Gulf-wide, and unconventional resource plays such as gas hydrates and new shale gas trends.