AAPG FOUNDATION PRATT CONFERENCE: PETROLEUM PROVINCES, 21st CENTURY
January 12-15, 2000
San Diego, California

GUZMAN, ALFREDO E., BENJAMIN MARQUEZ-DOMINGUEZ, and MARIO LIMON-GONZALEZ, Pemex Exploracion y Produccion, Viollahermosa, Tabasco, Mexico

Abstract: The Gulf of Mexico Basin South of the Border, the Petroleum Province of the 21st Century

The Mexican side of the Gulf of Mexico basin covers more than 400,000 km². It is limited by the maritime U.S. border on the north, the Yucatan peninsula and the Cuban maritime border to the east, and the coasts of the states of Tamaulipas, Veracruz, Tabasco and Campeche to the west and south. So far production has been established in the continental platform from five plays: Oxfordian coastal dunes, Kimmeridgian oolites, Cretaceous to Paleocene carbonate alus breccias, fractured Cretaceous deepwater carbonates and Tertiary deep water siliciclastics.

The deep water hypothetical plays that so far have been conceptualized are those associated to salt tectonics in the northern part of the basin, such as minibasins, subsalt traps due to allocthonous emplacements and folded belts (Perdido being the most conspicuous one); and Tertiary siliciclastic turbidites, mostly Miocene, associated to an extensional domain updip and a compressional one downslope in the central and southern occidental parts of the basin (Mexican Ridges).

Source rocks are considered to be upper Jurassic and Cretaceous shaly carbonates and lower Tertiary fine grained siliciclastics.

At the beginning of 1999, booked reserves (3P) in the Mexican side of the GOM were in the order of 24.5 billion barrels of oil equivalent, with a cummulative production at the time close to 12.5 bboe and 8 cf's of gas. Remnant upside potential quite large.

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