What's New

• New CBTH Newsletter - May 2020 edition (PDF)


• Due to the ongoing risk of COVID-19, we will be hosting our 2020 CBTH Sponsor Meeting virtually on September 25. To view this year's meeting schedule, click here. Stay tuned for more details.


• Invoices for CBTH Phase VI (2020-2023) have been sent out to sponsor representatives. We request that sponsoring companies submit their payments by August 15. Please feel free to contact us with any questions. To view the CBTH Phase VI Proposal, click here


• Congrats to the UH IBA Team, which placed 2nd in the Gulf Coast Section of AAPG's Imperial Barrel Award Competition. CBTH students on this year's team included team captain Maddie Bishop, Mei Liu, and Ben Miller. Click here for more information.


• Congrats to CBTH MS student and SEG Wavelets president Matthew Storey for organizing the four-day exploration software bootcamp. Click here for more information.


• CBTH welcomes back BHP as a project sponsor and looks forward to close collaborations in the Caribbean, GOM and other areas.


• CBTH graduate students Mei Liu, Matthew Storey, and Jack Kenning presented posters at the AAPG Hedberg conference in Mexico City (Feb 4-6, 2020). The conference was titled, "Geology and Hydrocarbon Potential of the Circum-Gulf of Mexico Pre-salt Section." To view the complete program for the meeting, click here. For more information on the conference, click here.


• Congrats to Sean Romito for his second place poster award at the HGS-EAGE Latin America exploration conference. His poster was a geophysical study of Caribbean basement terranes. Click here for more information.


• Congrats to Mei Liu for her second place award in the student poster competition at the Geogulf conference in Houston. Her poster was a regional gravity modeling study of the Gulf of Mexico. Click here for more information.


• Congrats to Jack Kenning for best oral student talk at the 2019 Geogulf conference in Houston in November 2019. His poster was a basin modeling study of source rock maturity for the Yucatan margin in the Mexican Gulf of Mexico. Click here for more information.


• Congrats to Sean Romito for his second place award in the early PhD/second year MS category at the student poster competition at the UH-EAS Robert Sheriff lecture. His poster was a geophysical study of Caribbean basement terranes. Click here for more information.


• Congrats to Marcus Zinecker who will start an exploration position with BP in 2020 and to Jack Kenning, who will start an exploration position with ConocoPhillips in 2020.


• Congrats to CBTH students Jacob Miller and Sean Romito for their 2020 summer internships. Jacob Miller will intern at BP and Sean Romito will intern at ConocoPhillips.


• Congrats to Paul Mann for receiving the Grover E. Murray Distinguished Educator Award from AAPG. Click here for more information.


• CBTH students and researchers presented at the 2019 GeoGulf / GCAGS Fall Meeting on Wednesday, October 23 through Friday, October 25. For more information, including a list of CBTH presenters, click here.


• The CBTH Annual Sponsors Meeting was held on Friday, September 27, 2019 at on the University of Houston main campus in Michael J. Cemo Hall, Room 109. For more information, including the meeting schedule, click here. If you are interested in joining the CBTH project as a sponsor, please contact us.


• Congratulations to CBTH PhD student Marcus Zinecker, who received the Rising Star Award for 2018-2019 from the Houston Geological Society. For more information, click here to visit the HGS Bulletin website.


• Congratulations to CBTH-supported, UH PhD student, Jack Kenning, who won first place in the AAPG student poster competition at the 2019 American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) International Competition on May 18! His poster was on the subsurface structure and stratigraphy of the Mexican Ridges in the western Gulf of Mexico. Click here to read more on the EAS website, and click here for more information on the AAPG website.


• Congratulations to the UH IBA Team, who won first place in the Imperial Barrel Award Program (IBA) of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) International Competition on May 18! They previously won first place in the Gulf Coast Section competition on March 17. Click here for more information on the EAS website, and click here to read a writeup in AAPG Explorer.


• On Friday, April 26, the University of Houston hosted its annual “Student Research Day and Alumni-Industry Open House." A schedule of events and presentations, including CBTH presentations, is availble by clicking here.


• The CBTH Project hosted a mid-year meeting for sponsors and prospective sponsors on March 22, 2019. Sponsoring companies can access the presentations from this meeting by clicking here.


• Congrats to the three CBTH-supported students who placed first, second, and third at the Annual meeting of the Gulf Coast Association of Geological Societies that was held in Shreveport, Louisiana, in October, 2018. Omar Zavala (undergrad) was in first place with a poster comparing the cooling histories of the conjugate margins of the South Atlantic Ocean; Jack Kenning (PhD student) placed second for his poster on Eocene-Oligocene mass transport deposits in the Mexican Ridges province, western Gulf of Mexico; and Nawaz Bugti for his poster on structural restoration of the Corsair normal fault zone in the northwestern Gulf of Mexico.


• The CBTH Project was featured in the latest issue of GEO ExPro in an article on the conjugate margins of the Gulf of Mexico. The work highlight was the CBTH-supported master's research of Andrew Steier, who is an now an explorationist with the GOM group at Total in Houston. Other CBTH work that this study was based on includes Luan Nguyen (Nguyen and Mann, 2015) and the 2018 PhD study by Pin Lin (now at Chinese National Offshore Oil Company in China). Current students working on various aspects of GOM conjugate margins include Jack Kenning (PhD), Nawaz Bugti (PhD), Mei Liu (PhD) and Marcus Zinecker (PhD). Click here to read the article in the latest issue.

" alt="Jacob Miller presnting at AGU 2019 on tectonics of the Lesser Antilles.">

CBTH Proposal and Product Information

Please feel free to browse a copy of our new Phase VI proposal (pdf), our project flyer(.pdf), and our Contributions List of CBTH publications, theses, and presentations.

The CBTH proposed study area for Phase VI is shown below. This area includes the oil-rich areas of the Mexican and US sectors of the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean, and northern South America, as well as the conjugate margins of Guyana, Suriname, Brazil, and west Africa.

click map to enlarge

The CBTH study area. Numbers correspond to Phase V, Year 3 student study areas: 1. Sharon Cornelius, Post-Doctoral Fellow: subsalt GOM 2. Lei Sun, Post-Doctoral Fellow: Hispaniola and Northeastern Caribbean 3. Jack Kenning, PhD, May 2020: structure, basin modeling, western MGOM and Mexican Ridges Fold Belt 4. Marcus Zinecker, PhD: northwest Africa 5. Nawaz Bugti, PhD: Port Isabel fold-thrust belt, northwestern Gulf of Mexico. 6. Mei Liu, PhD: GOM gravity inversion for crustal thickness; mapping of marginal rift system 7. Sean Romito, PhD: West Africa and South America conjugate margins 8. Hualing Zhang, PhD: Permian Basin 9. Md Nahidul Hasan, PhD: Campeche Salt province, GOM 10. Matthew Storey, MS: Apalachicola Rift, NE GOM 11. Jacob Miller, MS: SE Caribbean 12. Benjamin Miller, MS: Saba Bank, NE Caribbean Sea 13. Maddie Bishop, MS: Sandino Forearc Basin, Nicaragua and Costa Rica 14. Bryan Moore, MS/Post-Bacc: GOM and Atlantic conjugate margins 15. Sarah Meyer, Post-Bacc: Mapping of South Atlantic volcanic margins using gravity and magnetic data 16. Tarek Galhom, MS: offshore Morocco

Goals of the CBTH Project

The CBTH Project seeks to create a GIS-based digital and atlas synthesis of available seismic and well data to define the regional hydrocarbon potential of a vast region affected by the Mesozoic breakup of Pangea (shown in upper inset of map of the study area below). This project, which has been operating since September 1, 2005, includes: 1) known hydrocarbon basins of onshore and the lesser known offshore basins of the Caribbean and northern South America (Venezuela, Colombia, Trinidad, Suriname, Guyana, Northern Brazil); 2) the US and Mexico sectors of the Gulf of Mexico; 3) and the rifted-passive margins of the Central in eastern North America and western Europe, and the South Atlantic in South America and west Africa. Our main objectives are to compile all the available digital seismic and published data in a GIS database to provide an integrated geologic synthesis of tectonosequences, depositional systems, major structures, petroleum geology, paleogeographic maps, and quantitative plate reconstructions for a better understanding of the hydrocarbon systems in the region. Our largest concentration of data and current studies are in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico but we have several recently completed and ongoing projects in Brazil and west Africa.

Articles on CBTH Research

CBTH PhD candidate Jack Kenning, who recently won 1st place in the Student Poster Competition at the AAPG 2019 Annual Convention and Exhibition, is the subject of an article in the October 2019 issue of AAPG Explorer. Click here to read the article.

The UH IBA Team won first place in the Imperial Barrel Award Program (IBA) of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) International Competition on May 18. They previously won first place in the Gulf Coast Section competition on March 17. Click here to read a writeup on their achievement in AAPG Explorer.

The CBTH Project was featured in the December 2018 of GEO ExPro in an article on the conjugate margins of the Gulf of Mexico. The work highlight was the CBTH-supported master's research of Andrew Steier, who is an now an explorationist with the GOM group at Total in Houston. Other CBTH work that this study was based on includes Luan Nguyen (Nguyen and Mann, 2015) and the 2018 PhD study by Pin Lin (now at Chinese National Offshore Oil Company in China). Click here to read.

CBTH PhD student Lucia Torrado was the subject of an article in the June 2017, issue of AAPG Explorer. Click here to read.

Paul Mann and CBTH MS students Eric Lunn and Andrew Steier were the subject of an article in the June 2017 issue of AAPG Explorer. Click here to read.

The CBTH Project was the subject of an article in the October 2012 issue of AAPG Explorer. Click here to read.

CBTH Calendar of Events