What's New

• New CBTH Newsletter - June 2016 edition (PDF)


• The CBTH Annual Sponsors Meeting will be held on September 30, 2016 at the University of Houston in Cemo Hall, Room 109. Click here more details.
  
  
• Congratulations to CBTH students Andrew Steier, Rasheed Ajala, and Kyle Reuber, who won 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place, respectively, at the 15th Conference on Africa E&P hosted by HGS/PESGB.


• Congratulations to Patrick Loureiro who accepted a full-time offer with Hess Corporation in Houston starting in the middle of 2017, following the completion of his UH PhD study on the Brazil-West Africa conjugate margins. Patrick was a summer intern for Hess in the summer of 2016 working on NW Africa and completed his MS with the CBTH project in 2014 on the Puerto Rico-Virgin Islands area.


• Congratulations to Marie de los Santos, CBTH-supported UH undergrad geology major, who completed her master’s degree on isotope studies in August, 2016, at the University of Arizona and is now working as a technician at the University of Arizona Isotope lab.


• Congratulations to Lourdes Rodriguez who competed her MS degree on the Espino rift of Venezuela and is starting a full time job as a geophysicist with Sanchez Energy in Houston where she has been working parttime for the past year.


• Congratulations to Matt Copley who graduated with his BS from UH and is starting the MS program with the industry-funded reservoir characterization group at Colorado School of Mines. As a CBTH-supported undergrad at UH, Matt completed a study of the Somali basin of East Africa that he presented at the 2016 AAPG Annual meeting in Calgary.


• Congratulations to Javier Sanchez! Javier joined the Department of Geology at EAFIT University in Medellin, Colombia, in July 2016, where he is an assistant, tenure-track professor teaching structural geology, tectonics, basin analysis and petroleum geology. Javier was a post-doctoral researcher with the CBTH project from September 2015, to June 2016, where he completed several articles on basin modeling and geomorphology in northern Colombia. We thank Javier for his five years of productive and dedicated service to the CBTH project both as a PhD student and a postdoctoral researcher and wish him luck in his new professor position. We hope to continue collaborations with Javier and his colleagues and geoscience students at EAFIT University.


• Congratulations to the CBTH student awardees Shenelle Gomez and Luis Carlos Carvajal, who received second and third place, respectively, in the 2016 AAPG-ACE student poster competition in Calgary, Canada. Four CBTH students were selected from a pool of 90 first-authored, accepted abstracts to the Calgary meeting for the competition judged by a panel of 5-6 judges. CBTH students Naila Dowla and Lucia Torrado also participated in the student competition of 15 posters. Click here for more information on CBTH at AAPG 2016.



• CBTH Geomapper is now back online! The application is accessible through the Sponsor Login page for participating sponsors.


• CBTH student Luan Nguyen gave a talk at the Geophysical Society of Houston: Potential fields SIG Dinner on May 19th
  
  
• Congratulations for Pin Lin’s AAPG grant-in-aid that will fund her study of source rock maturity in the South Florida basin. She will travel to the Florida State Geological Survey core faculty in Tallahassee to sample cores. Analysis will be done at the UH Petroleum Geochemistry Lab. Click here to read more.


• 15 CBTH graduate and undergraduate student researchers presented at the 2016 Research Day and Industry Open House hosted by the UH Dept. of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences on the main UH campus on Friday, April 29, 2016. Click here for abstracts and more details.


• Congratulations to the UH Team, including CBTH PhD student Joan Marie Blanco (currently completing her PhD on Venezuela 3D seismic data), who won the Geological Society of Houston's Regional Challenge Bowl in April and will go on to compete in the finals at the SEG International Exposition and 86th Annual meeting in Dallas. For more details, click here.


• Congratulations to the 2016 University of Houston Imperial Barrel Award (IBA) team who placed second in a field of 12 Gulf Coast universities on April 15, 2016. Team members included Shenelle Gomez (Team captain and CBTH-supported PhD student working on the Barbados area), David Mora, Jing Hua, Lingfei Mao, and Jordan Dickinson. First place was the University of New Orleans and third place was Texas A&M University. The UH AAPG student chapter received a check for $2000 from AAPG. For details, the program for the competition is posted here.


• Congratulations to CBTH undergraduate Sabrina Martinez, who was recently selected to participate in the ExxonMobil Guadalupe Field School on April 2-9, 2016 in West Texas and New Mexico. Sabrina is currently working for the CBTH Project on the Puerto Rico area. For more information, click here.


• On Feb. 29, we provided an updated GIS database for our sponsors covering on- and offshore Mexico, as well as a compilation map of continent-ocean boundaries in the CBTH study area. The files can be downloaded via our secure FTP.


• On March 1, all papers from the AAPG Bulletin special issue titled "Geologic and geophysical synthesis of the Nicaraguan Rise and western Caribbean: A framework for understanding its petroleum potential" (editor: P. Mann) were submitted for review. These papers will be available for sponsors following the review process.


• Two new CBTH Publications by Nguyen and Mann (2016) and Sanchez et al. (2015) are now online and available to project sponsors here (password required).
  
  
  
• AAPG Memoir 108: Petroleum Geology and Potential of the Colombian Caribbean Margin, co-edited by Dr. Paul Mann, can now be ordered at the AAPG Books website. Click here for more details.


• CBTH PhD student Stephen Leslie presented at the SPE/AAPG Colombia Offshore - Challenges and Opportunities for an Emerging Industry Workshop on March 2, 2016 at 2 p.m. Click here for more information.


• CBTH students presented in the EAS student poster competition at the UH-HGS annual Robert E. Sheriff lecture on Monday, November 16, 2015. To view a list of presentations, including the 13 CBTH student presenters, click here. CBTH students were recognized with two of the three first place awards: Callum Byers (Undergrad category) and Zach Martindale (Beginning PhD category).


• CBTH PhD student Luis Carlos Carvajal tied for third place at the Gulf Coast Association of Geological Societies (GCAGS) convention in Houston on September 21-22. To read more, click here, and for a full list of CBTH presentations and abstracts at this year's meeting, click here.

CBTH Proposal and Product Information

Please feel free to browse a sample of our database, a copy of our new Phase IV proposal (.pdf), our project flyer(.pdf), and our Contributions List of CBTH publications, theses, and presentations (updated June 2016).

Click here to view the latest CBTH Newsletter (June 2016 edition) for information on our students, sponsors, and project activities. If you would like to see more of our compilation, please become a sponsor today!

The CBTH-Phase IV proposed study area is shown in the large boxed areas. The CBTH-Phase IV 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 equatorial, conjugate margins of Guyana, Suriname, French Guyana, Brazil along with countries in western and eastern Africa.

click map to enlarge

Numbers on map refer to areas of proposed work described in the text of the Phase IV proposal (revised in 2015): 1 = USA and Mexican Gulf of Mexico; 2 = Florida and Bahamas region; 3 = East Coast of the USA (conjugate rifted margin of NW Africa); 4 = Nicaraguan Rise in Jamaica, Honduras, Nicaragua, and ; 5 = Deepwater areas of Colombian and Venezuelan basins; 6= Panama accretionary prism; 7 = Onland basins of Colombia; 8 = Pacific margin basins of Colombia, Ecuador and Peru; 9 = Foreland basins of Peru and Ecuador; 10 = Llanos foreland basin of Colombia; 11 = Venezuelan foreland basins; 12 = Trinidad, Barbados, and Barbados accretionary prism; 13 = Northeastern South America in Guyana, Suriname, and Brazil (conjugate rifted margin of Equatorial Africa); 14 = Southern Brazil and Uruguay (conjugate rifted margin of southwest Africa); 15 = Northwest margin of Africa; 16 = Equatorial margin of Africa; 17 = East African margin.

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 the unexplored Caribbean region.  This project, which started on September 1, 2005, covers known hydrocarbon basins of onshore and the less known offshore basins of the Caribbean and northern South America (Venezuela, Colombia, Trinidad, Suriname, Guyana, Northern Brazil).  Our main objectives are to compile all the available digital seismic and published data in a regional basis - particularly offshore Venezuela, Colombia and Trinidad - to create 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.  To our knowledge, a project involving this amount of data and of this scope has never previously been attempted for northern South America.  Specific objectives include the following: 1) Identify source and location of main sedimentary depocenters; 2) Continuity of tectonosequences and terranes; and 3) Produce the first offshore geologic synthesis of the Caribbean region.

AAPG Explorer Article on CBTH Research

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