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A joint AAPG/Associación Mexicana de Geólogos Petroleros (AM GP) Hedberg Research Conference was held to examine issues associated with heavy oil in deep water. This article reports on the meeting highlights. Deep-water exploration has become increasingly important over the last three decades. For the deep-water environment to be economically viable, these accumulations need to be both volumetrically significant and capable of maintaining high production rates. Largely independent of the rise in crude oil price, there has been an increasing number of economically viable deepwater discoveries, where the resource base now exceeds 100 billion bbl oil equivalent. A significant percentage of this resource is heavy oil, with heavy oil dominating the resource base in such settings as offshore Mexico and Brazil. Economic success in both exploration and commercialization requires integration across disciplines as well as across the value chain, integrating the upstream, midstream, and downstream operations. Basin models were commonly used as the integration tool for exploration programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract In the southern Gulf of Mexico, deepwater sediments were affected during deposition by contractional and extensional deformation events and halokinesis. The Miocene reservoirs in this area were deposited in slope and basinal settings during the falling-stage systems tracts and the lowstand systems tracts, where channel and frontal splay depositional elements were the most important. The integration of the structural analysis with seismic data, seismic attributes and isochron maps allows us to evaluate how the deformational events (especially the contractional event D3) controlled the distribution of sediments and the external geometry of their deposits. This interplay between deformation and sedimentation mainly occurred in two ways. First, the structural elements modified the paleobathymetry of the basin and created an accommodation space for clastic deposition. Second, the structural features controlled the entry of sediments. During the Oligocene and early Miocene, the depocenters were bounded by diapirs, salt sheets and structural highs formed by older salt anticlines. On the other hand, for the middle Miocene, the depocenters were controlled by the presence of folds in the southern part of the study area and by shortened diapirs and salt sheets in the periphery. The formation of these depocenters provided the accommodation space for sediment deposition; as a result, during the early and middle Miocene, the frontal splays were confined to these depocenters. At the end of the middle Miocene, these depocenters were filled, and channel levee systems and frontal splay complexes predominated. Finally, during the late Miocene, the depocenters formation was controlled by the extensional event, which provided the accommodation space for sediment deposition in half-grabens, where frontal splays complexes and channel levee systems were the most important depositional elements. All of these structural elements had significant implications for the architecture and internal organization of the turbidite systems. Highlights • Reservoirs were deposited in the slope during the falling-stage and lowstand systems tracts. • Structural elements modified the paleotopography of the basin creating accommodation space. • Structural elements controlled the entry of sediments. • Deformation events had implications in the architecture and organization of turbidites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]