Assessment of undiscovered oil and gas resources in Central and South America

The U.S. Geological Survey recently completed an assessment of undiscovered conventional oil and gas resources in 130 selected petroleum provinces of the world (USGS, 2000). Of these 130 provinces, 23 are in South America, Central America, and the Caribbean area (fig. 1). The assessed provinces range from established petroleum provinces with long histories of production such as the Maracaibo Basin to frontier provinces with little or no petroleum production such as the Guyana-Suriname Basin. Not all provinces with historic production or potential production were assessed for the USGS 2000 Assessment. At present we are assessing many of the remaining oil and gas provinces in Central and South America. In each province we (1) geologically defined total petroleum systems, (2) defined assessment units within total petroleum systems, and (3) assessed the volume of undiscovered conventional oil and gas in each assessment unit. We defined 26 total petroleum systems and 55 assessment units in the 23 provinces.