The Minerals Management Service (MMS), Gulf of Mexico Region, manages gas, oil, and mineral leasing and provides oversight of exploration and production operations in the northern Gulf of Mexico. In order to pursue its regulatory duties, the MMS maintains extensive geologic and reservoir engineering files, including all well logs, all available paleontological reports, and complete history of gas and oil production. This data has now been organized into a Gulf-wide geologic framework in the Atlas, with the goal of assisting gas and oil companies to more efficiently discover and develop hydrocarbon resources in the northern Gulf of Mexico.

The Atlas is a joint effort of the Department of the Interior, Minerals Management Service, The University of Texas Bureau of Economic Geology, the Gas Research Institute, the U. S. Department of Energy, the Louisiana State University and the Alabama State Geological Survey. In the Atlas more than 10,000 productive sands from about 1,100 fields have been placed into one of 91 producing hydrocarbon plays. Plays are defined by a combination of production, chronostratigraphy, lithostratigraphy, and structural style.

The Atlas volumes will contain important reservoir engineering data such as gas and/or oil volume, amount of hydrocarbon produced, average reservoir depth, water depth and average porosity for each of the more than 10,000 productive sands in the 1,100 studied fields. Data are current to December, 1994. The digital database available here identifies all the plays present in each field in the Gulf of Mexico. It provides the same reservoir engineering categories as the Atlas but here, the productive sands in a field for the same play have been averaged (2,634 averaged sand values). A series of Hydrocarbon Play Maps shows the spatial distribution of the producing hydrocarbon plays. These data also provide the basis for the 1995 Assessment of the Undiscovered Hydrocarbon Potential of the Gulf of Mexico.

Cumulative production from these plays as of December 1994 was 9.34 billion barrels of oil and 112.6 trillion cubic feet of gas, with remaining proved reserves of 2.52 billion barrels of oil and 29.3 trillion cubic feet of gas.

The two-volume Atlas series is now available for purchase through the Bureau of Economic Geology (see information on the detailed version, below).

Further information is available on the detailed version of the Atlas .