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The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that about 4.1 billion barrels of oil and 13.3 trillion cubic feet of natural gas remain undiscovered, and technically recoverable, off and along the north coast of Cuba — the mean of a range from 0.9 to 10.7 billion barrels. The 2024 assessment is part of the USGS's worldwide series of oil and gas estimates, which uses the same method everywhere so that regions can be compared.
The three assessment units of the North Cuba area. USGS.
How the oil got there
The story runs from the break-up of Pangaea to a collision with an island arc.
- Rifting (Triassic–Early Jurassic). North America, the Yucatán block and South America pulled apart, and rift basins filled with river, alluvial and lake sediments — possibly including lake-bed source rocks.
- Salt and source rock (Middle–Late Jurassic). The sea flooded in and out, leaving up to 2,000 metres of salt. As rifting waned, organic-rich Oxfordian and Tithonian marls — the most important source rocks here — were laid on top of it, and the Gulf of America opened as the Yucatán block rotated.
- Platforms (Early Cretaceous). Slow subsidence and open sea built thick stacks of carbonate platforms along the margins, with more organic-rich marl in the basins between.
- Drowning (Late Cretaceous). Rising seas drowned the platforms and buried them under organic-rich shale.
- Collision (Late Cretaceous–Eocene). The Greater Antilles island arc rammed the edge of North America as oceanic crust dived beneath the Caribbean plate. The squeeze stacked the old rift and platform rocks into the North Cuba fold and thrust belt and bent the crust down into a foreland basin in front of it, which filled with up to 5 kilometres of sediment.
That burial under thrust sheets is what cooked the Jurassic and Cretaceous source rocks into oil and gas. The younger Paleogene rocks in the foreland basin may never have got hot enough.
Three places to look
| Assessment unit | What and where | Explored? |
|---|---|---|
| Fold and thrust belt | fractured carbonates in folded, thrust rock, onshore and offshore; some seals may have been broken by continued deformation | yes — more than 30 oil fields, mostly onshore, prove a working petroleum system |
| Foreland basin | sandstone reservoirs in structural and stratigraphic traps beside the thrust belt | barely |
| Platform margin carbonates | oil and gas that migrated up-dip into karst, dolomite, reefs, mounds and debris-flow breccias along the Yucatán, Florida and Bahamas platforms | not at all |
The estimate
"F95" is the amount with a 95 percent chance of being there at least; "F5", a 5 percent chance.
| Assessment unit | Oil, mean (million barrels) | Gas, mean (billion cubic feet) | Gas liquids, mean (million barrels) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fold and thrust belt | 1,450 | 5,168 | 89 |
| Foreland basin | 885 | 5,639 | 152 |
| Platform margin carbonates | 1,763 | 2,461 | 32 |
| Total (mean) | 4,098 | 13,268 | 273 |
| Total, F95–F5 range | 900–10,701 | 2,308–39,404 | 43–854 |
The widest uncertainty is in the foreland basin, where the largest possible gas field in the model is 40 trillion cubic feet but the typical one is a few tens of billions. These are undiscovered, technically recoverable resources: what could be produced with today's technology if it is found, not what is economic to produce.
Sources
Written from Christopher J. Schenk and others, Assessment of undiscovered conventional oil and gas resources in the North Cuba area, 2024, U.S. Geological Survey Fact Sheet, a work of the United States government in the public domain. Assessment unit boundaries and input data: Schenk (2025), USGS data release, doi:10.5066/P14BFJJC.
Лицензия: CC0 1.0 (общественное достояние) · По материалам pubs.usgs.gov
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