A renewed interest to continually search for hydrocarbon prospects in the deep offshore West Africa climaxed after the discovery of a rewarding oil prospects around the deep offshore basin of Mauritania. However, recent statistics showed that, viable prospects along this region are increasingly becoming difficult to locate and that, future success will greatly depend on identifying ‘structural and stratigraphic traps’ within prospective areas. In this study, digitised aeromagnetic data covering part of Niger Delta was processed and gridded to generate the residual map as well as the depth to basement maps. On these maps, potential areas for hydrocarbon traps were delineated accordingly. Oasis Montaj geophysical software was used throughout the data processing and analysis. The average thickness of the sediments or depth to basement varies from 0 km on the outcrops to as much as 10.7 km within the study area, large enough for hydrocarbon accumulation. In addition to that, eleven intrusives were mapped from 2.5D forward and inverse modeling, with lateral extents of 1.5 km - 6.0 km. The presence of these intrusives made parts of the study area less favourable for hydrocarbon exploration. The structurally low areas were also outlined from the depth to basement maps. Interestingly, most of the oil producing fields were reportedly located within the structurally low areas of the basin. Hence, it is recommended that a detailed seismic prospecting be carried out around the structurally low areas in ‘the new frontiers’.
