Green Canyon is an area in the Gulf of Mexico

Gulf of Mexico

The Gulf of Mexico is a partially landlocked ocean basin largely surrounded by the North American continent and the island of Cuba. It is bounded on the northeast, north and northwest by the Gulf Coast of the United States, on the southwest and south by Mexico, and on the southeast by Cuba. In...

 that is rich in oil field

Oil field

An oil field is a region with an abundance of oil wells extracting petroleum from below ground. Because the oil reservoirs typically extend over a large area, possibly several hundred kilometres across, full exploitation entails multiple wells scattered across the area...

s and under the control of the BOEM

Bureau of Ocean Energy Management

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is an agency under the United States Department of the Interior, established by Secretarial Order. The agency exercises the oil, gas, and renewable energy-related management functions formerly under the Minerals Management Service, including activities...

. Many oil companies, including Shell

Royal Dutch Shell

Royal Dutch Shell plc , commonly known as Shell, is a global oil and gas company headquartered in The Hague, Netherlands and with its registered office in London, United Kingdom. It is the fifth-largest company in the world according to a composite measure by Forbes magazine and one of the six...

, Exxon Mobil, ATP Oil and Gas

ATP Oil and Gas

ATP Oil & Gas Corporation is a Houston, Texas based company that develops and produces oil and natural gas in the Gulf of Mexico and the North Sea. It specializes in developing reserves. ATP trades on the NASDAQ Global Select Market under the symbol ATPG....

, Devon Energy

Devon Energy

Devon Energy Corporation , is among the largest U.S.-based independent natural gas and oil producers. Based in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, the company's operations are focused on North American onshore exploration and production...

, W&T Offshore and Anadarko

Anadarko Petroleum Corporation

Anadarko Petroleum Corporation is one of the world’s largest independent oil and gas exploration and production companies, with approximately 2.3 billion barrels of oil equivalent of proved reserves and production of 206 million BOE as of December 31, 2008. Anadarko employs a worldwide...

 have leased the rights to drill for oil in this area.

Green Canyon, block 185 is known as Bush Hill and is a well known cold seep

Cold seep

A cold seep is an area of the ocean floor where hydrogen sulfide, methane and other hydrocarbon-rich fluid seepage occurs, often in the form of a brine pool...

 with a wide array of tube worms

Lamellibrachia luymesi

Lamellibrachia luymesi is a species of tube worms in the family Siboglinidae.It lives at deep-sea cold seeps where hydrocarbons are leaking out of the seafloor...

.

Additionally, like most of the Gulf of Mexico, there is a significant amount of salt tectonics.

Blocks in this protraction area are defined in UTM

Universal Transverse Mercator coordinate system

The Universal Transverse Mercator geographic coordinate system uses a 2-dimensional Cartesian coordinate system to give locations on the surface of the Earth. It is a horizontal position representation, i.e...

 zone 15 north in feet.