Crude oil and gases in the seabed provide an important energy source for seabed microorganisms. We investigated the role of archaea in the anaerobic degradation of alkanes in deep-sea oil seeps from the Gulf of Mexico. For that we performed 16S amplicon sequencing for bacteria and archaea in sediment samples collected from a cold seep (GeoB19351-14), from ambient sediment (GeoB19351-5) and from sediment sample with asphalt pieces (GeoB19331-1). The analysis showed distinct archaeal and bacteria communities in the cold seep and asphalt sediments compared to the ambient sediment. The sediments contain a substantial diversity of hydrocarbon-dependent archaea such as anaerobic methanotrophs (ANME), Candidatus Syntrophoarchaeum, Candidatus Methanoliparia and GoM-Arc1 archaea. To study the function of these archaea, we sequenced metagenomic libraries from DNA extracted from the cold seep sediment (7 libraries, GeoB19351-14) and the asphalt sediment (1 library, GeoB19331-1). We used these metagenomic libraries to obtained two metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) affiliated with Ca. Methanoliparia: one obtained from the cold seep sediment libraries and the second one obtained from the asphalt sediment library. Additionally, we did single cell sorting from sediment samples of the cold seep (GeoB19351-14) and performed sequencing to obtained a genomic library used to reconstruct a single amplified genome (SAG) affiliated to Candidatus Syntrophoarchaeum.