Earth Equity News

Exploring the Extreme Frontiers of Oil Drilling. By Amanda Little, Grist, October 8, 2009. "The oil field known as 'Jack' is located 175 miles off the coast of Louisiana, below 7,200 feet of water and another 30,000 feet of seabed, occupying a geological layer formed in the Cenozoic Era more than 60 million years ago. This layer -- the 'lower tertiary' -- lies deeper under water than any other Gulf of Mexico oil discovery, which is one reason why many in the industry initially dismissed it as too remote to exploit. But in 2006, Chevron defied the odds when its engineers drilled a test well at Jack and discovered that oil could flow from this ancient sediment at profitable rates. Their success opened up a new drilling frontier -- a monster oil patch holding between 3 billion and 15 billion barrels of crude. It was hailed as the largest discovery in the United States since 1968 -- a discovery potentially big enough to boost national oil reserves up to 50%… Jack is among a cluster of nearly a dozen new fields there that companies are now tapping in waters from 4,000 to 8,000 feet deep and in sedimentary rock extending between 1 and 6 miles below the seabed…

"You have to burn fossil fuels to harvest them -- that's a reality in any drilling scenario -- but the ratio of energy invested to energy gained gets slimmer as the drilling conditions get more extreme. (By 'energy invested,' I'm referring to all fossil fuels used to discover, drill, pump, and refine the oil and transport it to market.) During the glory days of U.S. oil production in the 1930s, an investment of 1 barrel of oil would yield a return of about 100 barrels. By 1970, when oil deposits had become scarcer and more difficult to extract and refine, the ratio had shrunk by more than half: 40 barrels of oil gained for every 1 barrel invested. By 2005, as the industry faced ever-greater limits, the ratio had diminished still further: about 14 to 1. Returns will continue to diminish, some experts argue, until we reach a 1:1 ratio -- and that would spell the end of the petroleum era... Today, offshore rigs are capable of operating in 10,000 feet of water and boring through 30,000 feet of seabed (twice the depth they could manage a decade ago)… I found the whole enterprise of deep-sea drilling doggedly ambitious, but also seemingly desperate -- like an addict forcing a syringe into the earth's innermost veins."