Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells – Our Ride to the Renewable Future. Amanda Little

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 percent.

      Since then, global oil companies have been pouring billions of dollars into these so-called ultradeep waters of the Gulf in pursuit of the region’s buried treasure. Jack is among a cluster of nearly a dozen new fields there—including “Blind Faith,” “Great White,” and “Cascade”—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.

      Coaxing oil from such great depths poses unprecedented risks for oil drilling—and that’s why I decided to visit the area. I wanted to witness firsthand the world’s most extreme drilling territory, the Mount Everest of oil frontiers, where the industry has to tackle the tallest odds and gravest circumstances to eke out new discoveries before global petroleum production peaks and begins to decline.

      I set out at dawn on an April morning in a Sikorsky S-76 helicopter. The sky above the New Orleans heliport was a pea-soup green, thick with rain and pitchfork lightning. I was traveling with a Chevron executive and three of his staffers, all of us wearing regulation jumpsuits, hard hats, and steel-toed boots. The chopper lurched and shuddered in the squalls, but my travel companions nodded to the pilot to press on—this was typical weather for the Louisiana coast, and routine flying conditions. We hurtled over the bayou’s emerald marshlands, patterned like marbled paper with coiling blue inlets and flecks of white from puttering shrimp boats. Soon the marsh gave way to the Gulf of Mexico’s open waters and the storm lifted. I relaxed my grip on the edge of my seat as a smooth two-hour voyage stretched out before us.

      “Isn’t this transcendent?” Paul Siegele shouted as he pressed his nose to the window. The early morning sun glinted off a colony of metal structures pocking the surface of the sea. Siegele, the director of Chevron’s offshore drilling division, identified the objects below with the geeky verve of a birder: a miniature oil rig known as a mono pod, a drill ship nearly as big as the Titanic, and circular, tiered platforms scattered like steel chandeliers that fell from the storm-shaken clouds.

      A lanky six foot three, Siegele has none of the cowboy swagger you might expect from a top oil executive. He’s earnest and quick to smile, with a mild, professorial manner and a boyish mop of brown hair. Siegele was an aspiring artist as an undergraduate at California Lutheran University, until his studies of rock as a sculptural medium sparked his interest in geology. Oil drilling, he says, is not unlike sculpture: “It’s about precision—guiding tools into the earth artfully, not just blindly hammering at rock.”

      The Gulf yields 25 percent of all U.S. oil production, and is home to more than 3,700 production platforms, most of them located in relatively shallow waters of under 2,000 feet. Many geologists believe that the ultradeep regions of the Gulf—those covered by waters greater than 4,000 feet—hold more untapped oil reserves than any other parts of the Western world. 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). One rig sits atop each field, thrusting its tentacles into up to a dozen wells throughout the bed. The rig pulls up oil and then pumps it back to onshore refineries via underwater pipelines.

      Chevron is one of the largest leaseholders in the deep-sea Gulf, which means it has much to gain from these waters—but also much to lose. Three out of four exploration wells in this area come up dry—nerve-wracking odds when the wells cost $100 million apiece, or as much as twenty times what they cost on land. And even if you hit pay dirt, there’s no guarantee of profit: in the past decade, Chevron has abandoned nearly a quarter of the successful wells it has drilled because they wouldn’t flow at profitable rates.

      Our specific destination was an offshore rig known as the “Cajun Express”—a massive rectangular ship with onboard drilling equipment. It was the Cajun’s 5-mile-long drill that months earlier had burrowed the legendary discovery well at Jack. That day, the rig had motored over to a nearby field known as “Tahiti,” where Siegele would be overseeing final preparations for another drilling endeavor. (Field names are given by the geologists who discover and study them. There are plenty of fields in the deep-sea Gulf with names that carry more gravitas—“Thunder Horse” and “Atlantis,” for instance; “Jack” was named in honor of its founder’s lifelong mentor, and “Tahiti” by a geologist who loved the Polynesian islands.)

      The activity we were about to witness on the Cajun would help determine the fate of this extreme deep-sea frontier: Would the risks outweigh the rewards? Would Chevron be able to scale this drilling Everest?

      Truthfully, there’s no single Everest of oil drilling, given how many unthinkable extremes—environmental, technological, political—the industry and its workers face today. In the Chukchi Sea of the Arctic Ocean, for instance, drillers have to wear heated bodysuits to survive winter temperatures averaging 60 degrees below zero; the region descends into near-complete darkness for four months of the year. In the Kashagan field of Kazakhstan, workers have to wear gas masks to protect against the high concentration of poisonous hydrogen sulfide present in the oil they’re extracting. On Sakhalin Island, located in the Sea of Okhotsk off the coast of Russia, pipelines are placed in the vicinity of active fault lines, exposing workers to the ongoing threat of explosions and other disruptions caused by earthquakes. This remote territory is also home to brown bears and bandits, so security guards must stand watch. Add to that the more routine hazards of the job: five workers died in a single year on Sakhalin from accidents such as high falls. The oil wells, pipelines, and refineries of Chad, Iraq, and Iran, meanwhile, are vulnerable to terrorist attacks.

      But in the minds of oil executives, one risk outweighs all others: cost. In this category, no drilling frontier is more extreme than the world’s deepest seas. And no seas are more costly to exploit than the Gulf of Mexico, where the undersea sediment is particularly difficult to map and penetrate and the oil is embedded so deep underground.

      Chevron’s discovery at Jack was like spring in the autumn of the oil industry. Many of the world’s largest fields today—from Saudi Arabia’s Ghawar to Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay—are dwindling, verging on retirement. Nearly 70 percent of the world’s oil comes from fewer than eight hundred fields with an average age of forty years. Of those, only twenty-five are supergiants—a term industry insiders use to refer to fields that contain more than 5 billion barrels. Amazingly, only nine supergiant fields have been discovered worldwide since 1970, according to the International Energy Agency. Despite increasing exploration activity, the rate of supergiant discoveries has been slowing over time: Of these nine, six were discovered in the 1970s, two in the 1980s, and one in the 1990s. (Discoveries in the Gulf’s ultradeep waters have not been included in the tally, as the region is still being mapped.)

      Add to that the political pressures associated with many petroleum-rich areas: three-quarters of the world’s oil reserves are controlled by nations such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Nigeria, which have governments that are either at odds with the United States or vulnerable to corruption and conflict. Managing drilling operations in these regions can be dangerous, costly, and unpredictable. Even those oil-producing countries that are U.S.-friendly, such as Brazil and Mexico, require American oil companies to pay high taxes to produce their crude abroad.

      Taken together, these constraints on U.S. oil producers make domestic discoveries in the deep-sea Gulf momentous. But there’s a hitch—a few, in fact. Just because the oil is there doesn’t mean it can be reliably and affordably pumped up from extreme depths and into refineries and gas stations. The deeper and farther offshore you go to find oil, the bigger the technological and financial hurdles: temperatures “down hole” get ever hotter СКАЧАТЬ