Offshore Oil Drilling and the Oil Rig Disaster in the Gulf

[Sigma]

All oil produced anywhere goes on the world market.  So even if we produce more here now, we'll still pay the same commodity prices for it. 

However:

The reasons to tap our own resources,though, would be to have an advantage of readiness in case of further political volatility.  If we have accomplished the exploration and infrastructure required, we can then utilize the resources in a short timeline. We will not be held economically hostage by other countries who would do us harm.

But, we also need to build or upgrade the refineries here in the US.  But of course the EPA regulations make it cost prohibitive to build new or upgrade, so they just keep running the old 'grandfathered' refineries.  New efficient refineries would lower prices as well.

[mtraininjax]

All I know is that there are a lot of scared people about now. Does not matter where the oil goes, but our economy depends on it now, and that is not about to change over the next few years. Oil is used for every macro economic item in your house, either to produce it or create it.

If we could build natural gas drilling platforms, and pump that out, we have less of an issue for an accident, and we could convert most of the power plans to natural gas. Offshore plants don't just have to be for oil.

[stjr]

Question:  What if they drilled and didn't find oil?!  What studies have been done close to Florida shores regarding locating oil?  If it's at our beaches, why not under our land?  What evidence of oil is even motivating the legislature to consider this ill conceived legislation?  If this is all about "looking" for oil, could we just make a mess of things and end up with nothing to show for it?

And back to directional drilling.  If this is even necessary and feasible, why not push that to keep rigs far from land?

Directional wells are drilled for several purposes:

    * Increasing the exposed section length through the reservoir by drilling through the reservoir at an angle
    * Drilling into the reservoir where vertical access is difficult or not possible. For instance an oilfield under a town, under a lake, or underneath a difficult to drill formation
    * Allowing more wellheads to be grouped together on one surface location can allow fewer rig moves, less surface area disturbance, and make it easier and cheaper to complete and produce the wells. For instance, on an oil platform or jacket offshore, up to about 40 wells can be grouped together. The wells will fan out from the platform into the reservoir below. This concept is being applied to land wells, allowing multiple subsurface locations to be reached from one pad, reducing environmental impact.
    * Drilling "relief wells" to relieve the pressure of a well producing without restraint (a "blow out"). In this scenario, another well could be drilled starting at a safe distance away from the blow out, but intersecting the troubled wellbore. Then, heavy fluid (kill fluid) is pumped into the relief wellbore to suppress the high pressure in the original wellbore causing the blowout.

Most directional drillers are given a well path to follow that is predetermined by engineers and geologists before the drilling commences. When the directional driller starts the drilling process, periodic surveys are taken with a downhole camera instrument ("single shot camera") to provide survey data (inclination and azimuth) of the well bore.

These pictures are typically taken at intervals between 30-500 feet, with 90 feet common during active changes of angle or direction, and distances of 200-300 feet being typical while "drilling ahead" (not making active changes to angle and direction)

During critical angle and direction changes, especially while using a downhole motor, an MWD (Measurement While Drilling) tool will be added to the drill string to provide continuously updated measurements that may be used for (near) real-time adjustments.

These data indicate if the well is following the planned path and whether the orientation of the drilling assembly is causing the well to deviate as planned. Corrections are regularly made by techniques as simple as adjusting rotation speed or the drill string weight (weight on bottom) and stiffness, as well as more complicated and time consuming methods, such as introducing a downhole motor.

Such pictures, or surveys, are plotted and maintained as an engineering and legal record describing the path of the well bore. The survey pictures taken while drilling are typically confirmed by a later survey in full of the borehole, typically using a "multi-shot camera" device.

The multi-shot camera advances the film at time intervals so that by sealing the camera instrument into a tubular housing and dropping the assembly into the drilling string (down to just above the drilling bit), and then withdrawing the drill string at time intervals, the well may be fully surveyed at regular intervals (approximately every 90 feet being common, the typical length of 2 or 3 joints of drill pipe, known as a stand, since most drilling rigs "stand back" the pipe withdrawn from the hole at such increments, known as "stands".)

With modern technology great feats can be achieved. Whereas 20 years ago wells drilled at 60 degrees through the reservoir were achieved, horizontal drilling is now normal.

Drilling far from the surface location still requires careful planning and design. The current record holders manage wells over 10 km (6 miles) away from the surface location at a depth of only 1600â€"2600 m (5,200â€"8,500 ft). These are wells drilled from a land location to underneath the sea (Wytch Farm (BP), south coast of England, ARA (Total), south coast of Argentina (TFE) Dieksand (RWE), north coast of Germany, Chayvo (ExxonMobil), east coast of Sakhalin Island, Russia, and most recently Al Shaheen (Maersk Oil Qatar AS), Offshore Qatar.[1]

From:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slant_drilling

[stjr]

Here is a story on Collier County chances for oil.  Doesn't look that promising here, rated at less than 50/50.:

Oil under our feet in Southwest Florida
By Tami Osborne, WINK News

Story Created: Jul 11, 2008 at 10:09 PM EDT

Story Updated: Jul 11, 2008 at 10:14 PM EDT
COLLIER COUNTY, Fla. - Could the answer to high oil prices be right under our feet here in Southwest Florida?
You may not know it, but we have at least nine sites here in Southwest Florida where oil has been drilled in the past.
But the question is whether its worth it to drill here again.
The Sunniland Field south of Immokalee in Collier County is the site of the first successful oil drill in Florida.
That happened back in 1943, and by 1954 the Sunniland Field was producing a half million barrels of oil each year.
"That field was very productive and was productive for ten years and beyond," America Oil and Gas Historical Society board member Kris Wells says.
Wells has done extensive studies on the history of oil in Collier County, and around the United States.
"Oil is getting more and more difficult to find," Wells says. "It requires a great deal more capitol investment, and time, and risk associated with it."
Although, decades ago Collier County was the source of hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil, Wells says its hard to say whether its worth it to start drilling here again because its just so expensive to put these holes into the ground and so many of them come up empty.
"Its still extremely risky. Even with all the advances of modern technology. I don't think we're at the 50/50 point yet of being able to find oil," Wells explains.
Wells says the last time he could find record of oil drilling in Collier County was 2004.
While we found at least nine sites in Southwest Florida where oil has been drilled, Wells says its up to geologists and venture capitilists to decide if it should be drilled here again.

http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:fL43EGxSRMoJ:www.winknews.com/news/local/24554524.html+oil+around+florida&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

[stjr]

The issue of oil in Florida predates WWII.  Here is a fascinating account of oil exploration in Florida, including around Jacksonville, written in the late 1930's.  See the source for this account and other intriguing 1930's era descriptions of life in Jacksonville and Old Florida at a new thread I just opened at: http://www.metrojacksonville.com/forum/index.php/topic,4912.msg76078/topicseen.html#new

When Florida Strikes Oil

Nobody in Florida expects to find the gold which the Spaniards failed to find, but there are many people in Florida who hope to find oil, and who are backing their hopes with cash. Oil exploration has been going on in Florida since 1903. Fiftythree oil wells have been drilled in the period since the first one was put down at Sumpterville, northeast of Tampa, by oil operators from Pennsylvania, who got down 2,000 feet before their money gave out. They did not find oil, but they did find all of the geological formations which they, as experienced oil men, expected to find.

Since then every successive study of Florida as a potential source of oil has given more encouragement to the belief that there are stores of "liquid gold" underlying the peninsula and that eventually somebody will tap them.

If and when that does occur, Florida will experience a boom besides which all of its previous booms will seem insignificant, from the silk-worm boom of a century ago, when people flocked to Florida in 1838 to plant mulberry trees and grow silk worms for an American silk industry that was to compete with Italy and China, down to the speculative land boom of the 1920's.

The belief that oil might be found in Florida was based originally upon purely a priori reasoning. There was oil all around the great semi-circle of the Gulf, from Vera Cruz and Tampico to Texas and, latterly, to Louisiana. There are oil wells producing out in the Gulf, drilled through the bottom of the sea off the coast of Louisiana. It seemed hardly credible, those who reasoned thus pointed out, that geology took any note of state lines. Why should not the oil formations under and around the Gulf of Mexico extend clear across to its eastern shore?

The enlargement of scientific knowledge of oil formations, of scientific methods of detecting oil indications and of the technology of oil drilling have continued to encourage wild catters to sink their drills in various parts of Florida. Fortythree wells were shallower than 4,000 feet, two went down deeper than 6,000 feet, every one of them showed "signs" which to experienced oil men's eyes encouraged the belief that there was oil in paying quantities somewhere under Florida. Oil men with experience in the Oklahoma and East Texas fields are not given to discouragement if they drill fifty or a hundred dry wells in a limited field before they bring in a producer; therefore oil men will tell the inquirer that there has really been no adequate oil exploration of Florida's forty million acres of potential oil land.

Actual oil and natural gas have been found in some of these wells. In 1927 J. L. McCord of Oklahoma struck promising sands saturated with crude oil at Monticello, just east of Talla hassee. A year earlier a well at Cedar Key on the Gulf Coast struck natural gas at a depth of 4,010 feet, which burned at the casing head for months. Faulty drilling equipment and technique and failing finances-the Florida real estate boom had just collapsed-caused the abandonment of this project.

The bringing in of the East Texas field in 1928, and of the Louisiana field shortly thereafter, stimulated interest in Florida's oil possibilities. In 1934 William F. Blanchard, an oil engineer with experience in the Pennsylvania fields, called an oil conference at the George Washington Hotel in Jacksonville. Representatives of most of the great oil companies attended and such interest was shown in the assembled data and reports of previous oil explorations that some of the large companies immediately began taking oil leases on Florida lands, all the way from Cape Sable at the southern tip of the peninsula, north to the Georgia line and west to Pensacola. By the Summer of 1937 there were more than 5,000,000 acres of Florida lands under oil leases. At two widely divergent points the most modern scientific apparatus for detecting the presence of subterranean oil formations was being set up, one oil well was being drilled and preparations were under way for two others, using the most up-to-date drilling equipment.

Great encouragement has been given to Florida oil exploration by a revision of its previously expressed opinion by the United States Geological Survey, which had held that Florida was outside of the range of possible oil-bearing sands. In its geological map of oil fields and possible oil fields published in 1934 the Geological Survey included the entire State of Florida as well as an adjoining strip of southern Georgia and Alabama. This was a result, in part, of geological explorations made in the course of the surveys for the Florida cross-state canal.

These and other recent geological discoveries have resulted in the complete abandonment by geologists of the belief long held, first publicly announced by a famous scientist of a century ago, Louis Agassiz, that the Florida peninsula is a coral reef. Scientists now recognize that it is a southerly extension of the Appalachian rock formations, overlaid with water-deposited limestone, and so is geologically identical with the lands to the North and West, in which oil has been found in enormous quantities.

The Gulf Oil Company, in 1937, had leased large acreage in southern Florida, and had begun explorations with the use of the same instruments which had enabled them to locate im portant oil fields in Texas and Louisiana. Another oil company was preparing to drill at Cape Sable, which is in a geological line with the oil and gas developments in Cuba. A third corporation, backed and headed by Mrs. Lucy Cotton Thomas McGraw, had explored several million acres in North Florida with the seismograph and had come to the conclusion, in which many oil engineers and operators agreed, that the country adjacent to the Suwannee River, near Live Oak, offered the most promising outlook for a successful oil development. Meantime, the test well in Lake County was going through geological formations of the type which spell hope to oil operators.

Unless all of the oil geologists are deceiving themselves by thinking that the signs which mean oil in Texas and Louisiana mean the same thing in Florida, there seems to be a reasonable chance that, sooner or later, Florida will strike oil.

Well, hope springs eternal even if oil doesn't! 

[BridgeTroll]

It appears any reason is good enough to not drill anywhere in the U.S... yet those rascally environmentally correct Canadiens have no problem with. 

Prices too high or low
Environmental
force alternatives
Takes too long
No refining
Exports
NIMBY
Oil storage

[FayeforCure]

This is what we should be fighting for:

Comments by Rep. Franklin Sands:

“Legislation sponsored by Representative Keith Fitzgerald, D-Sarasota, and supported by other House Democrats, would help our state create a robust and secure renewable energy market. It is appropriate that we don’t waste the final crucial days of the 2009 legislation session without adequately discussing and approving House Bill 1317, which creates the Florida Renewable Energy Freedom Act.

“House Bill 1317 would put Florida in a position to be a national leader in the production and use of renewable energy. This legislation would be good for Florida’s economy, our environment, and provides the appropriate incentive to encourage homeowners and small businesses to invest in renewable energy, including solar and power, that would reduce our dependence on oil.”

Yet, Florida's hard core Republicans are nowhere to be found. They insist on the fake solutions of the past.

[JeffreyS]

I will sign on to the drill here drill now if that legislation is combined with real renewable energy projects at the same time.  I could be in favor of a small bridge of St. Johns river water being used by central Florida if their desalinization plant was already under construction.  I think short term solutions are OK but they should always be bound to the real long term solution. Legislated and funded at the same time not just talk about the long term solution.

[BridgeTroll]

A very realistic solution!!  As opposed to the never do anything except wish for windmills...

[Doctor_K]

I don't know.  Petroleum got us a long way up the civilization, industrialization, and progress ladder.

However, as a center-right former Republican, I'm all over this.  And it takes effect on July 1 of this year, per the Bill.

http://www.myfloridahouse.gov/Sections/Bills/billsdetail.aspx?BillId=41683

A very realistic solution!!  As opposed to the never do anything except wish for windmills...

Except if you're a Kennedy!

[stjr]

Putting aside the issue of drill - no drill, why does this have to be so close to shore?  What's the point?  Move it out of site or put it on land.  From the beach to the horizon is what Florida tourism and real estate is all about.

Why don't our pro-oil friends answer this question?!!  Because they are in such a rush to help out big oil, no one is thinking of compromises, alternatives, or consequences down the road?  That is #1 why I oppose this action.  Big decisions should not be rushed unless it's an emergency and this doesn't qualify.  It's a long term implementation deserving of public debate and input.  If it's really a good idea, it's backers shouldn't be concerned about such a process.  The desire to rush it through says they have something to hide.  The pro-politicians will pay for this eventually on this basis.  They always do when the regrets start flying.

[BridgeTroll]

The 130-turbine, 24-square-mile cluster of windmills would be about 8 miles from Kennedy's home in Hyannis Port, and he has long opposed it.

This Kennedy??

He said he's against the project because it would create a range of environmental and navigational problems and would hurt tourism, one of the area's key industries.

Or was it this Kennedy?

"I definitely support alternative energy," Robert Kennedy told a local public radio program. But he insisted that the wind farm plan "makes no sense for the public because the costs it's going to impose on the people of these regions are so huge . . . probably larger than coal. This isn't just about wealthy people objecting to the diminishment of property values, but that's an important issue too," he added. "The aesthetics are going to forbid people from going there."

The alliance says the wind farm would spoil tourism, kill migratory birds and create a "permanent industrial facility in a pristine natural environment." And the towers would be illuminated at night to warn boats and aircraft, turning the coastline into a Christmas tree.

Looks like it is ALL the Kennedys!   Who would have thought?

Just where in the heel are we supposed to put these windmills...??  Solar panels aren't exactly aesthetically pleasing in a pristine environment either!


http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2006/mar/02/20060302-124537-9804r/
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2006/04/27/kennedy_faces_fight_on_cape_wind/

[BridgeTroll]

Clearly the reasons to drill "so close to the shore" are to...

Irritate oil haters
Less distance to swim if it sinks
shorter commute
obscure everyones view
pollute the earth
practice in shallow water in prep for "the big time"
Since there is no oil there we need to keep our bits sharp
etc,etc,etc,...

If they are willing to pay Florida to drill for non existant oil we should let them... I mean no risk of spills yet we gain the cash and a great fishing spot.

Perhaps we can put a giant windmill atop the abandoned non producing oilwell...

Now THAT is thinking green!

[stjr]

Clearly the reasons to drill "so close to the shore" are to...

Irritate oil haters
Less distance to swim if it sinks
shorter commute
obscure everyones view
pollute the earth
practice in shallow water in prep for "the big time"
Since there is no oil there we need to keep our bits sharp
etc,etc,etc,...

If they are willing to pay Florida to drill for non existant oil we should let them... I mean no risk of spills yet we gain the cash and a great fishing spot.

Perhaps we can put a giant windmill atop the abandoned non producing oilwell...

Now THAT is thinking green!

Bridge, I appreciate your humor.  But, the lack of a substantive answer just supports my point that their is no compelling reason.  It's just an irrational rush to judgement and a HOPED-FOR money grab by the State that may very well fall flat.  So why go this route?

P.S.  I wouldn't want windmills in site of shore either.  Aesthetic pollution is just as bad as other forms.  It's almost impossible today to view a landscape anywhere without power lines, cell phone towers, signage, tall buildings, and other man-created objects intruding upon the view.  Finding sanctuary in "God's house" is nigh near impossible.  This just attacks one of the few remaining refuges.

[BridgeTroll]

My lack of a substantive answer is because both you and I and everyone else knows the answer...  They believe there may be oil.  They want to look for it and exploit it if it indeed exists.  To say there is no compelling reason to drill is silly.  Clearly somebody is compelled to spend alot of money on leases, platforms, drills, ships, crews, insurance.

Hmmm... why oh why would someone expend all that energy and effort?  Quite obviously NOT for the reasons I listed in my previous above post.

Aesthetic pollution is just as bad as other forms.

Here we agree... 100%  I cannot say that anymore clearly.

But... reality dictates that if you want energy... you will use resources, despoil someones view, create some form of pollution, and to claim otherwise is folly.

Current technology DOES NOT ALLOW US TO HAVE OUR CAKE AND EAT IT TOO!