Chevron Drills Down 30,000 Feet to Tap Oil-Rich Gulf of Mexico (ca. 2007)

(Look at this 3 year old article I found in a WIRED magazine in a box in my closet. Tell me if it sounds familiar, but in another reality. Chevron is no different from BP in their corporate stomp on everything attitude, but it seems like their deep water well was quite a bit more successful and less damaging than BP's efforts.--jef)

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Pumped Up
The Cajun Express has bored the deepest offshore well in Gulf history.
By Amanda Griscom Little | 08.21.07

Photo: Michael Sugrue

"Isn't this transcendent?" Paul Siegele shouts as he presses his nose to the window of a Bell 430 chopper hurtling through a sky thick with rain and pitchfork lightning. We're flying over the Gulf of Mexico, above some 3,500 oil production platforms, and Siegele is pointing them out with the verve of a birder — here a miniature oil rig known as a monopod; over there a drill ship almost as big as the Titanic; still farther out, platforms looking like huge steel chandeliers that dropped out of the storm-shaken clouds.

Siegele has reason to be giddy. He works for Chevron, and his team is sitting on several new record-breaking discoveries in the Gulf, a region that many geologists believe may have more untapped oil reserves than any other part of the world. On this trip, the 48-year-old vice president for deepwater exploration has come to a rig called the Cajun Express to oversee final preparations before drilling begins on the company's 30-square-mile Tahiti field.

Looming like an Erector set version of Hellboy — with cranes for arms, a hydraulic drill for its head, and a 200-foot derrick for a body — the rig appears at once menacing and toylike. But the real spectacle is below the surface: A drill is plunging down through 4,000 feet of ocean and more than 22,000 feet of shale and sediment — a syringe prodding Earth's innermost veins. That 5-mile shaft will soon give Chevron the deepest active offshore well in the Gulf. Some land drills have gone deeper, but extracting oil from below miles of freezing salt water and unyielding sediment creates a set of technical problems that far exceed those faced on terra firma.

Minutes after we land on the Cajun Express, Siegele gets some bad news from Ron Byrd, his weather-beaten site manager. "The junk basket is stuck way down there on some debris," says Byrd, who has captained offshore rigs for more than 30 years. The junk basket is an 8-inch hunk of iron that runs up and down the entire length of the drill hole on a piece of wire, scraping the well clean before sensitive production instruments are dropped in. It's a particularly important device when drilling offshore, because the presence of the ocean pushes debris, mud, fossils, and other muck into the hole.

Siegele, who is a lanky 6' 3" with a mild, professorial manner and a boyish mop of brown hair, winces almost imperceptibly. "Just a little bump in the road," he mutters. Technically, it's a million-dollar bump. The crew will spend 48 hours fishing the jammed tool out of the hole, halting all other activity on a rig that costs over $500,000 a day to run. But this is chump change to Siegele, who has an annual budget of more than $1 billion. "If snags like this didn't happen so frequently," Siegele says, "you'd probably let them get to you."

It's just another high-priced mishap in the world of ultradeep-sea drilling — the newest, riskiest, and most technologically extreme drilling frontier. Today, deep-sea rigs are capable of reaching down 40,000 feet, twice as deep as a decade ago: plunging their drills through 10,000 feet of water and then 30,000 more feet of seabed. One platform sits atop each so-called field, thrusting its tentacles into multiple wells dug into ancient sediment, slurping out oil, and then pumping it back to onshore refineries through underwater pipelines.

It's a business where huge sums are lost (two years ago, BP suffered a $250 million blow when a hurricane took out one of its platforms) but even more can be made. The mother lode of oil in the deepwater Gulf is so significant that Tahiti and other successful fields in this region are expected to soon produce enough crude to reverse the long-standing decline in US oil production of about 10 percent per year.

Even better, a recent discovery by Chevron has signaled that soon there may be vastly more oil gushing out of the ultradeep seabeds — more than even the optimists were predicting four years ago. In 2004, the company penetrated a 60 million-year-old geological stratum known as the "lower tertiary trend" containing a monster oil patch that holds between 3 billion and 15 billion barrels of crude. Dubbed Jack, the field lies beneath waters nearly twice as deep as those covering Tahiti, and many in the industry dismissed the discovery as too remote to exploit. But last September, Chevron used the Cajun Express to probe the Jack field, proving that petroleum could flow from the lower tertiary at hearty commercial rates — fast enough to bring billions of dollars of crude to market. It was hailed as the largest publicly reported discovery in the past decade, opening up a region that is perhaps big enough to boost national oil reserves by 50 percent. A mad rush followed, and oil companies plowed more than $5 billion into this part of the Gulf.

It was a burst of good news for the oil industry. Today, many of the world's largest fields — from Ghawar in Saudi Arabia to Prudhoe Bay in Alaska — are facing retirement, and the ultradeep frontier holds the industry's best hope for big new discoveries. But there are still big questions to be answered before Jack starts filling gas tanks: How well will oil flow from these prehistoric rocks? Can Chevron's equipment handle the increased temperatures and pressures at these depths? Can engineers successfully pump the oil back to shore?

In November, a sister rig to the Cajun Express will putter over to the Jack field, and Chevron will "spud" a preproduction well in search of answers to these questions. "There's no guarantee that the rewards in this field will outweigh the risks," says Siegele, slumping. But then he sucks in a breath of salt air and straightens up. He's got to brief a group of drilling engineers on the plans for Chevron's grand venture into Jack.

Chevron runs its offshore drilling operations out of a gleaming Houston skyscraper that recalls the nose of a double-barreled shotgun aimed skyward. Geologists work in cavernous visualization rooms with floor-to-ceiling monitors depicting digital renderings of the Gulf waters and seabed. Chevron has long bet that there's oil in these regions and has bought from the Department of the Interior almost twice as many federal leases to drill in the ultradeep waters of the Gulf as any other company.

One of Chevron's top geologists, a Jerry Garcia look-alike named Barney Issen, pulls an image of the Jack field up onto the monitors. "To you, this may looks like a dog's breakfast," he says, pointing to a multi colored morass. But the data is actually a finely detailed 3-D map of the ocean, seafloor, and sediment below. It will allow Chevron to locate promising spots to drill and then provide a guide for the engineers who operate the production process remotely.

To make this map, Issen and his team deployed ships that cruised through the Gulf, popping off air guns — underwater cannons that emit a gigantic burp into the ocean, bouncing sound waves off under water rock formations. Hydrophones (aquatic microphones) tethered to the vessels recorded the response, taking in hundreds of thousands of recordings simultaneously. These allowed the company to determine the composition and shape of the rocks below. Chevron needed to use masses of microphones to compensate for the distortions caused by a layer of salt as jagged as the Swiss Alps beneath the seafloor in the ultradeep regions of the Gulf. That mineral, unfortunately for the geologists in Houston, acts like a fun-house mirror for seismic sound waves. Issen compares sorting through the data to "peering through a thick wall of mottled glass and trying to count the freckles of someone on the other side."

Once the map was assembled, the Chevron team at the Houston office pored over the data and searched for sandy layers of sediment under domelike caps of shale. These signify the location of a potential reservoir because oil consistently rises through permeable sediment to the highest point it can go, collecting under unyielding shale mounds. Once these promising spots are found, the maps are used to chart the drill's optimal point of entry: the place where it's least likely to hit a nasty fault line or air pocket that would throw the whole well off. Finding the sweet spot is like dropping a baseball from 5 miles in the sky and hitting home plate — at night.

Then you have to hope you've found a highly porous and permeable oil bed. Most people think of oil as floating in big pools under layers of rock. But it's actually embedded in the rock, sort of like water in a sponge. "When you drive the drill down, you're going into porous rock that can be either kinda squishy or kinda rigid," Siegele says. Squishy is better, but as rock ages, it typically become tighter. That's why industry members were flabbergasted by the Jack well test that revealed high porosity. It's also what gives the Jack field, and the lower tertiary in general, the potential to reduce America's dependence on foreign oil — while earning Chevron a ton of money .

The galley of the Cajun Express is a prisonlike cafeteria of stainless steel and gray linoleum crammed with engineers in blue coveralls devouring their meals. Today the menu is bratwurst, cheese fries, and twice-baked potatoes. At first glance, it's hard to believe this is the setting for a proposed Food Network special on the high-caliber cuisine 140 miles offshore. But the grub is lip-smackingly good.
The Cajun is equipped with other perks: an Internet café, a gym, and a movie theater — but these luxuries are hardly used. Few of the men have the energy for entertainment or exercise after working a 12-hour shift on the drilling floor — hauling great vats of mud used for drill lubricant, welding broken iron casings, or repairing robotic submarines that fix problems with seafloor equipment. The living quarters, which house up to 150 workers, are the size of walk-in closets, filled with cot-sized bunk beds that fold out of the walls.

"When you're here, you're pretty much working or sleeping," says Siegele. Stout salaries make up for the extreme conditions: Entry-level tool pushers make about $60,000, and high-level geologists and engineers can earn in the mid six figures. Added bonus: a massive testosterone rush. "This is the best big-boy toy you'll ever find," says Chevron spokesperson Mickey Driver.

The first task for the men on the boat is to make sure that the rig stays in one place. In shallower areas, rigs can be anchored to the sea bottom — but it's dangerous to moor a drilling vessel in ultradeep water. The motion of the ocean and the fierceness of the currents at those depths make it too cumbersome. Plus, vessels need to be able to move to safety in the event of a hurricane. Ultradeep drilling rigs are kept "on station" by so-called thrusters — engines on each corner of the rig that are programmed to respond to a GPS system tracking both the drill's target on the seafloor and the ocean currents. The thrusters constantly push and pull, doing an extreme version of what you do if you're standing in shallow ocean water: constantly shifting your weight to stay balanced as the waves ebb and flow.

Dropping a drill down through more than 1 mile of water and 4 miles of earth isn't easy either. The drill string is composed of hundreds of 90-foot sections known as joints that are dropped into the water by an automated mechanical arm and successively screwed into each other. It took more than three days to assemble all the joints in the drill string that pierced the Jack field.

Once the rotating drill bit begins its journey down through miles of sediment and pierces the seafloor, it encounters another set of problems caused by the changing terrain. The test well for the Jack field drilled through nearly a dozen geological layers — ranging from hard bedrock to sandy sediment to empty voids. These rapid shifts from one level of pressure to another can disturb the rotations of the drill, causing it to get stuck or veer off course. Pressure is good — it's what naturally forces the liquid crude up the length of the well and into the barges and pipelines that send it back to shore. (The layer of shale over the oil-bearing sands acts like a brick on top of a water balloon — the fluid wants to surge upward.) But, at the very bottom, farther below sea level than Mount Everest is above it, there's enough pressure to implode a human head — or, more pertinently, to crack iron casings.

Moreover, the closer you get to Earth's core, the higher the temperature of the rocks. At 20,000 feet below seabed, the oil is hot enough to boil an egg. At 30,000 feet, it can reach more than 400 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to cook off into natural gas and carbon dioxide. Meanwhile, the water at the bottom of the deep sea is at near-freezing temperatures — between 32 and 34 degrees — creating a dangerous interaction: When the boiling-hot oil hits the freezing-cold water, it could solidify and block the flow, rupturing the pipes. The machinery on the seafloor, therefore, has to be well insulated. Engineers on the Cajun Express have been relying on a fairly primitive method — pumping the casing and substations with antifreeze — but much more sophisticated systems are in the works.

Because so many of the challenges that engineers encounter in the ultradeep can't be anticipated — or found anywhere else — the Jack test rig was populated with so-called Serial Number 001 technologies: one-of-a-kind innovations ranging from perforation guns that are triggered at well bottom inside the casing, creating holes that let the oil gush in and flow upward, to electrohydraulic systems that seal the wells in emergencies. And yet sometimes the solution is plain old creative thinking and duct tape. For example, when a tool got stuck down the hole during one well test, someone suggested just banging a giant hammer against the casing, sending vibrations down that jarred the tool loose.

As consensus grows that the world needs to shift away from fossil fuels, extracting oil from the most extreme and costly locations can seem foolishly myopic. If Chevron is going to throw billions of dollars into something untested and possibly doomed to failure, wouldn't it make more sense to invest in an inexhaustible, greener technology that's going to have political support a decade from now?
Siegele doesn't think so. He does know that geological limitations will prevent him from drilling much deeper: It's a pretty safe bet that below 40,000 feet, the extreme heat has baked off much of the deep-sea troves of crude. And there are financial limits to this frontier, too. Even as Chevron and other oil giants earn record profits, they also face record expenses. For example, the company has commissioned two new deep water rigs that will be able to drill 40,000-foot wells. But at more than $600 million each, they can't exactly be snapped up on boats.com. "The costs of developing a new oil or gas project are about 65 percent higher today than 30 months ago, and the greatest escalation of costs has been offshore," says Daniel Yergin, chair of the consulting firm Cambridge Energy Research Associates. At today's oil prices of $70 a barrel, the current exploration makes sense. But if oil drops below $40 a barrel, Yergin says, the cost of exploring this high-risk frontier will become prohibitive.

But Siegele is hardly worried. Technological breakthroughs have, decade after decade, revived the perpetually doomed oil industry. "Predicting peak oil," Siegele tells me as we tour the drilling floor of the Cajun Express, "is almost like predicting peak technology" — an exercise, in other words, that to him seems inherently small-minded. Even absurd.

Siegele takes me to the "crown" of the Cajun Express, a harrowing widow's walk suspended at the top of the drill's 200-foot derrick. The rig below looks like the loneliest place on Earth — a tiny, solitary board floating in a boundless blue sea. Then, out in the distance, I spot fleets of trawlers the size of thumbnails setting off seismic guns in search of the next big deep-sea prospect. "A decade ago, I never even dreamed we'd get here," Siegele marvels. "And a decade from now, this moonscape could be populated with rigs as far as the eye can see."

To extract oil from the Jack field, a rig will have to negotiate freezing waters, boiling oil, and seismic uncertainty. Here’s how.

1) Stable platform
Giant engines at each corner of the drilling rig keep everything stable. When the ocean pulls one way, the thrusters push the other.

2) The 6-mile Drill
The drill is made up of hundreds of interlocking 90-foot sections of iron. Buoyant sidings reduce the weight burden on the rig.

3) Point of entry
The drill needs to enter the seafloor at exactly the right point, minimizing the risk of hitting an air pocket or a fault as it goes whirring down. Boiling-hot oil emerges here and collides with freezing water, which means that the underwater pipes pumping the oil back to shore must be heavily insulated.

4) Dangerous journey
The drill must traverse numerous pressure zones, any one of which could knock it off course.

5) X marks the spot
Bedrock mounds, formed by oil pushing upward, signal promising hot spots.

6) Jackpot
The oil is trapped in squishy, porous rock.

Read More http://www.wired.com/cars/energy/magazine/15-09/mf_jackrig_drill#ixzz0uYh8tLy6