The Oil Frontier

Don’t expect the scarcity of fossil fuels to drive us toward alternative energy sources anytime soon: we’re getting smarter about finding and extracting oil.

The easy oil is gone. To get to the new oil, you board a yellow Bell 407 helicopter outside New Orleans and fly south, touching down 140 miles offshore, on a ship that’s drilling holes in the seabed nearly a mile below.

Along the way, you fly down a 50-year timeline of American offshore oil extraction. Through the glass panel at your feet, you watch the delta slide by with its flat islands of green and its fishing camps, occasionally passing the remains of a barge rig — the first and simplest waterborne oil rigs, which simply settled in the mud and drilled. After the barrier islands come the brown waters of the continental shelf of the Gulf of Mexico. Here, the platforms increase in number but are only slightly more complicated; of the roughly 4,000 platforms in the gulf, most are simple scaffolds standing on the bottom in 30 to 200 feet of water.
But the barge rigs and the fixed-leg platforms are the past. So you keep flying, and the rigs grow scarcer but larger, until you leave the silty waters and hit the blue of the deep water, which shimmers like an opal lit from within.

Out here, 4,300 feet above the seafloor, floats Discoverer Deep Seas. Leased by Chevron, it’s a ship that would have been too expensive to use 10 years ago, a ship that represents 20 years of advances in the art and science of oil extraction. It’s not particularly beautiful. With its derrick amidships and its rusty waterline, Deep Seas looks like a ghost tanker trying to make off with the Eiffel Tower. But it is a breathtaking expression of ingenuity, and a glimpse of what we’ll increasingly have to do to get energy.

The ship is so big that my incomplete tour will take a day. It’s 835 feet long — on end, it would be the height of an 80-story skyscraper — and 125 feet wide. Because it is so tightly packed with machinery, a visitor winds through Deep Seas rather than walking its perimeter, as one might on a cruise ship, and never gains a full sense of its size.

Technology Review