There’s a hole in the bottom of the sea

IN A RECENT ARTICLE entitled Chevron Conquers the Rock,” published Sept. 12, 2006, I discussed the recent announcement by Chevron Corp. that it successfully completed a record-setting production test on the Jack #2 well at Walker Ridge Block 758 in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico. I discussed the context of the Chevron announcement to include the timing of the announcement, the costs of drilling the well, the remoteness of the site, the depth of the well, and the oil itself and the difficulty of getting to it and lifting it from the Earth. I could not pass up the opportunity to discuss Peak Oil. And I even discussed good old Col. Edwin Drake.

Chevron has achieved a significant goal, and its success in the deep-water Gulf of Mexico is a very impressive accomplishment. Chevron’s effort is illustrative of the future of the petroleum industry over the next decades, and I think that the effort is worth dissecting some more. In this article, I am going to discuss geology, because I believe that it is important to understand what is going on down there, far beneath the waves.

The Most Eagerly Watched Prospect in the Gulf

The Chevron well is quite a hole in the bottom of the sea. According to a Dow Jones news account, reposted prominently on the Web site of no less than the highly respected oil field service company Schlumberger, the Jack #2 development was the “most eagerly watched oil prospect in the deep-water U.S. Gulf of Mexico.” The Chevron success with its test means, according to Dow Jones, that the Jack field “has passed a production test with flying colors, paving the way for development of an emerging geological play that could contain billions of barrels of hydrocarbon reserves.”

And to where in the Earth, exactly, does Chevron’s hole lead? Chevron’s Jack #2 well penetrates into what geologists call the “lower Tertiary,” an ancient rock layer that extends over many thousands of square miles beneath the rocks at the bottom of the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The successful Chevron test well has elevated the profile of the lower Tertiary in the eyes of oil industry observers, and holds out the tantalizing prospect that these deep rock formations could significantly augment U.S. oil and gas production.

Energy Bulletin