This oil is worth its salt

More stands between the world’s oil producers and the bounty of oil and gas beneath the Gulf of Mexico’s seafloor than sediment and sea life.

It’s salt.

But it’s nothing like the granules in the shaker on the dinner table. It’s a massive, undulating series of thick canopies, sheets and tongue-shaped chunks that stretch across the deepwater Gulf far off the coastlines of Texas and Louisiana.
Oil companies that drill in the Gulf are well acquainted with the salt layer. They have to be. The Department of the Interior’s Minerals Management Service estimates up to 50 billion barrels of oil equivalent or more await discovery in the deepwater regions, offering plenty of incentive to improve already sophisticated technology used to find resources that lie thousands to tens of thousands of feet below the water’s surface.

Companies use sophisticated 3-D seismic imaging — pioneered by Exxon Mobil Corp. — to gather images of salt, sediment and likely reservoirs of oil.

The cost of using such technology, which requires trained eyes like those of a doctor examining an MRI of the brain, runs in the tens of millions of dollars.

Houston Chronicle