Shell Oil Cast More Than Pennies Down This Well
Shell Oil has embarked on quite an ambitious project 200 hundred miles off the coast of Galveston, TX. In the summer to 2008 they anchored a newly built 50,000 ton floating rig to the seafloor, located over an area known as the Perdido foldbelt. The rig is aimed at accessing the crude oil and natural gas locked in a swath of seabed roughly the size of Houston, which could potentially yield up to 130,000 barrels of oil a day.
The engineering behind this project is an amazing feat, with more specs than you could shake a stick at. To access the oil, 22 wells are planned to be drilled in the seafloor below the rig, in addition to 13 more wells nine miles away. Instead of each well being traditionally connected to the spar by its own pipe (one 2 mile length of pipe being 500 tons), there will be five pipes called risers connecting to the spar. In addition, more pipe will connect each well on the seafloor, and truck sized generators will separate the oil from gas, pumping it up to the spar. All in all, that will encompass 184 miles of pipe under almost two miles of water, depths at which there is extreme pressure.
Given that Americans consume over 20 million barrels of oil a day, 130,000 barrels a day won’t exactly solve the problem America’s oil problems. However, given that there are hundreds of other locations in the gulf’s deep water, perfecting this technology can certainly help in accessing all that other oil waiting to be harvested.
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