posted June 20, 2008
Oil talk by anyone not associated with serious knowledge of offshore oil work can be amusing, at best. Mr Bush saying the opening of offshore waters will ease gasoline prices is dreamy.
I relate a short tale from my past.
In 1982, I had been working for four years the U.S. Gulf of Mexico and off the Eastern Seaboard largely in oilfield support vessels. The companies I worked for contracted to deliver crew, bulk liquids, and dry cargo to offshore drilling and production installations. The boat company I worked for in 1982 contracted with a subcontractor to Amaco Trinidad to provide the boat I skippered with crew for a six-month contract. We delivered crew and groceries to a pipe laying barge that worked 20 miles off the southeast end Of Trinidad. The pipe laying operation was for a 36" pipeline from a single platform that was put on location during the time we were on that job.
The now well-known KBR contracted the platform construction and setting and McDermott laid the pipeline. The well for natural gas had been drilled in years previous, 1979 to 1981, I believe. The pipeline we supported laying of was 36" diameter tested to 10,000 psi with a carrying capacity of 7000 psi from the wells. By standards of finds of the time, it was big. Most pipelaying I worked in the Gulf were 4" to 8" lines. When the line got to the beach, it had to be completed to a refinery 60 miles distant across the island to the Gulf of Paria. There were the usual hitches in the process. Over Christmas time worked slowed, not because of the holiday but because of weather. We made a couple of crew changes to the barge in 20' to 25' seas making the 20 mile trip in 2 to 2 1/2 hours rather than the usual 1 hour.
Coming back was easy, I got to play helmsman of a 95-foot surfboard riding with the seas, engines humming with no effort of riding down the face of huge seas, it seemed blowing all the way from Africa they were so big. The ship that brought the pipe from a steel mill in Scotland took a roll in her crossing and spilled a fair number lashed to the deck. They had to be replaced. One boat working pipe transport was a World War II veteran, a roll on roll off that the engineer for told me he rode to Chattanooga to pick up a reactor vessel at Combustion Engineering. The pipeline, where it was to go ashore, was determined to have the best chance of making the path by having a ditch blown in the sand bottom. That task went to a crew out of Covington, La., who, with lots of explosives, made a really big splash and a ditch that filled in before the pipe could be laid. The dredge that arrived to finish the task was on station for a few weeks, sank near land and our boat had the chore of retrieving its crew while we worked with our bow in the surf just off the beach. The job there wasn't unusual in the vagaries of the weather or the loss of time due to breakdowns. Water depth was up to 250 feet so work wasn't done with robots.
A friend working off New Zealand at that time was on a job 60 days and was able to go alongside the drilling rig only twice due to weather. So this job in Trinidad took, from arrival of drillship to delivery of gas in the pipeline, around five years when one accounts the time to tie in at the wellhead and get the pipeline run all the way to the refinery. That timeframe holds true even with today's advances in engineering and construction technology.
Back in the Gulf of Mexico, its largely like making cupcakes relative to the South Atlantic until August when hurricane season starts. When Ivan went through in 2004, a large deepwater production structure named Spar took a sea that left vacant space where a stairway went to the water. This stair was meant to be the exit route when it was too windy to use the personnel basket from the crane. One could use a 120' long line with chain at the top to swing from the platform to a waiting boat with the boat rising and falling according to sea conditions. Spar was offline for at least five months after Ivan due to repairs needed so crude delivery could resume. The seas that claimed that stairwell were documented to be in excess of 80'.
Another job I worked was for Pemex in Mexico, just after the well Ixtoc was capped after it lubed the beaches of Texas. Ixtoc no longer was a production platform, another one had to be built to tap into the runaway well. The original platform was now a radio base for that oilfield. There was also a ghost platform in the distance in that field. It slid off a barge and could not be recovered. So there this huge structure was like the Eiffel Tower at a bad lean. One time in that oilfield, we took the boat through crude oil so thick on the water, it slowed us down. We had no wake, so, but for the exhaust, our progress was nearly silent. In the fog off Louisiana, a fog that stayed for a couple of weeks, I saw the same sort of spill, one that took your breath away not with the damage it would do but the smell. Most times, on the American side of the Gulf, the platforms and water were clean.
My point with all this is simple, we can clamor all we want for oil that is there. It is under water over a mile deep and longer distances farther to get to than most offshore oil production is now. The pipelines have to be built or the recovery vessels have to be built to get this oil back to where we can process it. First the wells have to be drilled. Right now refineries are at full tilt so what does it matter if we have American oil. China will double her consumption in 10 years anyway. Our price at the well is based on world demand and supply. So the price won't change.It will most likely stabilize and continue a slow rise. Peak oil is a topic for another day. So is the availability of drillships. And I have not mentioned boat crew shortages since the 2004-2005 hurricane seasons.
Another short tale. Early in 1979, I got to work on a lightering operation out of Cameron, La. Hurricane Rita made that town like a bug the windshield wiper tried to finish removing. That job meant the boat I was on supplied huge rubber fenders to go between supertankers and the offloader tankers that took crude oil to Lake Charles. Once we got the fenders placed alongside the supertanker and the offloader secured, we would go on both ships and hook up hoses to transfer oil. Most times the offloader had deck equipment that ran on steam with British and German officers and Pakistani Crew to do their part of the work. Language was a barrier with the deck crew but we got the job done. Our boat had a long layover through the end of December to the first part of January. Out of sight offshore, 90 miles south of Cameron, it was like a parking lot. Where normally there would be one supertanker offloading with another a week away, there were 7 supertankers standing by. Seven 1200' ships with Persian Gulf crude oil. The first of January was the day of price increase so the crude couldn't come to town yet. Our crew got a lot of bar time.
So, once again with politics, what Mr Bush says is not so much what reality can provide, friendly congress or not. Our senator, Bob Corker, states the situation much better in pointing out our energy future is destined for much broader solutions that oil production is a portion of. Raising sand about opening offshore waters is exactly that and little more. I have always thought Florida should share in the plastic litter, the sheen on the beaches, the lights on the horizon with the sometime flare. I find it more pathetic that an oil state president could reverse his course from when his brother governed Florida. They concurred that Florida waters were too pretty for drilling.
What Mr Bush counts on is that Americans really are so stupid to believe that planting oil wells is like planting plastic Christmas trees. Instant gratification. And I didn't share the tale about the $26 million dry hole I helped work.
Prentice Hicks
Lookout Valley
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Mr. Hicks,
Your personal history sounds exciting and interesting. In some ways you appear to be an expert on offshore drilling. Your article leans against more production.
But what is your answer to our energy problem? Al Gore and John Kerry wanted to tax gasoline an extra dollar per gallon. Gore to slow usage and Kerry, well, who knows.
Obama wants to apply a windfall profits tax to oil companies. Only the government gets windfall tax because U.S. government does nothing to produce energy. That windfall tax will be passed on to you and me; i.e. even higher prices.
The United States needs to tell the environmental extremists to protest Hugo Chavez or China. Oh, those guys do not allow diverging opinions in their countries.. The anti-drilling, power hungry environmental wackos are putting the middle class in our country on the "endangered species" list by way of unintended consequences. High energy and continued short sighted energy policies will wipe out the middle class.
Carnell Storie
Carnellstorie@comcast.net
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