New technology and rich reserves are drawing dramatic investment in deep offshore oil exploration, Reuters reports.
As
recently as a decade ago, less than 1 percent of oil drilling vessels
were incapable of operating at depths of greater than 7,500 feet, with
fewer than 10 rigs available.
That number has risen quickly to more than 80 rigs as of this year.
Interest
has come from both some of the largest national oil companies and the
biggest names in the private sector. So far in 2012, the Western oil
majors have invested more than $80 billion into offshore oil
exploration, and BP
has started a project called 20K that hopes to develop a new slate of
technologies that will allow the company to tap oil reservoirs at
pressures as high as 20,000 pounds per square inch.
At present, companies are generally limited to around 18,000 psi.
Still,
such depths were nearly unimaginable only three decades ago, when
offshore oil companies were first tapping into the modern benchmark
North Sea oil fields.
Reuters reports that Brazilian national oil company Petrobras
recently made a major deep-water discovery that could rival the largest
American offshore oil discovery at Lula-Cernambi, which held 8.3
billion barrels of oil equivalent.
PennEnergy's Research area investigates the rise of the ultra-deep offshore oil well.
Source: PennEnergy
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