Pictures: Four New Offshore Drilling Frontiers

In Africa, Turning the Valve on a New Era

Photograph courtesy Tunlow Oil

Ghana's President John Atta Mills opens the valve for Anadarko Petroleum Corporation's Jubilee project on December 15, 2010. The offshore well in some 3,300 feet (1,000 meters) of water may produce as much as 2 billion barrels of oil and 800 billion cubic feet of natural gas.

Partnering with Anadarko and other petroleum companies, Ghana's national oil concern has a 13.75 percent stake in the project and hopes to usher in a new era of prosperity for the African country—if its growing oil industry can be managed without corruption, violence, and environmental degradation.

Jubilee and another Anadarko well (Venus) near the Sierra Leone-Liberia border may bookend a 700-mile (1,100-kilometer) undersea basin with an active petroleum system and hundreds of millions of barrels of deepwater oil. These and other projects are helping a new group of West African nations join established giants like Angola and Nigeria as the continent's major petroleum exporters.

Published April 19, 2011

Farther, Deeper Into the Gulf of Mexico

Photograph by Mike Duhon

Shell's Perdido project 200 miles (322 kilometers) off the Texas coast in the Gulf of Mexico is the deepest of the world's deepwater drilling sites and the farthest from the shore. It began retrieving oil and gas from beneath more than 8,000 feet (2,438 meters) of water just three weeks before BP's Deepwater Horizon accident closer to shore.

Perdido became the first project to produce oil from the Gulf of Mexico's next big oil frontier—the Lower Tertiary Trend. Pulling oil from that band of 60 million-year-old rock requires going further offshore than conventional Gulf rigs and drilling far deeper—delving below the seafloor to depths greater than the height of Mount Everest.

Tapping Lower Tertiary oil requires evolving knowledge and technology to deal with novel problems like poor imagery, scorching temperatures, and enormous pressures at depth. But the rewards appear to be well worth it for energy companies—billions of barrels of oil are believed to lie in the formation.

Published April 19, 2011

Brazil Plunges Into Offshore Oil

Photograph by Felipe Dana, AP

In October 2010, former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva happily raises his hands, covered with the first oil from the massive deepwater oil field which now bears his name. The "Lula" field holds some 6.5 billion barrels of oil.

Lula is just part of a massive deepwater oil inventory at the disposal of Brazil's national oil company Petrobras—perhaps 48 billion barrels in all. Recovery of these reserves promises to make Brazil a major player in the international petroleum market.

Published April 19, 2011