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Gold/Mining/Energy : Big Dog's Boom Boom Room -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: CommanderCricket who wrote (123976)	9/2/2009 2:21:03 PM
From: JimisJim	4 Recommendations Respond to of 206093

CC: the reality is that this news is better news for RIG than just about anyone else... they are claiming a bunch of "firsts" on this one and they deserve it... used a 5th-gen. floater only rated to 30,000 ft. TD... RIG proves once again that they are the leader in deep offshore ops of this nature... this should benefit RIG in the near term much more than BP. Jim

To: CommanderCricket who wrote (123976)	9/2/2009 2:21:59 PM
From: Think4Yourself	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 206093

Drill a six and a half mile long hole through rock, some of it grainite and basalt, and hit what you are aiming at? That thoroughly impresses me.

To: CommanderCricket who wrote (123976)	9/2/2009 2:27:39 PM
From: JimisJim	Respond to of 206093

BP’s Tiber Find Underscores Challenges of Deepwater Exploration By Joao Lima and Fred Pals Sept. 2 (Bloomberg) -- BP Plc’s announcement of a “giant” discovery in the Gulf of Mexico underscores the technical challenges of deepwater exploration after Europe’s second- biggest oil company drilled to a depth that’s greater in height than Mount Everest. The Tiber well, about 250 miles (400 kilometers) south east of Houston, was drilled to about 35,055 feet (10,685 meters), making it the world’s deepest exploration well to date, the London-based company said today. It may contain as many as 3 billion barrels, according to BP. Everest stands 29,029 feet tall in comparison. “The rocks that are getting drilled are very tough rocks to extract oil from, and indeed nobody has really done it yet from this particular formation in the Gulf of Mexico,” Neil McMahon, a London-based analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. said in an interview. “The development costs and exploration costs could be quite expensive relative to what we’ve seen in the past. Geologists and engineers didn’t know if oil that far beneath the seafloor could be tapped until 2006, when Chevron Corp. completed the first ever successful test well at those depths. The well, drilled into Chevron’s Jack prospect about 175 miles southwest of the Louisiana coast, showed that energy companies could keep a hole open down to 60 million-year-old rocks despite shifting layers of salt and blistering temperatures. Kaskida, Buckskin Other discoveries in the same geologic formation as Tiber and Jack include BP’s Kaskida, found in August 2006, and Buckskin, which Chevron announced in February of this year. The ocean-depth record for production was previously set in 2007 by Anadarko Petroleum Corp. The company is extracting natural gas from beneath 8,960 feet of water in the Gulf of Mexico, where pressure measures 3,069 pounds per square inch, squeezing joints and tearing at seals. “What we do at that water depth in the ocean is similar to NASA’s space program, but they get to do it without any pressure trying to attack them,” Kevin Renfro, production engineering manager at Woodlands, Texas-based Anadarko, said in a November 2007 interview. BP’s Tiber well is deeper than Tupi, the largest crude find in the Americas in three decades and part of an area offshore Brazil with ultra-deep deposits. The pre-salt area runs 800 kilometers (500 miles) along Brazil’s coast and has oil deposits beneath a layer of salt resting as much as 3,000 meters beneath the ocean surface and another 3,000 to 5,000 meters below the seabed. High Temperatures To get to the pre-salt oil, Brazil’s Petroleo Brasileiro SA, which is also a partner with BP at Tiber, will have to sink tons of equipment to depths with high water pressure and temperatures. When oil as hot as 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius) suddenly meets pipes rising through extremely cold water on the ocean bottom, paraffin, a waxy substance in the oil, can solidify and block the pipes. BP is operator of the Tiber prospect with a stake of 62 percent, while Petrobras holds 20 percent and ConocoPhillips 18 percent. BP is developing nine projects in the Gulf of Mexico and in 2007 overtook Royal Dutch Shell Plc in terms of output from the region. “The search for oil at those depths shows that the easier fields are clearly drying up,” said Peter Heijen, an Amsterdam- based analyst at Theodoor Gilissen Bankiers NV. “Service companies will benefit from this and a lot will need to be constructed to get this out of the ground.” To contact the reporter on this story: Joao Lima in Lisbon at jlima1@bloomberg.net Last Updated: September 2, 2009 12:32 EDT