Does the technology exist to drill through the Outer Continental Shelf?

[underpants]

I have been researching this and have found little about it.

I have found that "technology has increased" on a "Drill Barry (Obama) Drill" page but that is about it.

I suspect that if the technology does NOT exist that we, the taxpayers, will pay for it and hand it over to the oil companies.


Is there a good source on this? Anything? Anyone?

[TheWraith]

1. THROUGH it? Into what, the mantle?

Fuck no. Nor will it for a very long time.

INTO the OCS, sure.

[underpants]

2. Okay into

that is what I meant

[Warpy]

4. Uh, that's where that offshore oil is

buried under the continental shelf. Yes, the technology exists and yes, it's being done.

We don't know if there are deep ocean oil reserves, but there probably are.

We don't have the technology to go down through miles of water and pump oil back up through it, though, the whole operation would be prohibitively expensive.

The ancestor to offshore drilling was Project Mohole. There's some interesting reading at http://www.nationalacademies.org/history/mohole/

[A HERETIC I AM]

3. ...

http://www.slb.com/resources/technical_papers.aspx

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090804090942.htm

http://www.google.com/search?q=deep+water+drilling+technology&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

[madrchsod]

5. it will be years before a drop an oil will be pumped

right now there`s richer fields around the world to exploit. there`s just so many off shore drilling rigs in the world and they`ll go where the best fields are. the fields off our shores will have to wait.

[pscot]

6. Oil is a product of vegetation decaying over eons

of time. So we're only going to find it where dry land once existed. Unless the continental shelves were once dry land or are covering strata that were once dry land, there's no oil there. The deep ocean is bedrock and volcanic deposits, so probably no oil there. The North Sea was once dry land. So, presumably, was the Gulf of Mexico and offshore West Africa. If it wasn't part of Pangaea, there's probably no oil under it. The Russians and Swedes tried for years to prove that oil was being created deep in them earth's crust, with no luck.

[TheWraith]

8. Not the case. Petroleum primarily comes from plankton and algae.

Land-based vegetation turned into coal.

[Statistical]

9. There is almost nothing about that paragraph that is correct.

1) As someone else already pointed out Petroleum is the result of mass die offs of algae and plankton due to oxygen depletion. It only occurs in places that were once water (large lakes, seas, oceans). Periodically in earths past massive dieoffs occurred in the oceans (billions of tons of plankton dying off at once) likely due to oxygen depletion in the ocean. The exact reasons are unknown but they ultimately became oil.

2) There is plenty of oil found at extremely deep locations.
The Independence Hub (in Gulf of Mexico) for example is a record for deep water drilling. Nothing else comes even close.
http://www.offshore-technology.com/projects/independence/

It is located in 8000ft on water and has drilled 18,000 feet below the ocean floor.
More convention fields have been found more than 10,000 feet below oceans floor in up to 2000 feet of water.

To the OP original question:
It is more than possible and has been done in hundreds of sites around the world. However as you can imagine the costs are huge. Anchoring a platform in 2000ft deep water and then running pipe down to the ocean floor and drilling miles into the earth isn't cheap.

So the amount of oil and current market price has to warrant that cost.

There is plenty of oil around the world we have found that simply is not economical to recover at even $100 oil. Now $200? $300? $350? well that starts changing things.

[Ozymanithrax]

7. Absolutly...And it has existed for decades...

Gulf of Mexico, the North Sea, and the Persian Gulf are just two places where they have drilled in similar conditions.

The question is not whether the technology exists. The questions are whether there is enough oil there to make a difference.

[happyslug]

10. Are you looking for Oil or Natural Gas?

The reason I ask is if oil drops below about 20,000 feet the heat of the earth converts it to Natural Gas. We could drill to 20,000 feet by 1938 thus we can drill for any OIL deposit that exists with present technology.

Now, Natural gas exists below 20,000 feet, in Pennsylvania I have heard of Natural Gas wells going beyond 50,000 feet. How far is unknown to me, but we have had the technology for floating oil derricks since at least the 1960s and that is the biggest problem with drilling off shore. Once a base is set up and anchored (as are ALL such platforms) the drill can proceed through the water till it hits the bottom and start to drill. The piping needed to stabilize the drill is the same off or on shore (With more anti-rusting elements off shore) thus no significant difference, once the platform is set up, between off or on shore drilling. The key is setting up the platform and setting up the way to get the oil from the platform to shore (By boat or by pipeline).

Yes, Drill, Baby, Drill sounds good, but once you accept that all we need is 1938 technology to reach almost all of the oil in the world it starts to sound sillier and sillier.

[NickB79]

11. Sure we do. The real question is, are you willing to pay $200+/barrel for it?

Deep-ocean drilling will always be more expensive than land-based drilling, in most cases prohibitively so. That's the gist of Peak Oil theory: we will never run out of oil, because there will always be oil somewhere that is so difficult to extract that no one can afford to buy it.