“Isn’t this transcendent?” Paul Siegele shouted as he pressed his nose to the window. The early morning sun glinted off a colony of metal structures pocking the surface of the sea. Siegele, the director of Chevron’s offshore drilling division, identified the objects below with the geeky verve of a birder: a miniature oil rig known as a mono pod, a drill ship nearly as big as the Titanic, and circular, tiered platforms scattered like steel chandeliers that fell from the storm-shaken clouds.
A lanky six foot three, Siegele has none of the cowboy swagger you might expect from a top oil executive. He’s earnest and quick to smile, with a mild, professorial manner and a boyish mop of brown hair. Siegele was an aspiring artist as an undergraduate at California Lutheran University, until his studies of rock as a sculptural medium sparked his interest in geology. Oil drilling, he says, is not unlike sculpture: “It’s about precision—guiding tools into the earth artfully, not just blindly hammering at rock.”
The Gulf yields 25 percent of all U.S. oil production, and is home to more than 3,700 production platforms, most of them located in relatively shallow waters of under 2,000 feet. Many geologists believe that the ultradeep regions of the Gulf—those covered by waters greater than 4,000 feet—hold more untapped oil reserves than any other parts of the Western world. Today, offshore rigs are capable of operating in 10,000 feet of water and boring through 30,000 feet of seabed (twice the depth they could manage a decade ago). One rig sits atop each field, thrusting its tentacles into up to a dozen wells throughout the bed. The rig pulls up oil and then pumps it back to onshore refineries via underwater pipelines.
Chevron is one of the largest leaseholders in the deep-sea Gulf, which means it has much to gain from these waters—but also much to lose. Three out of four exploration wells in this area come up dry—nerve-wracking odds when the wells cost $100 million apiece, or as much as twenty times what they cost on land. And even if you hit pay dirt, there’s no guarantee of profit: in the past decade, Chevron has abandoned nearly a quarter of the successful wells it has drilled because they wouldn’t flow at profitable rates.
Our specific destination was an offshore rig known as the “Cajun Express”—a massive rectangular ship with onboard drilling equipment. It was the Cajun’s 5-mile-long drill that months earlier had burrowed the legendary discovery well at Jack. That day, the rig had motored over to a nearby field known as “Tahiti,” where Siegele would be overseeing final preparations for another drilling endeavor. (Field names are given by the geologists who discover and study them. There are plenty of fields in the deep-sea Gulf with names that carry more gravitas—“Thunder Horse” and “Atlantis,” for instance; “Jack” was named in honor of its founder’s lifelong mentor, and “Tahiti” by a geologist who loved the Polynesian islands.)
The activity we were about to witness on the Cajun would help determine the fate of this extreme deep-sea frontier: Would the risks outweigh the rewards? Would Chevron be able to scale this drilling Everest?
Truthfully, there’s no single Everest of oil drilling, given how many unthinkable extremes—environmental, technological, political—the industry and its workers face today. In the Chukchi Sea of the Arctic Ocean, for instance, drillers have to wear heated bodysuits to survive winter temperatures averaging 60 degrees below zero; the region descends into near-complete darkness for four months of the year. In the Kashagan field of Kazakhstan, workers have to wear gas masks to protect against the high concentration of poisonous hydrogen sulfide present in the oil they’re extracting. On Sakhalin Island, located in the Sea of Okhotsk off the coast of Russia, pipelines are placed in the vicinity of active fault lines, exposing workers to the ongoing threat of explosions and other disruptions caused by earthquakes. This remote territory is also home to brown bears and bandits, so security guards must stand watch. Add to that the more routine hazards of the job: five workers died in a single year on Sakhalin from accidents such as high falls. The oil wells, pipelines, and refineries of Chad, Iraq, and Iran, meanwhile, are vulnerable to terrorist attacks.
But in the minds of oil executives, one risk outweighs all others: cost. In this category, no drilling frontier is more extreme than the world’s deepest seas. And no seas are more costly to exploit than the Gulf of Mexico, where the undersea sediment is particularly difficult to map and penetrate and the oil is embedded so deep underground.
Chevron’s discovery at Jack was like spring in the autumn of the oil industry. Many of the world’s largest fields today—from Saudi Arabia’s Ghawar to Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay—are dwindling, verging on retirement. Nearly 70 percent of the world’s oil comes from fewer than eight hundred fields with an average age of forty years. Of those, only twenty-five are supergiants—a term industry insiders use to refer to fields that contain more than 5 billion barrels. Amazingly, only nine supergiant fields have been discovered worldwide since 1970, according to the International Energy Agency. Despite increasing exploration activity, the rate of supergiant discoveries has been slowing over time: Of these nine, six were discovered in the 1970s, two in the 1980s, and one in the 1990s. (Discoveries in the Gulf’s ultradeep waters have not been included in the tally, as the region is still being mapped.)
Add to that the political pressures associated with many petroleum-rich areas: three-quarters of the world’s oil reserves are controlled by nations such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Nigeria, which have governments that are either at odds with the United States or vulnerable to corruption and conflict. Managing drilling operations in these regions can be dangerous, costly, and unpredictable. Even those oil-producing countries that are U.S.-friendly, such as Brazil and Mexico, require American oil companies to pay high taxes to produce their crude abroad.
Taken together, these constraints on U.S. oil producers make domestic discoveries in the deep-sea Gulf momentous. But there’s a hitch—a few, in fact. Just because the oil is there doesn’t mean it can be reliably and affordably pumped up from extreme depths and into refineries and gas stations. The deeper and farther offshore you go to find oil, the bigger the technological and financial hurdles: temperatures “down hole” get ever hotter and the pressures more intense, the seas get rougher, and the likelihood of placing the drill in the right location gets more and more remote.
In short, penetrating fields like Jack and Tahiti is as much an exercise in brute mechanical force as it is an act of extremely delicate surgery—or careful artistry, as Siegele sees it—the likes of which my travel companions and I were about to witness.
INTO THE DEEP
From my helicopter window, the Cajun looked like a child’s toy—a multicolored Erector Set floating on a buoy. But once we landed and I stepped out into the salty, sunny Gulf air, the rig gave an entirely different impression, awesomely vast and imposing. Looming above us like an elephant above ants was a massive hydraulic drill encased in a 250-foot cage of steel scaffolding. The rest of the hulking industrial curios on the platform looked miniature by comparison. Siegele explained these objects and their functions as he walked me past two huge red cranes; six smokestacks releasing exhaust from the rig’s diesel generators; a robotic submarine that oversees drilling activity on the seafloor; mountainous piles of metal pipes used to tap the dormant oil bed; and steel holding tanks for the sediment, mud, and thick black crude that soon would be pulled up from below.
We entered the boxy three-story cement building that houses the dorm rooms and offices. So austere were the surroundings—and so far removed from civilization—that I found myself heartened by the daily, familiar details of a Snickers wrapper crumpled on the floor, a dust bunny underneath a desk, and a family snapshot tacked to an office wall—evidence that people actually do live and work on this floating city.
“It isn’t the Queen Elizabeth,” Siegele told me, “but we’ve got what we need.” The cafeteria was a grim,