There are new oil fields to be found if one is willing to drill deep enough. In addi­tion to the Caribbean, deeply lying deposits are believed to exist in the North Sea, the Nile River Delta, the coast of Brazil, and West Africa.19 To see how hard this is, consider Chevron’s Jack 2 well, 175 miles offshore in the Gulf of Mexico. The drill goes 1 mile in water down to the bottom, then four more miles down into the ground. To find such large deposits, modern supercomputers are used to analyze seismic signals in three dimensions, requiring the processing of huge amounts of data. A new generation of drilling rigs had to be built to go twice as deep as ever before. These platforms, almost as large and as dangerous as that at Sleipner, cost half a million dollars a day to rent, but they could still be profitable if oil prices stay above $45 a barrel. This large deposit could yield 15 billion barrels, just a drop in the bucket compared with the world’s proven reserves of 1,200 billion barrels. New deposits have been found that can be accessed only by horizontal drilling.20 From a central platform, pipelines are drilled down and then horizontally out to deep — lying deposits kilometers away. The oil collected from these wells is then pumped to the mainland in a large pipeline. Figure 2.20a shows what a normal-size drilling rig looks like when the weather is nice. These are ships that go wherever they are needed. Storms and uncontrolled fires make oil drilling a dangerous occupation. An oil platform under less ideal circumstances is shown in Fig. 2.20b.

These words, written previously, were brought to a focus when the Deepwater Horizon platform in the Gulf of Mexico exploded on April 20, 2010, killing 11 workers. The huge rig burned for days, and the oil leaking into the Gulf was uncon­trolled, contaminating thousands of square miles and disrupting the fishing and shellfish industries in Louisiana. The damage to aquatic and avian wildlife is yet to be determined. Before the leak was capped in August, 4.9 million barrels of oil had been released, exceeding the 3.3 million barrels in the Ixtoc 1 blowout off the Yucatan peninsula in 1979. These numbers overwhelm the 257,000 bbls from the 1989 Exxon Valdez tanker spill in Alaska, whose effects are still felt 30 years later. Energy giant BP, owner of the Deepwater Horizon, suffered severe economic losses. The accident triggered legislation to regulate and restrict deepwater drilling. Aside from ecological concerns, it is becoming apparent that it would be cheaper to develop a substitute for oil than to ferret out the last of the earth’s deposits.