The challenge to Drill the depth of the New Offshore Wells

About 80 kilometers from the coast, 1,500 meters below the water surface. The "numbers" of Macondo make an impression: just ten years ago the idea of ​​extracting oil on the high seas, at such high depths, was simply science fiction. And yet, faced with the greatest ecological disaster in the history of the oil industry, there is a comment that recurs with particular frequency among the experts: "BP was not dealing with a difficult well".

Over the course of a few years, the progress of offshore technologies has been so great that it has allowed companies to achieve the limits of the impossible, in front of which Macondo seems almost an amateur exercise. The Deepwater Horizon itself, the platform exploded on April 20, had just broken the submarine drilling record, identifying - again on behalf of BP and always in the Gulf of Mexico - the Tiber field, 10.6 km above sea level, of which over 9 under the backdrop.

There were 33 other offshore installations engaged in exploring the seabed at depths equal to or greater than those of Macondo in the United States. After the Macondo incident, the White House ordered that everyone stay for six months, waiting. of a crackdown on security conditions. The overall number of drills in the Gulf of Mexico, however, is much higher: according to the statistics of Rigzone, in April there were 243, of which about half were in use (in the world they were 578). As for the number of wells, the bottoms in front of Texas and Louisiana are literally studded with holes: it is estimated that there are about 3,500, dug with increasing frenzy as the search for crude oil on the mainland became more difficult, due to the decline of the most "at hand" fields and the spread of so-called resource nationalism. Technology has made it possible to make a virtue of necessity, with progress that in recent years has undergone a truly dizzying acceleration.

Oil was searched for the first time in water in 1938, at a depth of just 4 meters, with a few swimming strokes from Louisiana. The first really "offshore" well, 17 km off the same state, dates back to 1947: the platform was no bigger than a tennis court (the Deepwater Horizon had the size of a couple of football fields) and the crude was transported to land with barges taken by the Navy at the end of the Second World War.

It had to wait until the 1980s before Royal Dutch Shell managed to break the 1,000 foot deep (304.8 meter) threshold and up to 2000 to get to Macondo's 1.5 kilometer, with the Hoover Diana made by Saipem for ExxonMobil. Perdido - inaugurated last March 31 by Shell and capable of producing up to 100 thousand barrels of crude oil and 50 thousand cubic meters of gas per day - sinks its drills into the water for 3 km, more or less like five stacked Empire State Buildings.

But the real breakthrough in the offense is not only linked to the creation of increasingly powerful and sophisticated platforms, but to the new technologies for detecting the deposits, which allow to probe the depths, reconstructing images with three or even four dimensions of the potential deposits of hydrocarbons. This is how great discoveries have been made like that of Tupi, off the coast of Brazil, or Jubilee in the waters of Ghana. Discoveries that represent the future of oil.