by Sonia Shah
This was where university scientists came in handy. The highly trained academics toiling away in the ivory tower, the nation’s brain trust, its repository of intellectual capital for helping solve society’s challenges, could easily be shifted toward pursuing basic research that might lead to the next big thing in the oil industry. Most worked on miniscule budgets perpetually slashed by the federal government. A few choice grants could easily generate the kind of buzz in the academic world that would lead to university researchers subtly and overtly channeling their own and their students’ research toward where the money was.
For financial giants like ExxonMobil and BP, scattering a few million dollars amidst the starving academic masses would hardly slow their stride. But the influx of corporate dollars could remake academic disciplines. Petroleum geology, for instance, the science of finding and measuring oil, shot at least twenty or thirty years ahead of the rest of geology. “We understand a lot more about where oil comes from, how it is formed, how to find it, simply because there was so much money to be made by corporations and individuals,” says one petroleum geologist. “The investment and effort was way way way bigger than any other branch of geology.”27
But it was more than just petroleum geology that could profit from the industry’s new deep-water hunt. “There are many . . . disciplines central to the development of deepwater and ultra-deepwater,” Offshore magazine enthused. “The list can go on almost indefinitely.”28
A range of public universities openly transformed themselves into corporate R&D centers for the petroleum industry. According to US News and World Report, the University of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M University, and Stanford were the very best graduate schools in the country for petroleum engineering.29 The University of Texas at Austin awarded more PhDs in petroleum engineering than any university in the world. Oil money funded Texas A&M University and the University of Texas at Austin directly; the universities shared in the oil income from 2 million oily acres in west Texas.30 The oil industry and the National Science Foundation showered them with funds to create a joint research center on offshore technology, where academics and students studied how to make oil exploitation of the Gulf of Mexico more lucrative. They honed their oil platform and subsea well models in a giant, fifty-five-foot-deep tank of water fitted with paddles and fans to simulate the gusty, wavy ocean.31
Oil companies were graced with full access to shape and direct such university research. The University of Tulsa, for instance, took a $500,000 grant from ChevronTexaco. In return, the school would allow the company to be “intimately involved in every phase” of university research, “developing a powerful new collaborative model to help solve some of the industry’s toughest challenges.”32
BP, by underwriting some research at the University of London’s Imperial College, gained access to “everything from the writing of briefing papers to major programmmes of fundamental research,” BP’s inhouse magazine boasted. Indeed, “BP effectively has access to the whole intellectual think-tank that is Imperial College,” admitted one of the college’s research directors.33 According to Aberdeen University’s public relations office, its Oil and Gas Centre was “genuinely committed to trying to do all we can to help [the oil and gas industry] through contract work and through consultancy and, where possible, training programmes,” with funded positions such as the Shell Chair of Production Geoscience, the BP Arco lecturer in Petrophysics and the ExxonMobil lecturer in Structural Geology. According to an independent study, British taxpayers spend 40 million pounds a year subsidizing such research on fossil fuels.34
The aftershocks of oil industry largesse encounter a few breaks as they ripple through academia. Mount Holyoke geology professor Michelle Markley, for instance, didn’t relish the idea of her beautiful rocks being punctured by oil drillers, but she, like most academic geologists, couldn’t do the work she loved without relying in some way on oil industry funding. Markley, like many scholars of rock, lived for stone. Small rocks adorned the shelves and alcoves of her airy Northampton, Massachusetts apartment; whole slabs littered her office at Mount Holyoke’s geology department. She chose her life’s work after an incident with a bit of boulder. As a young student, a teacher explained that the pockmarks on the rock were imprints from raindrops that fell 2 billion years ago. It moved Markley to tears.
“Oil exploration and research geology have been evolving together for about a hundred years, so lots of the ties seem so natural that no one thinks twice about it within the field,” she says. The oil companies collected the best earth-science data in the world, using the fastest machines and the most advanced technology. Three-dimensional seismic imaging was just one example. It is “truly innovative,” Markley says. With improved imaging, structural geologists like Markley were able to pioneer a more sophisticated understanding of the faults, folds, and sedimentary basins they poked around in, so much so that three-dimensional seismic had even changed their guiding theories about how the earth’s features moved and collided.
It is a two-way street. “The relationship between oil exploration and basic research is intimate,” she says. “Much of what we all do is useful to the oil industry. Lots of geologists who are well respected for their basic research either work directly in the oil industry or are partially funded by the oil industry.”35
And yet, unlike most academic research conducted under the grace of public subsidy for the advancement of human understanding, industry-related research culminated in a product, a lucrative intellectual property to be bought and sold to the highest bidder. And so, the results of oil-industry-friendly academic research were often not available to the public, as is standard in most other fields. Albert Bally, a widely respected geologist who joined the faculty at Rice University after a three-decade career with Shell, openly admitted that his concept for a new textbook using three-dimensional oil-industry data would “revolutionize traditional structural geology,” yet insisted that he’d leave out crucial information “to insure that the commercial value of the data would not be diminished.” Students wanting to know where the beautiful three-dimensional images were shot from would be out of luck.36
Oil companies and the academics who work for them “are sitting on a shocking amount of great seismic data that the majority of academic geologists have never seen and never will see,” Markley remarks. How all of that information, were it digested in the broader public and scientific community through publication, debate, critique, and reanalysis, would lead to new understandings is unknown. The few chunks of information that do occasionally filter out of industry’s secret cache—like some of their three-dimensional data—indeed do make “a big difference,” she says.
With support from academic engineers, geologists, and other experts, the industry has developed the tools they need to find and extract oil from its hidden nooks and corners.
A new technology called “directional drilling,” for instance, allowed a single platform to claw into the ground from all directions. Now those deposits of oil, which would have been too small to be worth the expense of an entire rig, could be profitably developed, sending oil entrepreneurs to sniff out and encircle every last little bit. Directional drilling was “dramatic” and “so accurate,” the American Petroleum Institute bragged, that companies could “target an area the size of a walk-in closet located more than five miles from the well and a mile or more below the surface.” With this technology they could sap the oil coursing under delicate wetlands or fragile coral reefs, over which it would be impossible to directly position a rig. Directional drilling allowed them to increase the amount of oil siphoned out of reservoirs twenty times over.37
“Oil and gas at depths recently considered unreachable can now be tapped. Smaller accumulations once thought to be uneconomic can now be produced profitably. Fields under wetlands or cities can be accessed without disruption of the surface,” crowed the Department of Energy’s fossil energy office.38
With new methods of “enhanced recovery”—getting t
he second half of the oil out of the rock—every last bit of oil could be gained, as detergents, fire, water, bacteria, and soda water were all shot down into the well. Scientists were dreaming up new products to try every day. Geophysicists shot three-dimensional seismic images before and after the first gush of oil was taken out, tracking how the oil and gas moved in the rock. The technique was called four-dimensional seismic: three-dimensional seismic plus the fourth dimension of time.39 Four-dimensional seismic imaging could target several millions more barrels of oil or its equivalent for a company’s cache.
In other words, the industry could perform both as a lumbering giant and a nimble parasite. No ecological niche, no matter how tiny, fragile, or beloved, could consider itself safe from the drills.40
While seismic explorers pored over the Gulf of Mexico and the waters off West Africa, oil companies were struggling to tame some of the planet’s most awesome forces in ice, water, wind, and wave in order to unearth Hibernia’s riches. More than two thousand icebergs drifted around Hibernia’s oilfields every year. Underwater currents could slam those icebergs into a rig even if the wind were blowing in the opposite direction.41
The scale of the development had started to smell bad during the early 1990s, as the federal and provincial governments put up ever-greater sums to lure investors into developing the oilfield. The locals were increasingly doubtful. “It’s not a viable project in the strict sense of economically viable. If it was, why are we putting these massive amounts of subsidization into it? ” a Newfoundland economist said. “Even with that, you’re having difficulty to get people to say ‘Yes we want to do it’.”42
Then a cash-heady Mobil struck a deal with the Canadian government to attempt to exhume Hibernia’s oil, icebergs or not. Their strategy: build the biggest, strongest rig ever. With a price tag of no less than $7 billion, Hibernia would be the most expensive oil development ever.43
First, the sleepy foggy town of Bull Arm was bulldozed for a new construction facility to build the concrete base of the rig, a behemoth of more than 400,000 tons of concrete and 69,000 tons of steel. By 1992, thousands of workers descended upon the newly built construction camps. They built a dock for the coming concrete base, in the process pumping out 38 million gallons of water. They built a pier, draining a small lake for a fabrication yard.
Two years later, the structure was floated out to sea where it was anchored. Workers by the thousands rode helicopters and barges out to the site to pour more concrete and steel into it. Forty barges circled the ever-growing giant, including one where concrete was mixed, another supplying power, and yet another holding more than eighty offices. It was an industrial city afloat in the ice and fog.
In Korea, Italy, and Canada, workers built the drilling derricks, the flare boom that would burn the natural gas that inevitably accompanied the oil, the lifeboat stations, helideck, and living quarters that would sit atop the concrete base. When these “top modules” arrived in the desolate province, they struck a reporter as “a many-tentacled space station inexplicably plunked down in the stark landscape of coastal Newfoundland.” Over five days, the concrete base was gradually partially submerged into the icy waters while the top modules were lined up on top. (When Norwegian oilmen had attempted the same maneuver in the North Sea, their concrete base shattered and sank to the bottom of the sea.)44
Once combined, the resulting mammoth weighed 587,000 tons, heavier than five aircraft carriers.45 Nine tugboats towed it to the stormy site, where 400,000 tons of iron ore were pumped onto it until the whole thing slowly sank to the bottom of the sea floor, more than two hundred feet down.
It had taken six years and over five thousand people toiling on three different continents to build. “I don’t think that a more complicated civil construction project will ever be built,” bragged Hibernia’s construction manager in 1997.46
Unlike the rigs of the North Sea and elsewhere, swaddled in pipes, boats, machinery, and steel, the concrete fortress at Hibernia was fully enclosed upon itself; nothing except lifeboats hung over its sides.47 More than forty wells spat oil into underwater pipelines leading into the rig, and then off to floating loading stations to be delivered to tankers.48 By the late 1990s, the rig’s two drills and several hundred workers were fighting off icebergs and storing over a million barrels of oil onboard.
The looming icebergs were shot off course by water cannons from the supply ships ringing the rig. Others were lassoed and dragged away. The rig itself was armed with a 1.4-meter-thick ice wall, spiked with sixteen serrated teeth.
Was it worth it? By the turn of the century, the consortium of oil companies that owned Hibernia, including ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco, estimated they’d get just over 500 million barrels of oil out of the ice-ridden field.49
In the sapphire seas off West Africa, where oil companies were poising their drills over some of the deepest, most remote patches of ocean in the world, trials of a different nature presented themselves.
As in the new deepwater finds off the Gulf of Mexico, the oil finds offshore West Africa were not only generally smaller, they were out in the middle of nowhere, miles away from the complex of underwater pipelines, refineries, and oil terminals that ringed the oilfields of the North Sea and Alaska. If companies had to build entire infrastructures just to drain these small pools, they certainly wouldn’t be making any money.
Girassol, for instance, an oilfield ninety miles off the coast of Angola, was discovered in 1996. The French oil company TotalFinaElf figured there could be over 700 million barrels there.50 But the oil was cocooned under more than 4,500 feet of water,51 over ten times more than Hibernia. The cost of building a man-made concrete island would be astronomical.
Through small incremental progress in corporate and academic research labs, the possibility of extracting oil from under thousands of feet of moving living ocean, without an elaborate system of pipes, processing facilities, and tanker terminals, was being realized. By the mid-1990s, a new oil-production model had emerged, perfect for exploiting small, remote, and deepwater oilfields: the FPSO, or floating production, storage, and offloading system.
Instead of a giant concrete-and-steel island piercing the seabed and sending oil through dozens of pipes to production facilities and ports, an FPSO could get the oil out, process it, store it, and pack it off onto tankers all from a single vessel, swishing around on the surface of the sea. No more underwater pipe jungles and extensive onshore facilities would be needed. A single gigantic vessel could serve as drilling rig, processing facility, and tanker all at once.
Perhaps most amazing of all, instead of building these marvels from scratch, the industry could simply refurbish aging oil tankers.52 And so, FPSO construction was rapid. Generally, the oil industry took about ten years from the time they pinpointed an oil reserve to the time when they started drilling out the oil. By refurbishing an old tanker into an FPSO, they could cut that time lag by a factor of six.53
The technology reached its zenith in 2001, when TotalFinaElf ’s FPSO for Girassol chugged into Angolan waters. Oil industry insiders were positively bedazzled by it. The $2.8 billion, 343,000-ton floating rig won accolades for technological innovation from trade groups. It was big. The rig was in the deepest water ever; the platform was the largest ever; its buoys the biggest ever.54 The Girassol FPSO would extract oil from almost two dozen wells scattered over a wide expanse of sea-floor. Over a dozen more wells were punctured to pump water and gas back into the reservoir, forcing more oil out. It could store at least 2 million barrels of oil, and so could fill up the largest oil tankers cruising the seas today, for the long trip to Europe and North America.55 Everything would be done on board. No pipelines to shore, no processing facilities along the coast, and no tanker terminals amidst villages along the bay would be necessary.
FPSOs bypassed the painstaking courtship of traditional oil developments for a series of quickie one-nightstands. Oil extraction offshore, found via three-dimensional seismic, and sucked out by FPSO: a rap
id profitable model for mining the last of the world’s crude had been forged.56
CHAPTER SIX
Aftershocks
WHILE BIG OIL chased new frontiers in ever-more far-flung locales, its old rigs slowly rotted in its abandoned oilfields, teetering in the wake.
According to the National Research Council, it would cost nearly $10 billion to restore Alaska’s North Slope to its pristine, pre-oil state, but it is exceedingly unlikely anyone will ever do it.1 The search for oil itself disturbed plants and animals unlucky enough to trample, unknowing, upon oily graves. Between 1988 and 1998, seismic surveyors had hacked over 900,000 miles of tracks for seismic lines, opening up some secluded wild places for the very first time. Hunters and diseases followed.2 Seismic ships sent out deafening blasts of noise that interrupted the dark, quiet waters where whales and other marine mammals clicked and squeaked to each other across the water column. Whales and dolphins were known to go quiet and veer off their ancient water trails to avoid the blasts.3
With oil companies developing more smaller fields and quickly depleting them, strings of “mature” drained fields litter the globe. As the fields, age their facilities require more maintenance, just as the money to be made shrinks precipitously, and so the incentive to postpone or avoid maintenance of facilities is built in.
Years after their planned obsolescence, the platforms on the North Sea’s stormy seas keep chugging along. Many production platforms, towering over the water on concrete legs shoved into the seafloor, had been built in the early 1970s and were meant to last about fifteen years, the amount of time companies figured they’d need to suck the oil out and move on. But the technology of forcing the oil out of the rock keeps improving, the government’s take continues to diminish, and as a result, the platforms still bob in the frigid waters, “while many of them are literally wearing out,” according to the Financial Times.4
