Special Anniversary - The history of offshore: developing the E&P infrastructure
F. Jay Schempf
The Creole field was a logical step in the evolution of the petroleum industry, which had been born nearly 100 years earlier with the successful Drake well in Pennsylvania. The industry's growth did not become noteworthy until the 1901 Spindletop discovery on the Texas Gulf Coast. Spindletop ushered in what today is known as the Petroleum Age. Subsequent discoveries of large new reserves around the country, along with advances in refining techniques, made crude oil the basic feedstock for US industrial and economic growth. Motor gasoline, its primary product, gave Americans a new auto-mobility, and demand skyrocketed as the country phased rapidly from a largely agrarian culture into a more urban society.
The decades after Spindletop witnessed rapid industry expansion across the nation. Using newly developed geophysical exploration techniques to support geological studies, oil prospectors spread the search to Mexico, Canada, South America, and half-way across the world to eastern Europe and the Middle East. Technology development continued apace. By the beginning of World War II, US exploration had expanded widely into more isolated, less-hospitable areas. Among these were the salt marshes and inshore lakes and bays along the coastlines of Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, and Louisiana. So, it wasn't difficult for oilmen to imagine that, if the right equipment were available, they could push seaward to wrest production from beneath the open waters of the Gulf.
Precedents for offshore drilling already had been set. Early 20th century explorationists had succeeded in producing oil from beneath water-covered areas. Using crude wooden trestles and platforms, drillers had coaxed oil from beneath the Pacific Ocean just off the California coast and had made modest gains in developing crude oil and associated natural gas from beneath inland water bodies like Lake Erie and the cypress-studded shallows of Louisiana's Caddo Lake. By the 1930s, drillers were developing giant oil reservoirs in Venezuela's Lake Maracaibo. Snippets of news leaking out of the highly secretive Soviet Union indicated that drillers there were producing oil from beneath their own "great lake," the Caspian Sea.
Floating rigs to locations
The true birth of the offshore petroleum industry stemmed from experience gained during the 1930s-40s by US oil companies that moved drilling and production equipment to well sites in the Gulf Coast's so-called "transition zone." There, between dry land and the marshy, shallow-water flats infused regularly with tidal flow from the Gulf, producers attained valuable know-how drilling in a semi-protected, partially marine environment.
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Page 2 of 17
Volume 64 Issue 1
January 2004
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