Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells – Our Ride to the Renewable Future. Amanda Little
pie, and twice-baked potatoes were the items piled on my lunch plate, for instance. The living quarters, which taken together house up to 150 workers, are each the size of a walk-in closet, crammed with two cot-sized Murphy beds. I poked my head into one room, finding that it held little trace of its occupants except for a wooden crucifix and a Sports Illustrated swimsuit centerfold Scotch-taped to the wall. These are temporary dwellings—most of the occupants work two weeks of each month, going ashore in between.
While the Cajun did have an Internet café, a gym, and a movie theater (starkly furnished venues that look more like conference rooms than recreation areas), these luxuries are rarely used. Few of the men (the rig workers I met were invariably men) have the energy for entertainment after working twelve-hour shifts on the drilling floor. There’s not much contact with family on the job: cell phones don’t work this far offshore, so workers have only the options of e-mailing (by satellite Internet connection) or calling from a community phone. And while the sapphire ocean views are beautiful, especially when painted with the pale light of dawn and fiesta-colored sunsets, the workers don’t indulge in recreational swimming. I found out why when I saw a lone dorsal fin circle the platform—this is shark territory.
But not one Cajun Express worker I spoke to complained about the unforgiving environment. As global demand for oil increases and supplies become scarcer, oil industry profits in recent years have never been higher—and there are generous salaries to show for it. Entry-level tool pushers make about $60,000 a year and high-level geologists and engineers can make in the middle six figures. There’s also the guaranteed Rocky Balboa–sized testosterone rush of this type of work: “This is the best big-boy toy you’ll ever find,” said Chevron’s public affairs manager Mickey Driver, patting a railing on the platform. “There’s more horsepower beneath this puppy than in all the engines of the Indy 500.”
Rising from the concrete floor and up through the bottoms of my boots was a strange and subtly apocalyptic vibration. “The thrusters,” said Siegele, noticing my puzzlement. Thrusters, he told me, are gigantic engines at each corner of the platform relentlessly pushing and pulling against the ocean currents. Picture yourself standing in shallow waters at a beach and incessantly shifting your weight to stay balanced as the waves surge and the tides ebb and flow. Thrusters do an extreme version of this in order to keep the rig “on station,” meaning within six inches in any direction of the drill’s charted entry point into the seabed below. Anchors can’t be used to moor drilling vessels at these depths—the motion of the ocean would strain even the strongest of moorings, and rigs need to be able to motor to safety in the event of a hurricane.
The thruster solution is ingenious, but it carries an astonishing energy burden: these 9,500-horsepower engines use a combined total of 27 megawatts of power when running at full capacity—enough to power about twenty-one thousand homes. The generators that power the thrusters and keep the lights on, the electric drill turning, and the computers humming in this village at sea require about 40,000 gallons of diesel per day. It’s roughly the amount of fuel that 13,300 Hummers consume in a typical day of driving.
PRESSURE POINTS
You have to burn fossil fuels to harvest them—that’s a reality in any drilling scenario—but the ratio of energy invested to energy gained gets slimmer as the drilling conditions get more extreme. (By “energy invested” I’m referring to all fossil fuels used to discover, drill, pump, and refine the oil and transport it to market.) During the glory days of U.S. oil production in the 1930s, an investment of 1 barrel of oil would yield a return of about 100 barrels. By 1970, when oil deposits had become scarcer and more difficult to extract and refine, the ratio had shrunk by more than half: 40 barrels of oil gained for every 1 barrel invested. By 2005, as the industry faced ever-greater limits, the ratio had diminished still further: about 14 to 1. Returns will continue to diminish, some experts argue, until we reach a 1:1 ratio; and that would spell the end of the petroleum era.
As I watched the Cajun in action, I began to understand why extreme drilling conditions can be so treacherous and demanding. It’s an expensive fuel-intensive process by itself to grind a drill into the farthest reaches of the earth; it’s an even bigger challenge to overcome the inevitable barriers and delays that occur along the way, draining more fuel and resources as the project wears on. That morning, workers on the Cajun Express had begun scraping clean the 5-mile drill hole so that perforating guns could be dropped down to the base of the well. There the guns would be triggered, releasing a spray of buckshot to loosen the sediment and stimulate the flow of oil into the well. If these highly sensitive instruments encounter unexpected obstacles on the way down, they can fire prematurely and this can permanently cripple the well. The well therefore has to be thoroughly cleared first by a tool known as a junk basket—an 8-inch-wide hunk of iron that’s forced up and down the entire 5-mile length of the hole, removing loose earth, rocks, and other possible barriers.
Halfway through our visit, Siegele took me to the rig’s control room—a small glassed-in chamber that contains a thronelike chair and a desk with a red joystick that operates the drill. I could hear the clank BOOM clank BOOM of the drill’s robotic arm sounding rhythmically as it gripped, positioned, and screwed together 90-foot sections of pipe to plunge the junk basket ever deeper into the hole. Minutes later, Siegele got some bad news. “The junk basket is stuck way down there on some debris,” reported Ron Byrd, a weather-beaten Chevron employee who has captained Gulf rigs for more than thirty years. Siegele winced almost imperceptibly. “Just a little bump in the road,” he muttered when I pressed him for details. Technically, it was a million-dollar bump. The crew would have to spend the next forty-eight hours fishing the jammed cleaning tool out of the hole, halting all other activity on a rig that costs over $500,000 a day to lease, fuel, and operate. But this is chump change to Siegele, with his annual budget of more than $1 billion. “If snags like this didn’t happen so frequently, you’d probably let them get to you,” Siegele told me, sucking in a breath of salt air. “But you can’t do these kinds of wells without stuff breaking—it comes with the territory.”
It’s one of many hazards that come with the territory. Take, for instance, loop currents. These mighty flows of water propelled by the Gulf Stream can threaten to bend or snap the drill shaft as it plunges toward the seafloor, and have to be vigilantly monitored for any directional shifts. The rig’s electrical system is also highly vulnerable—if a fuse blew, the thrusters would seize up, and the drill shaft would have to be severed. Still another challenge is guiding the drill on its optimal course down through 30,000 feet of sediment—a challenge akin to “flying above New York City in a jumbo jet, aiming a baseball at the pitcher’s mound in Yankee Stadium, and hitting it dead center,” said Siegele. The margin of error as the drill enters the seafloor is only about a meter in any direction. Any farther, and chances go up that you’ll hit a fault line or air pocket that will throw the whole well off.
Charting the course of the drill is an implausibly difficult task of its own. “We’re pretty much shooting in the dark,” said Siegele. Chevron runs its offshore drilling operations out of a gleaming Houston skyscraper that’s the shape of twin cylinders, resembling the nose of a double-barreled shotgun aimed skyward. The company devotes billions of dollars annually to mapping out the subsea landscape of its deepwater fields on high-tech equipment at this location, but there’s a limit to what these maps can show.
Geologists work in cavernous visualization rooms with floor-to-ceiling monitors and computers that have the processing power of “a PlayStation the size of an eighteen-wheeler,” as one engineer described it to me. The computers crunch seismic data that are then translated into maps of ancient sediment. To collect the data, geologists deploy ships that cruise above deep-sea prospects and pop off air guns—underwater cannons that emit gigantic burps of air into the ocean, bouncing sound waves off the underwater rock formations. Aquatic microphones tethered to the vessel record the response.
Gathering seismic data for subsea oilfields in the Gulf of Mexico is far trickier than in other offshore drilling regions. The sediment beneath the Gulf has a salt layer that’s as massive and ragged as the Swiss Alps; this layer acts like a fun house mirror for sound waves, deflecting and distorting them in ways that other sediments don’t. So Siegele’s team had to trigger