E6


The BP Disaster


KLMNO


TUESDAY, JULY 13, 2010


DAVE MARTIN/ASSOCIATED PRESS Crude oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill washes ashore in Orange Beach, Ala. The gulf’s near-unique geology and millions of years of river flow account for the area’s exceptionally rich deposits. No telling how much oil remains beneath the gulf


geology continued from E1 “It traps oil and gas beautiful-


ly,” said Roger Anderson, a Co- lumbia University geophysicist who has long studied Gulf of Mexico geology.


Anderson compares the deep-


water gulf to Texas and Okla- homa more than a century ago. The “oil patch” had its famous moments, such as the Spindletop gusher in Beaumont, Tex., in 1901, which blew out at 100,000 barrels (4.2 million gallons) per day, and the Wild Mary well, which spewed out of control for 11 days in Oklahoma City in 1930. That region still produces, but there aren’t many big discoveries still to be made in the pincush- ioned ground. Not so the deep water. There’s oil out there, in reservoirs that can top a billion barrels. “It’s like the old days. It’s true frontier,” Anderson says.


Shaped by great rivers


It’s not the only such place in the world. There’s abundant oil in deep water off the coasts of Brazil and West Africa, for example. But the gulf has its own near-unique geology, shaped by the great river that flows into it. The Mighty Mississippi, the Father of Waters, drains almost everything from the Rockies to the Appalachians. Millions of years ago, the Red River, which forms part of the Texas/Oklahoma border, was as big as the Mississippi. These riv- ers dumped dead organisms into the gulf in prodigious quantities. Those nutrients help feed thriving ecosystems and some of the richest fisheries in the world. But the gulf is also an isolated sea, almost walled off from the Atlantic Ocean by Cuba and the Florida and Yucatan peninsulas. That means the gulf lacks the deep-water circulation of open ocean.


Bad circulation means lots of anoxic layers, dead zones, places where there’s so little oxygen that


SOURCES: Geo ExPro, Halliburton, BP, USGS


organic matter doesn’t decay. That’s great for the eventual crea- tion of an oil field. “What oil and gas is is un-


decayed dead organisms. Micro- organisms, not dinosaurs. So the small foraminifera and algae that lived in the ocean and lived in the Mississippi River died and got swept out to sea and got buried under all the mud coming out of the Mississippi. As it got deeper and deeper, it got hotter and hot- ter and got cooked into oil,” An- derson said. Ken Deffeyes, a retired Prince-


ton geologist who once worked for Shell Oil and has written about the gulf, said, “The Missis- sippi Delta and the Niger Delta are the only two really produc- tive, big deltas in the world. The Amazon, nothing. The Ganges, nothing or very, very little.”


The geology story has been un- folding for more than 40 million years, to the very origin of the gulf as a rift in the crust of the Earth. The gulf is widening to this day. Cuba is sliding away from Texas. The Yucatan peninsu- la is retreating from Louisiana. At its deepest point, the Gulf of Mexico is more than 12,000 feet deep.


Valuable but lethal


The oil-hunters know the sub- sea escarpments and canyons the same way hikers know moun- tains and rivers. They have ex- plored the Sigsbee Escarpment, the long cliff at the edge of the abyssal plain; they’ve poked holes in the Mississippi Fold Belt and the Perdido Fan Fold Belt. There is one tricky conse- quence of the fact that the Missis-


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VOLUNTEERS VOLUNTEERS


Whiskey casks were once used to collect oil gushing from wells


by Frances Stead Sellers Many countries have a modern


way of measuring crude oil — by weight. They use the metric ton, which remains unchanged when the liquid expands and contracts as it is pumped through pipelines or shipped in supertankers at varying temperatures. But the United States still cal-


culates crude by volume, using a unit of measurement that prob- ably owes its heritage to the stan- dardization of spirits and was ap- plied to oil during the Pennsylva-


LOUISIANA New Orleans Land below the gulf


The well that has been spewing oil since April is in a part of the Gulf of Mexico called the Mississippi Canyon, an oil-rich trough on the outer continental shelf.


MISSISSIPPI Biloxi


Mobile ALABAMA FLORIDA Pensacola 0 MILES 50


Miocene layer Scientists say the rock into which the BP well was drilled was formed during the middle of the Miocene age, 5.3 million to 23 million years ago.


Gulf of Mexico


The well’s reservoir was 13,016 feet below the sea floor, which is about 5,000 feet below the surface.


Lower Tertiary layer The Gulf’s deepest wells now go more than 35,000 feet below the surface, into sandstone reservoirs from the Lower Tertiary era, which were formed up to 65 million years ago.


Ocean floor


Pliocene Salt


Anticline: Potential oil deposit


Miocene


Cretaceous Lower


Tertiary Salt Jurassic GENE THORP, ALBERTO CUADRA AND BONNIE BERKOWITZ/THE WASHINGTON POST


sippi River deposits so much sed- iment in the gulf. The rapid lay- ering of mud in deep, low-oxygen water leads to high rates of gas formation. The gas is valuable, potentially.


It’s also the major cause of the loss of well control — blowouts. Gas was the lethal agent in the Deepwater Horizon explosion. So for the petroleum execu- tives (if not for the shrimp and fish and turtles and so on), the gulf is a good place to drill holes in the sea floor. But it’s also a place that demands great care. That’s true even in the shal- lows. But the drilling rigs have marched — or sailed, to be more precise — right off the continen- tal shelf, into very deep water, us- ing satellite technology and pre- cision thrusters to fix themselves over wells drilled on the conti-


nental slope and in the depths be- yond. The oil industry looks at the gulf covetously, for this is where roughly a third of the U.S. domestic oil production comes from, increasingly from the deep water. The oil companies do not drill


randomly. Where the oil is, and in what quantity, are the questions that preoccupy oil companies that need huge amounts of cap- ital to drill a deep-water well. “That well is going to cost you 40 to 50 million dollars to drill, and you can’t afford to drill a lot of dry ones,” said Dennis O’Neill, a computer scientist who has worked for decades in petroleum exploration.


So the companies use sound


and radar to take snapshots of what’s hidden below the sea floor. A large vessel will tow anywhere


What the layers may look like


For millions of years, the Mississippi River has stacked sediment in the gulf in wavy, irregular layers interspersed with huge salt canopies.


from eight to 20 cables, each thousands of feet long and stud- ded with hydrophones, which are microphones that float in the wa- ter. The vessel will fire an air gun that creates a sound that propa- gates through the water and down through the sea floor into the rock below. The microphones pick up echoes; software creates a picture that helps the geologists craft a story of what’s below the sea floor: the type of rock, the faulting, the salt layers, the po- tential traps for oil. “In a perfect geophysical world, when you listen to the ech- oes of the sound propagating and bouncing back through this rock, and plot it on a piece of paper, you’ll see what looks like a layer cake of the geological structures,” O’Neill said. If the picture that emerges matches a plausible “story” of oil, the company can decide whether to drill the site. “The only way to test the hy- pothesis is to drill a well,” O’Neill said. The long-term question, one


that has incited great debate, is how much oil is still out there, yet to be discovered and potentially commercial. Deffeyes, a leading proponent of the idea that the world needs to be concerned with an inexora- bly downward turn in oil produc- tion known as “Peak Oil,” said it’s time to prepare for the post-oil age. Indeed, he says, we need to move beyond all of the nonre- newable energy resources. The professor says, “We have about 100 years of coal plus ura- nium plus natural gas plus oil. But you’ve got to start switching to natural gas now. You’ve got to start building more nuclear pow- er plants. But your goal in 100 years: You’ve got to be 100 per- cent solar — that’s wind, plants, biodiesel — all those things are directly or indirectly solar.” When will Peak Oil happen? “It happened in 2005,” Deffeyes


said. achenbachj@washpost.com


Getting to the bottom of the bbl


nia oil rush of the 1860s: the 42-gallon barrel (or bbl). After Edwin Drake struck oil in 1859 in Titusville, Pa., blowouts were common, according to en- ergy analyst Byron King. Oil workers grabbed any vessel they could — washtubs and casks of all sizes for storing salt and fish — to collect the spewing black gold, which they shipped down the Al- legheny River to Pittsburgh for re- fining. The most reliably sized container at hand was the stan- dard 40-gallon whiskey barrel. When the oil industry sought to


create its own standard, it took the volume of the whiskey barrel and added two more gallons. Why? One theory comes from Charles A. Whiteshot in “The Oil- Well Driller,” who cites producers agreeing in 1866 that “An allow- ance of two gallons will be made on the gauge of each and every 40 gallons in favor of the buyer.” The additional two gallons were a buyer’s bonus, a bit like the 13th bread roll in the baker’s doz- en. The 42-gallon barrel remains the standard for pricing crude on


the New York Mercantile Ex- change. Those are U.S. gallons, of course, as opposed to the imperial gallons standardized by the Brit- ish in 1824 (and now largely re- placed by liters). Both contain eight pints, but a U.S. pint has just 16 fluid ounces while an imperial pint has 20. At 128 fluid ounces — as opposed to 160 — a U.S. gallon is one of the few things smaller in the New than in the Old World. Meaning that every 42-gallon barrel of oil that flows from the Macondo well is a little less than 35 gallons to the British. What’s more, through one of the chemical mysteries of the re- finement process, each 42-gallon barrel of crude yields about 44 gallons of gasoline, jet fuel, heat- ing oil and other substances. Meaning that every 80,000 bar- rels (or 3,360,000 gallons) that BP soon hopes it will capture from the well each day will result in 160,000 additional gallons of pe- troleum products. (U.S. gallons, that is.)


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