Easy oil is never far from the cutting edge

Fly out by helicopter 300 kilometres over the Gulf of Mexico. The water here is more than a kilometre deep, and hurricanes like 2005’s Katrina sweep through every year. Now drill an exploration well costing some US$100 million (Dh367m), through sand and shifting layers of salt. The well, one of the deepest ever, goes further beneath the seabed than Mount Everest is tall. The temperature underground is 120°C, and pressures are extreme. That is BP’s latest giant oil discovery, made last Wednesday: Tiber, the new frontier of oil exploration in US waters.

Tiber is reported to hold some 4 to 6 billion barrels of oil equivalent, of which a third or more might be recoverable. That makes it bigger than BP’s nearby find from 2006, Kaskida, with 3 billion barrels, and adds very substantially to the company’s existing reserves of 18 billion barrels.

These are not the only finds in the Gulf of Mexico’s “Lower Tertiary” province. Chevron, Shell, ConocoPhillips and other big oil players are also active there, with a string of colourfully named finds including Great White, Tiger and Trident. As yet, none of these fields has begun production, but the first Lower Tertiary oil, from developments by Shell and the Brazilian state oil giant Petrobras, is due next year.

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