Kevin's space

There have already been successes.  In 2004 Shell broke the record for the deepest producing field--the Coulomb, at 7570 ft.--when it tapped a formation 144 miles southeast of New Orleans.  Tow years later, in 7,000 ft. of water 270 miles southwest of the city, Chevron successfully tested its Jack No. 2 well in a field that may hold 15 billion barrels.

At this point the Boudreaux has already installed a 90-ft-long steel casing into the seabed and capped it with a wellhead and a 48-ft-high tower of controls and hydraulic valves known as the blowout preventer.  Then, nearly 8,000 ft. of aluminum-alloy pipe in 75-ft. sections, known as the riser, was connected to the seafloor assembly.

This automation is in sharp contrast to the technology of earlier rigs, which required roughnecks on the drill floor and in the derrick to disconnect and connect sections of drill pipe by hand, a laborious, dirty and dangerous process.  Ten years ago it would have taken 75 days to drill a well 18,000 ft. deep; the Boudreaux's crew can do it in two weeks.

 

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In deep water a rig can't stand on the bottom, which means it either has to be anchored with dozens of miles of chain and cable, or float freely, held in place by GPS-guided thrusters.

 

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And then there's the ocean itself.  At a depth of 8,000 ft. the pressures are enormous--3,500 psi.  no human hands can operate equipment on the seabed.  That means remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) have to be able to work in those pressures, day in and day out.  And the range of temperatures plays havoc with drilling mud.  "it's 44 degrees at the seabed and 275 at the drill bit," says Ricketson, keeping an eye on the turning drill, "So that mud has to function at extremely high and low temperatures--only new synthetic mud can do that."

There's a gym onboard and a flat-screen TV in every room, but the crew members mostly do just one thing, and that's work.

 

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Day or night seems the same; you lose track of time--at 3pm or 3am there's always someone pumping iron in the gym, a few guys sipping coffee in the mess hall.  You forget where you are, until you step out onto the smoking deck--a flat, steel pace witha  few aluminum benches--remove your hard hat and safety glasses and realize you're standing on a huge spigot in the middle of nowhere.

All this tech doesn't come cheap.  A typical offshore development in 100 ft. of water costs $100 million; just the test well for Chevron's Jack No. 2 cost $100 million, and the U.S. Minerals Management Service estiamtes the cost of developing a deepwater field can exceed $1 billion.  Shell won't say what the Perdido regional development will cost, but Noble is charging Shell hundreds of thousands of dollars a day for its rig.  Shell has already spent $554 million on leases in the gulf--that's just for the right to drill.

McCain: Why shouldn’t we be able to reimport drugs from Canada? It’s because of the power of pharmaceutical companies…

Romney: Don’t turn the pharmaceutical companies into the big bad guys.

McCain: Well, they are.

Romney: No, actually, they’re trying to create products to make us well and make us better, and they’re doing the work of the free market. And are there excesses? I’m sure there are, and we should go after excesses. But they’re an important industry to this country. But let me note something else, and that is the market will work. And the reason healthcare isn’t working like a market right now is you have 47 million people that are saying, “I’m not going to play. I’m just going to get free care paid for by everybody else.” That doesn’t work. Number two, the buyer doesn’t have information about what the cost or quality is of different choices they could have. If you take the government out of it to a much greater extent, you’d get it to work like a market and we’ll rein in costs.

The unanimous decision has implications for 50 million workers with $2.7 trillion invested in 401(k) retirement plans.