Five years after the nation's worst offshore oil spill, the industry is working on drilling even further into the risky depths beneath the Gulf of Mexico to tap massive deposits once thought unreachable. Opening this new frontier, miles below the bottom of the Gulf, requires engineering feats far beyond those used at BP's much shallower Macondo well.
BP PLC remains at the vanguard of ultra-deep exploration, and with its "Project 20K" it is developing the tools to handle the extremes of these deep reservoirs. The project's name is a reference to the 20,000 pounds of pressure per square inch the equipment must withstand.
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Operating in deepwater presents many challenges, including water depths ranging from 1,500 metres (4921ft) to over 3,000 metres (9842ft), ambient pressures of thousands of pounds per square inch (psi) and temperatures just above freezing.
Below the seabed, oil and gas can be found more than 10 kilometres (6 miles) deep under hard rock, thick salt and tightly packed sand, where temperatures can rise to 300 degrees Fahrenheit (148 degrees Celsius) and the pressure increases to 20,000 psi.
Massive production platforms and specially-designed systems and pipelines are required to extract and transport the oil and gas to shore. For example, the topside area of our Thunder Horse platform in the Gulf of Mexico is the size of three football fields. It contains equipment and systems capable of processing a quarter of a million barrels of oil equivalent per day from more than 20 wells. And design, testing and construction of the platforms required a new generation of technologies and subsea equipment.
Given all this is going on kilometres below the surface, in some cases with subsea equipment dealing with heavier crude oils, maintenance and monitoring of subsea production is also a massive challenge as subsea wells are often much further away from the host production facility.
For the past decade BP has been at the forefront of developing subsea technology to meet these challenges.
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"We believe absolutely that it is safe to drill these reservoirs," said Lars Herbst, the Gulf of Mexico regional director of the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, the agency that oversees offshore drilling."