NPR reported this morning that it will take five years for a pipeline to be built to transport oil from the newly discovered Gulf of Mexico well to the mainland. What will happen in the meantime? Will the oil be transported by ship, or can they just seal off the well and leave it alone until the pipeline is ready?
It has been sitting there for millions of years. It isn’t going anywhere. The well they drilled is just a test well. Now it is in their own best interests to get the infrastructure up and running as soon as possible but the oil doesn’t care. I doubt they would build a temporary setup to fill ships when 7 years or so isn’t really that long to get the whole thing running.
I cannot imagine them building a pipeline to offload the oil to shore. The test well is 270 miles away from land and the ocean floor is 7000 feet down where the well is. How in heaven would you build a pipeline and maintain a pipeline in those conditions? A floating pipeline? I can already hear the environmentalist’s screams of horror at such a thing.
My guess is ships will pull up nearby and get filled up. Seems far simpler and less costly.
The wells will probably be cemented up and plugged (aka P&A). They are appraisal wells designed to evaluate the area extent of the reservoir, total net pay and production rates that can be achived from the reservoir. Apraisal wells are sometimes used for production, but many times they do not intersect the reservoir in the right way or place, or the sub sea location is not in the correct place for the sub sea well head center. This reservoir will probably be developed with many wells drilled directionally from a central location.
The operater is planning to drill another aprasial well later, and then assuming the economics work out they will go ahead with full scale development and drill production wells, build a floating production facility and a sub sea pipeline.
Some deepwater discoveries use floating production and storage, or floating production and off load to a tanker. However these deep water discoveries are prolific producers (100K bbl a day for a facility is not uncommon) and having to shut down for tanker switching or weather that does not alow safe mooring ofa tanker will lead to shut in. Stopping and starting production is not a trivial task.
The subsea pipeline is no problem - These guys already have one at 5600ft and the BP Thunder horse and Holstein ultra deep water floating production facilities have set pipelines at 7200 ft
See here for details and a map of thesub sea pipeline system.
5 years to get a pipeline, but there are a lot of other things that need to happen as well to get this reservoir on stream.
cheers
Wow…guess I need to have more faith in engineers pulling off the seemingly impossible. Still seems crazy in case of leaks and other maintenance problems but apparently they have that sorted out.