Last December, I visited an offshore oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico — specifically, the Brutus platform owned by Shell oil. I probably sell the experience a little short in my NRO article about my trip today. But if you want to knock your socks to be knocked off by the seemingly limitless possibilities of human endeavor, I highly recommend a trip to an an offshore oil platform. Per my article, here’s the most astounding thing I learned on my trip:
The platform is the size of a few football fields jammed together, and the top of the derrick was easily a few hundred feet off the water. Dozens of people lived on board, and everything — from the computer systems to the actual drilling rig — was state of the art. Brutus produced over 100,000 barrels of oil a day — down from over 300,000 at its peak capacity.
That sounds impressive. But here’s what truly floored me: Shell decided Brutus’s location in the gulf would be profitable for drilling in April 1999. The company then built the massive oil platform, transported it to the right location in the gulf, anchored the floating leviathan onto the seafloor 3,000 feet below, drilled 17,000 feet below that, and began producing oil in July 2001. It took only two years to get Brutus online.
Of course, it’s not nearly as simple as saying if we lift the ban on offshore drilling we’ll have millions of gallons of oil flowing in only two years. However, oil companies are highly motivated and have a lot of money to throw at prospecting and building new facilities. Based on what I saw, they are almost literally capable of moving mountains. If the ban is lifted and we cleared unnecessary regulatory hurdles, it’s quite likely we’ll have significantly more domestic oil production on a much faster timeline than the nay saying politicians who currently oppose drilling would have you believe.