Word: km
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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Until recently, drilling in the Gulf was concentrated close to shore in water as shallow as 9 m (30 ft.). But now that most of those easy-to-tap reserves are depleted, oilmen are looking to the slopes of the continental shelf, hundreds of meters deep and 160 km (100 miles) or more from land. The cutoff of oil supplies from Kuwait and Iraq and the resulting run-up in prices have lent new urgency to the exploration ventures, some of which have been in the works for a few years. "Oil at $30 to $40 a barrel is suddenly...
...deepwater quest began in 1984, when the Hunt brothers pioneered some of the new production techniques in a subterranean formation known as Green Canyon, some 240 km (150 miles) southwest of New Orleans. But they failed to make the big strike they needed to salvage their collapsing financial empire. Conoco followed the Hunts and had more luck, finding sizable deposits at the * 535-m (1,760-ft.) level. The company, with Occidental and Texaco, spent $400 million to build the world's deepest production platform, and has been producing from 20 wells for about a year...
...equally huge project is Shell's $500 million Bullwinkle platform, 130 km (80 miles) off the Louisiana coast. Standing 162 stories high -- taller by 49 m (161 ft.) than Chicago's Sears Tower -- it looms like a gigantic iceberg in 412 m (1,353 ft.) of water, only its top-deck production facilities visible above the water. Chevron is planning a big project nearby. Southeast of New Orleans, Exxon is operating a 110-story platform, and a few miles away British Petroleum is erecting its own 100-story behemoth...
...current projects are only the beginning. "The real potential lies farther and deeper offshore," says Roger Abel, Conoco's general manager for production engineering. "The big easies have all been found." Shell is investing $1.3 billion to build and install a tension-leg platform some 411 km (255 miles) southeast of Houston that will retrieve oil from a world-record depth of 872 m (2,860 ft.). Called Auger, the giant is scheduled to begin producing from 32 wells in 1993. Shell has also drilled an exploratory well at a 2,300-m (7,500-ft.) depth, and Mobil...
Trails: 40 km totals; 10km beginner,20km intermediate, 10km advanced...