Essay on Offshore Drilling

Finally, the drill is shut, and the fracking fluid is pumped into the underground layers and sealed there.

Once the well reaches the right depth, it turns right or left and becomes horizontal. This is called the kick off point. The horizontal section can span anywhere from 1,000 to 6,000 feet. The drill is removed but the surrounding steel casing remains. These steel casings are meant to protect the groundwater and the surrounding area from any potential leakage during the fracking process. Down at the horizontal section of the well, little holes are punctured through the steel in thousands of spots. Then, a water solution is pumped at a extremely high pressure down the well. This causes tons of cracks and fissures in the rock. Additives and sand in the water mixture hold the cracks open, allowing oil to escape and be brought up to the surface.

Offshore drilling has become an essential part of today’s oil production and demand for energy. With the growth of population comes the increasing demand for oil. The oil industry today, is one of the most used providers of energy. Today in the 20th century the majority of the population in America has a car and cars needs gas to run. The oil reserves in the earth that are easily accessible via land are starting to run dry and are becoming harder to find. This is why we have begun to see more and more offshore oil drills. Although there are benefits of offshore drilling such as profit, lower gas prices, and becoming less dependent on foreign oil. There are also many drawbacks in which if something were to go wrong, the mistake would be catastrophic impacting the environment, the nature, and have trickling effects all around the world.

Offshore drilling is defined as” The operation of oil wells on the continental shelf, sometimes in water hundreds of feet deep” according to dictionary.com. This method of drilling is a very common form, being used throughout different locations offshore everywhere in the world, the first being in 1897 according to howstuffworks.com. The locations of oil are found by two main methods. The first one is by finding magnetic occurrences that are in natural in the ground. If readings found a steady amount of magnetism over a general area then suddenly a large decline, they could have found the location of an oil deposit. But to ensure that is in fact a trap, the second method called sparking. “sparking is sending shock waves down through the water and into the ocean floor.” This allows ships above to be able to read the ground below and see at different locations where

After it has drilled a while deeper another casing is placed to further protect the groundwater from the natural gas and oil which is to be soon produced. Vertically the drill may dig as deep as 4,500 to 7,500 feet.

As technology evolved, offshore drilling moved progressively into deeper water and farther away from oceanfront. In 1958, Richfield Oil Company developed the first drilling man-made island in Rincon where there was a substantial amount of oil was found. With the mounting pressure and high demand to produce more oil and gas, geologists studied the anticlinal trends and discovered the abundance of oil productive in Rincon Island extended underneath the Santa Barbara Channel.

The goal of our research is to seek possible solutions to reduce the risks of offshore oil spills. To attain this goal, we gathered information from over twenty sources, including “Deepwater Horizon oil” from Wikipedia research and an article from the LA Times.

Unfortunately, the drill cannot simply be poked in the ground with natural gas spewing out of the hole that has been created, fracking is much more complex than that as I am sure that you know already. Decades of research, triumphs and failures have gone into the creation, management and use of drilling rigs that, as a result, has left us with the standard fracking procedure we know today.

They then pump fluid through pipelines into the drilled areas in order to extract materials that would further indicate the presence of oil. Once a company is certain that there is a sufficient amount of oil at a given location to make drilling worthwhile, it sets up a more permanent structure, or platform, from which to extract it. The oil that is pumped out is sent through pipelines back to shore. An offshore facility can pump oil from a field for decades.

The issue of whether offshore oil drilling is a safe operation or not has been arguing for a long time in the United States. ( SPE International, N.D.) Drilling on water started in early 1930s in Louisiana by shallow-draft barges. Nevertheless, the first oil well on water was drilled in 9th of September, 1947 by Kerr-McGee’s unit Tender Assist Drilling (TAD) in the Gulf of Mexico (SPE International, N.D.). A year after year, oil companies used more and more sophisticated equipment to drill on water, but the number of spilled accidents has been rising since 1964 (Ivanovich, and Hays, 2008). After all, while

Development of Penobscot Filed Offshore Nova Scotia Sankaranarayanan Sai Darshan B00613681 Supervisor: Dr. Adam Donaldson Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of Meng in Petroleum Engineering Department of Process Engineering and Applied Science Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia August 2015 CONTENTS Page No Introduction 1 History of Nova Scotia Offshore 2 Part I – Field Development 3 • Water Saturation 3 • Permeability 4 • Porosity 5 • Volume calculation 6 • Fluid Modelling 7 Part II – Reservoir Modelling 9 • Rock Physics 9 1.

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In SAGD shown in the Figure 1.1, pairs of horizontal parallel wells separated by a vertical distance of 4-6m are drilled for one kilometer of a horizontal distance. The upper of the two wells (injection well) is used to inject steam in the formation to lower the viscosity of the bitumen. The lower one (production well) is used to collect the produced oil. The well drilled into the formation removes earth for a well (casing) to be inserted to the well bore. The well bore is then cemented to increase the stability and isolate it from underground water to prevent contamination. A smaller pipe with a number of small slits is then inserted in the reservoir.

Oil spills usually occur as temporary accidents, while pollution from trucks happens every day. Therefore, offshore drilling does not contaminate the water as badly as the United States thinks.

Since the past few decades, owning a car has become a necessity in order to commute from one place to another. However, cars do not work automatically, they require fuel. Since the past decade, the petroleum industry has become one of the leading industries impacting the nation’s economy. Oil has become an essential commodity as it is utilized in transportation vehicles, serves as a raw material for manufacturing plastics, and is utilized in homes for cooking. America’s economy is greatly dependent on petroleum as it is the “black gold” of the nation. The considerable significance of oil has led to the drilling of it, which is not only limited to land, but also the oceans. Offshore drilling is a method in which petroleum is extracted from underneath the seabed. It is one of the significant technological advancements in the past few decades. However, the ones who are involved in the process of offshore oil production are humans, and humans tend to make mistakes. In 1969, due to a human error, an oil spill occurred and natural gas, oil, and mud shot up the well and oozed into the ocean (“Offshore Drilling”). The oil spilled led to an environmental disaster which killed thousands of marine animals and distorted the environment. In order to prevent the same error, the government passed a moratorium in 1981, banning more than 85 percent of the country’s oil drilling sites (“Offshore Drilling”). The moratorium restricted the United States to mass-produce its natural resource.