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Yes, you read that right. 3,858 oil wells are in the gulf.
Greed is one thing but the murder of an entire ecosystem is, simply put, stunningly ignorant and stupid. We are not the species we think we are.
We need to keep an eye on Chevron’s Tahiti, the deepest-producing offshore oil platform in the world. Chevron has plans to build six more rigs in the gulf this year.
A rig can operate many different wells.
Crude Awakening-An infographic to help you understand the oil spill catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico and the incredible costs that will affect us all.
"If you kill the shrimp, you kill the fish that feed off the shrimp,
and if you kill the fish then there is nothing left in the Gulf of Mexico.
That would absolutely be a disaster for years and years."-Dan Dix, fishing boat captain"
A ‘double-dip’ recession probably has been made more likely
by this tragedy."-David Kotok, chief investment officer, Cumberland Investors
Where do we go from here?
I admit to feeling impotent.
18 Comments
Fact check: There are NOT 3,858 oil rigs in Gulf of Mexico waters. The number is far fewer.
There may be that many wells in the Gulf, but modern practice allows multiple wells to be served by a single rig. In some cases, a well does not even require a rig for the oil and/or gas to be gathered.
Thanks, Mary, glad you shared that graphic, it’s pretty amazing. I saw it last night and spent 30 minutes just combing over it.
Of the 3,858 rigs, about 15 are deepwater, with one of them being the deepest in the world — and owned/operated by BP. It’s these 15 which really concern me because the science is very different once the rigs aren’t drilling into the shallower shelf area, as the Deepwater Horizon site has revealed to Americans.
Then perhaps you might want to go around and correct numerous outlets including government sites which report that 3,858 number.
[edit: Here, you can start with NOAA which created this image now posted at Wikipedia. Frankly, the number 3,858 only represents those in American waters in the Gulf of Mexico; there could be more.]
Mary’s own citation states there are 3,858 WELLS, not rigs.
Let’s compromise on the word PLATFORMS, because it’s right there in print.
There are certainly of lot of oil rigs in the Gulf that are not in US waters. Mexico has quite a few. I think the numerous Venezuelan rigs would be considered located in the Caribbean Sea, not the Gulf, but am not sure exactly how they are counted.
I changed the wording from rigs to wells. Maybe I should have said “holes in the earth created to draw oil from under the ocean floor so we could continue to foul the planet.”
From Wikepedia:
“An offshore platform, often referred to as an oil platform or an oil rig, is a lаrge structure used to house workers and machinery needed to drill wells in the ocean bed, extract oil and/or natural gas, process the produced fluids, and ship or pipe them to shore. Depending on the circumstances, the platform may be fixed to the ocean floor, may consist of an artificial island, or may float.
Remote subsea wells may also be connected to a platform by flow lines and by umbilical connections; these subsea solutions may consist of single wells or of a manifold centre for multiple wells.”
Offshore platforms are the wells’ supporting structures. Since NOAA is stating there are 3858 platforms does that mean that there are more wells?
Maybe I should have left the title alone.
laborite57-how do you feel about what happened in the gulf?
Sorry to sound pedantic. I spent some time researching the Gulf of Mexico oil business a few years back and was surprised to learn of its size and complexity.
Yes, Mary, there are more wells.
There are 50,686 wells/bore holes according to this map found at Wikipedia. This map from MMS doesn’t give a number, but if every platform has multiple bores, well, you get the idea. There were three wells drilled at the Deepwater Horizon rig’s Mississippi Canyon 252 site.
ok. but what is the answer? I am not trying to be abrasive I just want to know. NOAA says 3858 platforms off of the coast of TX, LA, MS, & AL. Can platforms have more than one well? Is NOAA wrong? Am I misinterpreting NOAA?
Holy shit and thanks.
Yeah, I know, the 3,858 number is enough to choke on as it is. I don’t think I’ve ever flown over the Gulf of Mexico, but I’m picturing wall-to-wall oil industry.
or
“No problem can be solved from the same consciousness that created it.” — Albert Einstein
:)
Ignore me, I mistyped something here . . . and edited it out.
Great post Mary, and what an outstanding graphic, and Rayne thanks for all the other facts.
Rccd, of course.
Well, I don’t know the precise answer except to know that a well is not the same thing as a platform and that neither is same thing as a rig. Rayne says that his source identifies the number of wells (active or inactive? both?) at 50,000 plus!!
High tech rigs for deepwater drilling (like the one that blew up) are fairly new and fairly rare. On the other hand, I’ve seen platforms out there in the Gulf that look very crude and low-tech. I was told that these are generally older natural gas platforms, and that many of them are entirely unmanned. A helicopter flies around to check the equipment every couple of days.
But I suppose there are simply details. The important questions are different. Are the offshore oil/gas fields safe? Clearly not. Are they environmentally friendly? Emphatically no. Should they be shut down? That’s a good question and I don’t know the answer.
And when they run low they pump boiling seawater in to extract the last drop.
Try that in your crankcase sometime , but don’t worry BP happy.
By what right, among the chain of humanity, did we decide to extract the last possible drop screw the kids and grand kids, let alone the third and forth generation.
Great information. Thank you Mary and all. Here’s another graphic from NOAA that’s a less detailed version of the MMS graphic, posted on the NRDC staff blog. Though it’s not certain just how many rigs vs wells there are, it’s sure clear that that whole region of the Gulf is an industrial zone, right in the middle of one of the most diverse ecosytems in the world.
http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/vjaffee/photo_with_thousands_of_potent.html
Also, here’s a link to the BP Exploration Plan for this particular operation in Mississippi Canyon 252.
http://www.gomr.mms.gov/PI/PDFImages/PLANS/29/29977.pdf
Notice on page 2-1, the very last entry under General Information, 2.7 Blowout Scenario.
“A scenario for a potential blowout of the well from which BP would expect to have the highest volume of liquid hydrocarbons is not required for the operations proposed here.” (emphasis added)
The whole document is worth a reading, as it is no doubt the template for most of the operations represented in the graphic. Bureaucratic rubber stamping gone wild.