Javier Blas of Bloomberg reports that the British petroleum giant is back in the Gulf of Mexico. Blas writes:
A few years before going down in flames and infamy, the Deepwater Horizon semi-submersible oil rig made a sensational discovery.
In August 2006, the craft — which was on a mission for the UK petroleum giant BP Plc — was drilling in the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico when it found an enormous accumulation of oil buried so deep that no one had looked there before.
That new oilfield, named Kaskida, was both stunning and unattractive. It contained billions of dollars worth of petroleum, but the technology needed to develop it didn’t exist. The oil wasn’t just far beneath the sea. It was under a thick layer of salt and under such high pressure and temperature that it would gush out into the seabed if tapped. Nothing at the time could have contained it. […]
BP, in particular, has a lot to prove. Its CEO may be excited about developing the Kaskida oilfield, but environmentalists, climate activists and left-leaning US lawmakers are unlikely to be enthusiastic about the prospect of the British oil major drilling a complex and challenging well in the Gulf of Mexico of all places. Everyone deserves a second chance, but US federal regulators must keep a close eye on the future of Kaskida and all other new Paleogene oil fields. BP should focus on convincing everyone that it’s up to the task, rather than simply trumpeting the riches that await beneath the bottom of the sea.
Read more here.
