Photograph by Mike Duhon
Shell's Perdido project 200 miles (322 kilometers) off the Texas coast in the Gulf of Mexico is the deepest of the world's deepwater drilling sites and the farthest from the shore. It began retrieving oil and gas from beneath more than 8,000 feet (2,438 meters) of water just three weeks before BP's Deepwater Horizon accident closer to shore.
Perdido became the first project to produce oil from the Gulf of Mexico's next big oil frontier—the Lower Tertiary Trend. Pulling oil from that band of 60 million-year-old rock requires going further offshore than conventional Gulf rigs and drilling far deeper—delving below the seafloor to depths greater than the height of Mount Everest.
Tapping Lower Tertiary oil requires evolving knowledge and technology to deal with novel problems like poor imagery, scorching temperatures, and enormous pressures at depth. But the rewards appear to be well worth it for energy companies—billions of barrels of oil are believed to lie in the formation.
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