Redefining Efficiency by Hugh S. Gorman

Author:Hugh S. Gorman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781884836756
Publisher: University of Akron Press

Figure 10.1. In Santa Barbara, producers had been drilling wells in shallow water since the turn of the century. (Library of Congress Library of Congress LC-US-Z62-16232)

Advances in directional drilling also improved access to underwater deposits. For example, in the mid-1930s, operators in Huntington Beach, California, started using directional drilling to reach offshore oil deposits there. They typically drilled four or five closely spaced holes from a single lease, each hole curving out to drain different portions of a reservoir three-quarters of a mile offshore.51 This technology would eventually prove useful when drilling multiple holes from a single offshore platform.

One barrier to development revolved around the question of who owned the continental shelf. In general, as one ventures away from the shore, the floor of the ocean slopes gently down until reaching a depth of about 600 feet (100 fathoms). After that point, the floor of the ocean drops off rapidly, falling a mile or more in a relatively short distance. The width of the shelf varies widely, ranging from only a few miles wide to over one hundred miles wide along portions of the Texas and Louisiana coast. In total, the area of the continental shelf off the entire United States amounts to approximately one-tenth of the country’s area, making it a valuable asset to whoever could claim ownership.

The question of ownership first emerged in the 1920s when California started leasing the submerged land off its coast to oil companies that wished to drill from piers. Texas and Louisiana began leasing some of their offshore lands in the 1930s. However, in 1937, the federal government laid claim to that land, triggering a legal dispute with coastal states that would last almost thirty years. Initially, this fight over the question of ownership did not have much of an effect on the strategy being pursued by oil companies. The pressing demands of World War II, which included shortages of material and submarine attacks on ships and tankers, temporarily discouraged oil companies from exploring most offshore areas.52

In the meantime, other people raised questions about the wisdom of drilling oil wells in offshore areas. One of the more significant debates occurred in connection with the development of oil fields underlying Galveston Bay. By 1936, geologists had located six “oil domes” beneath the bay. The Texas State Land Commission, with definite authority over the bay because it lay within state boundaries, then began leasing rights to drill. Some of those leases, however, lay in the path of the thirty-two-mile-long channel that connected the Houston Ship Channel to the Gulf of Mexico. All ships headed to Houston from the Gulf of Mexico had to follow this channel across the shallow bay. Once across the bay, those ships still had to travel another twenty-five miles up Buffalo Bayou, which had been dredged to make Houston accessible to oceangoing ships.

Keeping the entire ship passage open, including the portion in the bay, was serious business to the hundred or so chemical and manufacturing companies that operated plants along the ship channel.

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