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By Vladimir Posted in BP | Deepwater | Energy | Thunder Horse — Comments (6) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Thunder Horse platform finally pumping after three-year delay

When the structure 150 miles southeast of New Orleans reaches its full daily capacity of 250,000 barrels of oil and 200 million cubic feet of natural gas, Thunder Horse will be the biggest producer in the Gulf.
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When running at full tilt, Thunder Horse alone will increase overall U.S. oil and gas production by 3.6 percent. Add BP's Atlantis platform that started up last year, and the boost grows to 6.4 percent.

Analysts have said that is likely the biggest production increase from just two locations that the U.S. has seen in a decade.

Thunder Horse (and other developments like it) might never have been, had the owners succumbed to the defeatist thinking so common among Democratic and weak-kneed Republican politicians these days:

“What’s the use? Its reserves are only xx months of U.S. consumption.”
“It can’t help our energy picture for 10 years.”
“It will only contribute to Global Warming.”
“What we really need are higher CAFÉ standards.”
“It will spoil the view.”
“Let them drill the leases they already own.”
Or President Clinton’s classically shortsighted excuse for failing to approve ANWR exploration in 1995: “Oil is cheap. We don’t need it now. (Psst, Monica -- you missed a spot.)”

While Congress has been twiddling its thumbs and investigating Roger Clemens’ elbow, BP have been moving ahead with Thunder Horse. (Remember, they’re Brits.)

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The Thunder Horse PDQ (the floating Production/Drilling/Quarters Structure) is a world-class engineering achievement. It is the largest moored floating structure in the world. It is anchored in 6,000 feet of water, in a fixed location and it serves multiple wells, some many miles from the platform itself. The wells are suspended on the floor of the Gulf, and are drilled through some 19,000 feet of rock, including a thick salt layer, before reaching the oil reservoir.

Originally christened Crazy Horse, the field was discovered in 1999. (BP later honored the wishes of the Lakota Tribe to change the name of the field; rumor has it that the field was actually named for Neil Young’s band, and not the revered Native American.) Production startup was originally scheduled for 2005, but Hurricane Dennis intervened. The culprit that caused the 20 degree list shown below was reportedly bad software in the automatic system that controlled the ballast.

Last year, Thunder Horse suffered another setback when pre-production testing revealed that an underwater piping manifold had sustained a leak due to hydrogen embrittlement – an unforeseen problem due to the extreme pressures on the seafloor. The entire manifold system had to be reengineered and replaced.

The entire development cost some $5 billion. The PDQ by itself cost a cool $1 billion. The project was discovered in 1999; during that year, oil sold for as little as $10 per barrel, so moving ahead with a project of this magnitude was fraught with risk. Now, some in Congress would propose to take away part of BP’s (and partner ExxonMobil’s) “windfall profits” for having been visionaries.

We may have embarked on a new era of high oil prices. It is true that help from ANWR and the currently off-limits portions of the OCS may be years away, but the oil and gas industry has not been asleep. There are more deepwater fields in various stages of development that will help take up the slack in the mean time. Those may not bring back $1.50 gasoline, but it would be folly to forsake the technology we have in hand that has a chance to help our situation. Yes, we should pursue alternatives, but there is no realistic expectation on anyone’s part that 10 years from now alternatives will be a significant fraction of our energy supply.