THE OILMEN & THE SEA

From sun-beaten ports in the Gulf Coast a monstrous, ungainly fleet is putting out to sea on a dramatic mission. It is the "navy" of the offshore oilmen, and never did stranger ships sail on more venturesome voyages. Some of the craft bristle with giant cranes; others grow forests of steel columns as tall as Douglas firs. All of them clank and roar with violent machinery. Alongside conventional ships built for more seemly duty, they look as clumsy as cassowaries splashing in a lake of swans.

Many more such outlandish craft will be built to exploit the fabulous treasure of oil, gas and sulphur that lies under the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. Bringing it up and to shore will be hard, risky and expensive, but the oilmen, though strangers to the sea, are the most supremely confident of confident Americans.

"Up in west Texas where we come from," said one calloused driller, "there's no water around. We operate dry as horned toads. They bring us down to Louisiana, and there's the ocean! We'll lick the s.o.b." No one who knows the oilmen doubts that they will.

"Here We Are!" Back in the Permian (pre-dinosaur) period, 200 million years ago, the south central part of the U.S. and much of the present Gulf of Mexico was covered by a shallow sea, connected with the open ocean by an even shallower strait. The climate must have been hot and dry, and the sea evaporated rapidly, drawing fresh salt water in through the strait. Its brine became saturated and deposited crystalline salt, which eventually formed a bed thousands of feet thick.

Later the climate grew wetter, and the rivers cleared the shallow sea of its heavy brine. Some of the salt on the bottom probably dissolved, but the rest was protected by sediment washed down from the land. As the sediment grew thicker, it pressed on the underlying salt, and the salt (comparatively light and plastic) billowed up through it like slow-motion bubbles rising in a viscous liquid.

These rockbound bubbles of salt, one or two miles across and sometimes taller than the Rocky Mountains, are the famed salt domes of the Gulf Coast. In the eyes of the oilmen, they are lovely things. As the salt pokes through the sediment beds, it bends and breaks them and drags them upward, forming many pockets to trap the oil that has formed from marine organisms buried in the sediments. Best of all, salt domes all but shout, "Here we are!" To an oil geologist using the proper instruments (gravimeters and seismographs), a deeply buried dome stands out like a snowcapped mountain against a clear sky.

Since the oil-forming sediments and the underlying salt sweep beyond the coastline where domes abound, the oil geologists reasoned that there should be domes under the Gulf, too. They took their instruments to sea and found that the salt domes march, rank upon rank, to the edge of the continental shelf, more than 100 miles from land.

A dozen major oil companies have "shot" the Gulf thoroughly. They do not publish or share their findings, but Vice President Ben C. Belt of Gulf Oil Corp.

believes that the continental shelf is at least as rich in oil, acre for acre, as the narrow coastal strip of Texas and Louisiana. He predicts that within five years a vigorous drilling campaign in water up to 150 feet deep should find oil reserves of four to six billion barrels. Beyond the 150-foot line, the shelf should be just as rich, and no one knows in what depth of water the drillers can learn to drill.

Amphibious Oil. The oilmen have approached the sea by easy stages, meeting it first in the Mississippi delta, where land and sea are interlaced. Winding bayous snake through the land, connecting brackish lakes only a few feet deep. What looks like land is often sea with tall grass growing up through it.

To work in this mushy country, the oilmen turned amphibious, dug canals instead of building roads, and invented big-tired "marsh buggies" to travel on water or land or a soft mixture of both. Here the landlubber Texans met the seagoing, French-speaking Cajuns, who taught them the rudiments of seamanship. But the oilmen had yet to meet the full power of the sea.

At first they attacked head on. "In our business," says one of them (with some chagrin, now), "weather had never stopped us. We'd work through a blizzard or duster. So when we started on offshore oil, we said: 'To hell with the weather. What's a hurricane, anyway? Nothing but a big ol wind!' "

Weather Lesson. The smallish hurricane that hit Freeport, Texas in 1949 taught them a startling lesson. The great waves rode higher than anyone dreamed they could. They twisted and smashed the steelwork of the sea rigs, and tossed heavy machines around as if they were wooden mockups.

The "roughnecks" might have continued their head-on attack on the sea, but the major oil companies realized after the Freeport episode that the open sea could not be licked without the highest type of scientific engineering. While Congress was deciding how to divide the underwater lands between the states and the nation, the companies had time to start a long-range research program.

One thing the oil companies discovered was that no one had measured the full power of hurricanes. No one knew what force a wave could exert far below the surface of the sea, and no one had decided how high the surface would be lifted by hurricane winds.

Pushed by a gush of oil money and promises of more, scientists attacked these problems from half a dozen directions. They hung steel piles studded with strain gauges from offshore drilling platforms and measured the force of passing waves all the way to the bottom. Theoretical physicists figured the size of the waves that hurricane winds would generate in different depths of water, and how high the sea would rise.

High-Boot Oceanographers. One result of this burst of activity was that Texas got a first-rate Department of Oceanography. Backed largely by oil money, the department was set up at Texas A. & M. Its students cruise the Gulf in the pursuit of science. These newly seagoing Texans talk and look like oceanographers from Massachusetts or California, but some of them wear high Texas boots while they probe the depths of the Gulf. The system most used for drilling in the open Gulf is a sophisticated outgrowth of the simple, pile-supported platform. Brown & Root, Inc. of Houston starts with what it calls a "jacket": eight heavy-walled steel cylinders, 34 inches in diameter and up to 100 feet long. It sets them upright in two widely spaced rows, and braces them with a criss-crossing network of strong piping welded to their sides. It loads the massive affair (weighing up to 250 tons) onto a big barge, and tows it out to the drilling site. Then a powerful crane, mounted on the barge, lifts the jacket and stands it up on the sea bottom, the tops of the cylinders extending about 30 feet above the surface.

Next step is to drive steel piles, 30 inches in diameter, down through the cylinders. When they reach firm footing (which may be 100 feet in the mud), they are cut off even with the jacket's cylinders. Then a prefabricated deck is jockeyed into position on top of the jacket. The final result is a firmly braced platform high enough above the surface so that hurricane waves can sweep harmlessly below.

This sort of platform has disadvantages: it must be big enough (up to 200 feet long) to support all the massive gear of a drilling outfit as well as quarters for the crew and storage space for fuel, water, pipe and other supplies. Its size makes it expensive, and its salvage value, if it has to be moved, is very low.

Platform & Tender. A more advanced kind of platform is made only big enough to support the drilling machinery. The rest of the outfit, including crew quarters and all supplies, is carried in a tender: a good-sized ship tethered close to the platform. Pipes and other heavy objects are swung across by a sling running on thick cables. Liquid necessities travel in flexible hoses. If a hurricane approaches, the tender can take all hands on board and run for shelter. A rig of this type, belonging to Gulf Oil Corp., is now drilling off Corpus Christi, Texas in 67 feet of water, the depth record so far.

Seagoing oil engineers believe that these "permanent" platforms can survive any hurricane that should be expected in the next 50 years, but they are dangerous to ..erect except in a glassy sea. The critical moment is when the heavy jacket is lifted from the deck of the barge and set upright in the sea. Even gentle waves can make it swing like a pendulum, tipping the barge, pulling the crane out of line, snapping thick steel cables. Sometimes an erecting barge has to wait for costly weeks before the sea is calm enough to risk a dash to the drilling site.

Mobile Platform. The faults of permanent platforms have stimulated inventors to develop a weird and wonderful craft: the "mobile drilling platform."

Only one of them, which belongs to the DeLong Engineering Co., is in operation at present, but it has captured the imagination of the seagoing oil industry (TIME, June 21).

The DeLong drilling platform looks like an engineer's doodle turned into steel. It is a shallow-draught barge. Running through vertical holes near its sides are eight steel caissons. When the barge is being towed through shallow water, they stick up like lofty smokestacks. At the drilling site they are dropped, poking their ends into the bottom.

Then starts the merriest operation in the offshore oil business. An engineer, sitting at a control cabinet with little handles on it, opens valves releasing streams of compressed air. One stream runs through tubing to each of the caissons and inflates a heavy-walled rubber "inner tube," locking the caisson tightly to a steel ring. Then other inner tubes inflate, expand, and drive the caisson into the mud. Eventually the caissons reach firm footing deep in the mud. Then, inch by inch, the barge climbs up its own caissons like a boy shinning up a tree.

From a distance, the DeLong platform looks like nothing else on land or sea. It stands serenely above the water while the waves slosh among its eight thick legs. Schools of fish and porpoises swim around it, and files of comic pelicans flap slowly past. All the time the drill is turning, biting into the rock thousands of feet below. If the platform must be moved, the barge shins slowly down its legs and pulls them out of the mud. A complete move takes less than a day, and costs less than moving a drill rig on land.

The industry believes that permanent platforms (probably of the jacket type but set up by much larger and more stable barges) will always be used for permanent offshore oilfield structures. But drilling in up to at least 200 feet of water will probably be done from mobile platforms. When the well is finished, the platform will sail away, leaving only a few piles to protect the top of the well casing.

Sea Cities. More startling proposals, e.g., a giant diving bell containing a drilling outfit worked by remote control, are current among the offshore oilmen, but the responsible heads of the oil companies point out that drilling is only a part of the oil-producing business. The wells must be kept cleaned out; the oil must be freed of water, gas and sand, and brought ashore in pipelines. The crews must be housed and fed. All this is enormously expensive, with boats plying continually among the well platforms, special bases to service the boats, and radars to guide them in foggy weather. When an offshore field is fully developed, it will look like a steel city built in the sea.

When the oil executives plot their off shore campaigns, they are sometimes ap palled, fleetingly, by the job they have undertaken. One thing they are sure of is that at first only very rich offshore oil fields can be exploited at a profit. Pools containing only 10 million barrels, though profitable on land, cannot support all the costly services demanded by offshore pro duction. When the big fields have been fully developed, the little fields can live off them, like small villages and farms between major shopping centers.

As the cities of offshore oil grow out into the Gulf, they will tend to lose social contact with the distant shore. This is a serious morale problem, and the oil com panies are worried about it. One answer might be airplane or helicopter service to fly the men to their jobs; already some of the rigs have heliports on them.

High-Sea Problem. One problem that the operating oilmen refuse to worry about is who owns the oil under the high seas, far from U.S. shores. The Federal Government claims everything beyond the state limits (three miles for Louisiana, ioj for Texas), and Mexico, presumably will claim the oil-rich undersea lands on its side of the Gulf. But there is no authority for such an interpretation of international law, which has always con sidered that the high seas belong to all nations in common. As far as precedent goes, there is nothing to prevent the Brit ish, for instance, from building an oil navy on the Clyde and sailing it down to drill for oil just outside Louisiana's three-mile limit.

Such problems are for the statesmen and diplomats of oil, who make their in tricate deals in New York, London or Pittsburgh. The working U.S. oilmen are sure of their own offshore empire, and they are supremely confident that they can drill through almost any depth of water.

They look out at the warm, green waves of the deep, shrimpy Gulf and say to the oil: "We know you're down there. Some day we're coming to get you."

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