Petrobras Sidebar: Making a Splash
How do you extract oil from miles below the ocean floor?
Very carefully.
Courtesy Petrobras
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E-mailFrom a distance, the drilling platforms that sit 180 miles off the coast of Brazil look almost like a kid’s Erector set. But at a price of $1.5 billion to build — and with the need for about 40 of them — these rigs aren’t child’s play.
To get to the oil that’s buried deep beneath the earth’s crust, Petrobras Exploration and Production Executive Manager José Jorge de Moraes Jr. explains that a drill shoots straight down from the rig through more then a mile of water. Once it hits the ocean floor, it drills through another 3 miles of rock and salt. “Salt is not stable rock,” he observes. “We do a lot of testing to figure out the right speed and weight of the drills to use.” Still, Moraes says, the real challenge is the sea. “Oil is always connected to salt, so this part isn’t new,” he notes. “The challenge is how to drill through 2,000 meters of water and the pressure on the equipment at that depth.”
Petrobras is getting the hang of it. Moraes says it took the company 170 days to drill the first pre-salt well. These days it takes anywhere from 60 to 70 days to drill. “Our goal,” he explains, “is to drill a well in 50 days for $50 million.”
