Fire on the Horizon

by Tom Shroder

  In 1961, one of these submersible rigs, owned by Shell Oil Company, was being towed in heavy weather. The platform, rocking like the hand of a metronome high above the waves, threatened to capsize the rig. The operator, desperate to lower the center of gravity, allowed water to partially fill the pontoons, which sank below the surface, but not to the bottom. Instantly, the stability of the rig improved dramatically.

  A Shell engineer named Bruce Collipp happened to be on board. Collipp had a background in naval engineering—unusual in the oil business, but ideal for the situation at hand. He immediately saw the possibilities suggested by the performance of the partially submerged rig. He came up with a design for a drilling vessel intended to operate at varying levels of submersion, controlled by ballast tanks in the pontoons. The design proved to be so stable when the rig was partially submerged that it prompted an outrageous idea: drilling could commence while the rig was still afloat. This was no longer a clever way to elevate a platform above the waves. It was a kind of ship.

  But Shell didn’t want to call it that, for fear of placing operations under the thumb of the famously tough maritime unions. So when Collipp was explaining his design to the New Orleans Coast Guard officer, he stressed the idea of a submersible that, nevertheless, operated while only partially submerged. The officer, apparently convinced, merely took up the license application and, under “vessel type,” wrote “semi-submersible.”

  That same year, the National Science Foundation and the National Academy of Sciences launched the first attempt to explore the earth’s deep geology beneath the planet’s outer crust. It was known as the Mohole Project. Drilling into the earth’s inner mantle would have been virtually impossible from the solid surface, where the crust can be twenty-two miles thick. Project designers came up with an audacious strategy: take advantage of some of the deepest waters in the world to get thousands of feet closer to their target.

  They hired the experimental offshore rig CUSS I (named with the initials of the consortium of oil companies that owned it) to test the theory that a rig could operate in deep water. Project engineers developed an entirely new system for drilling that used radar and underwater sonar sensors to provide continuous information about the ship’s exact position—“dynamic positioning,” they called it.

  Some garbage scow.

  While on board the CUSS I for Life magazine, Steinbeck wrote:

  Success or failure of the daring enterprise hinged upon the ability of the pilot to hold the CUSS at a precise position, as unmoving as if planted in concrete instead of being adrift on a turbulent ocean. To achieve this the pilot used a complex control console designed by Marine Engineer Robert Taggart to regulate four outboard motors, two on each side of the CUSS, which could nudge the vessel in any desired direction. The crucial task was to keep the drilling derrick directly over the hole in the ocean bottom, 2.3 miles below, where the drill turned in the earth’s crust. The long string of pipe would bend only so much. If the barge moved more than 1,000 feet from center, the pipe would snap, the drilling operation would be over—and the resulting recoil would jolt the craft and seriously endanger the crew. To avert such a disaster, the pilot watched blips on his radar and sonar screens…their pattern told him at any given moment whether and where he was drifting so he could compensate by manipulating motors.

  A 1962 analysis of the experiment concluded: “The system operated successfully for a month at sea and proved that dynamic positioning was not only feasible but entirely practical.”

  But the CUSS I system, which could still be defeated by unfavorable wind, current, or an inexpert operator, was crude compared to what would follow. In the mid–1980s, when the Global Positioning System was opened to nonmilitary use, semi-submersibles came of age. Minute changes in the rig’s positioning were instantly sensed by the GPS unit and fed into a computer, which could make constant and very slight adjustments to the direction and thrust of the propellers, keeping a rig the size of an office park idling within twenty feet of an exact point on the ocean’s surface in a gale or raging current. If the seas and winds were calm, the margin of error was no more than the size of a king bed. It was perpetual motion in the service of standing still. Or in the Zen koan of technical nautical language, “under way, not making way.”

  Geologists had suspected the existence of major subsea oil deposits since before World War II, when they realized that the same geological formations that signaled oil reservoirs beneath the surface of the land would also likely occur beneath the depths of the ocean.

  Over the years, estimates of how much crude languished beneath American waters kept rising, up to just under 90 billion barrels today—about 9 percent of the world’s estimated total. It was not nearly enough to challenge the dominance of Middle Eastern oil, which makes up two-thirds of the planet’s estimated reserve. Nonetheless it was a significant boost to America’s dwindling stock—enough to supply all of the country’s oil needs for a decade. In the same period, known American petroleum deposits began to pump dry, and Western oil companies’ access to foreign oil fields plummeted. Exxon Mobil, British Petroleum, Shell, and Chevron once collectively controlled most of the world’s oil reserves, but aren’t even among today’s top ten. State-owned monopolies, primarily in countries not especially friendly to the interests of the United States—in the Mideast, Russia, China, Nigeria, and Brazil—dominate.

  Desperate as Western oil companies were to expand their reserves, all that oil trapped beneath deep water remained tantalizingly distant: harvesting oil from the deep ocean is two to three times as expensive as is producing oil on land. With the price of oil stalled or declining through the 1990s, the companies that specialized in offshore drilling trod cautiously and were reluctant to commission new rigs.

  Oil prices bottomed out in 1998, at the 2010 equivalent of sixteen dollars a barrel, the lowest inflation-adjusted price since before World War II. Then they began to climb. By 2000, as most Americans watched in dismay and anger, the price for oil had doubled, and it was on its way to more than quadrupling in ten years. The first rumbling warnings of “peak oil”—a theory that known oil reserves would shrink a little more each year until they had vanished—began to appear in the media. The common assumption was that as oil prices increased, the “pain at the pump,” as the headline writers put it, would push the economy toward conservation and alternative, renewable energy sources, just as an oil price spike had begun to do during the short-lived crisis of the ’70s.

  Back then, high prices had shocked consumers, who cut oil consumption dramatically, which led to oversupply and steep deflation of oil prices. That history lesson made some oil companies wary of moving too fast once the price of oil began to spike again. As it continued to rise, the caution was replaced with confidence and a sense that the world had changed in a fundamental way since 1975, a way that spelled good news for the oil industry. The two most populous countries in the world also happened to have the fastest-growing economies. China and India, with 2.5 billion people between them—more than a third of the world’s population—were on the way to tripling their per capita wealth, and inevitably their consumption of energy. Hundreds of millions in China and India, instead of living in huts and riding bicycles, would be moving to air-conditioned homes, buying cars, building factories, shopping centers, flying in commercial jets.

  That all takes enormous amounts of energy, and by far most of it would have to come from fossil fuels. Use of renewable energy sources—water and wind power, solar, geothermal, biomass fuels and others—will no doubt increase over the first half of the twenty-first century, but the consumption of oil, gas, and coal will increase even more. At least until we can match the power and convenience of fossil fuels with renewable energy sources.

  Addiction to oil and gas is simple: it’s very hard to beat hydrocarbons for efficiency. They are on the order of one hundred times more powerful per ounce than the most powerful batteries, solar panels, or wind generators. To generate the thrust necessary to li
ft a passenger jet, a battery pack would need to weigh tons and be roughly the size of the airport terminal. Not very aerodynamic.

  Far from sparking an epic flight from fossil fuels to sustainable energy, the profits from spiraling oil prices ignited a black gold rush, a frantic race to locate and remove the last great undiscovered oil reserves on the planet, which were almost certainly beneath the world’s oceans.

  And the profits were immense. In the first half decade of this century, the top five Western oil companies pumped their coffers full, netting nearly half a trillion dollars.

  Oil company execs who were betting the 2010 equivalent of half a billion dollars on the Deepwater Horizon weren’t exactly lying awake at night worrying about the end of oil. Neither were the engineers who devoted whole careers designing the next generations of oil rigs, nor the men like Doug Brown and Jason Anderson who made their living on board, or the millions purchasing shiny new SUVs expecting plentiful gasoline to fill the tank.

  No doubt the oil windfall funded its share of diamonds and fine wine, villas on the Riviera and mansions in Connecticut with Mercedes parked regally in the driveways of both. But the unstanched flood of dollars also financed an explosion of technological advancement and the construction of the most sophisticated industrial machines ever built.

  CHAPTER THREE

  COLD COMFORT

  February 2001

  Ulsan, Korea

  The Deepwater Horizon was to be the first of a new generation of semi-submersibles, the fifth. Previous generations had been inching toward what, in the Horizon, had become almost total computer control of all the rig’s critical functions. On a skeleton of steel and concrete, designers had threaded a web of electric cable that branched out across every surface and bristled with sensors that reported back to computers in the rig’s control centers. This was the rig’s nervous system, and the computers, ordinary PCs, were the brain. The real power was in the software, among the world’s most advanced, capable of considering the millions of data points flooding from the thousands of sensors and instantly interpreting and applying that information to make intelligent decisions concerning the rig’s performance. In addition to registering changes in position, current, and wind for the dynamic positioning system, the sensors alerted the computer to every broken hatch, clogged pipe, overheated engine, and burned-out bulb, every yee and yaw of the drilling platform, each sniffle and sneeze of the ventilation system. It automatically closed hatches to seal out gas-contaminated air, shut down electrical systems to avoid dangerous sparks or risk of electrocution, and sounded evacuation alarms. The builders boasted that these new systems would make the Deepwater Horizon the safest rig ever floated.

  As the February 23, 2001, completion date approached, the assembling crew swelled with the rank and file: the assistants, the roustabouts, the ordinary seamen. Most were experienced hands and knew what to expect from the on-again, off-again life at sea, including the fine distinctions and separations between the subcultures that proliferated on almost all American-staffed rigs bound for the Gulf.

  The top managers and the engineers often had advanced degrees to go with six-figure salaries and posh homes, while for the drill-hands like Jason, a diploma from a community college was an advanced degree. For the most part, the drill crew came from small southern Gulf Coast towns with names like Pipe Creek, Sandtown, Jonesville, or State Line. They were a hardy, beefy breed who, failing to find substantial work in their small communities, got on with the oil rigs. They lived close enough to the Gulf Coast ports that they could drive the couple of hours to the helicopter shuttles that swept them out to sea. To them, the rugged, monotonous grind of twelve-hour days, seven days a week was well worth salaries of $40,000 to $70,000 or more, which they couldn’t possibly make at home. It enabled them to buy cars and houses, Xbox 360s and ATVs. After their exhausting hitches, they rushed back home and made love to their wives, took their kids to baseball games, barbecued with friends and family, drank beer, watched football, hunted and fished. Especially hunted. Jason Anderson had severed two fingers in a childhood bike accident, but when only the middle fingertip could be found, the family asked a surgeon to sew it to his pointer. The boy was damn sure going to need a trigger finger.

  Then there was a much smaller group of technical specialists, engineers, and the professional sailors who’d been trained in a little-known network of maritime academies ringed around America’s coast. These tended to be northeasterners for the most part, or Left Coasters like Doug, who had to earn the respect of the southerners if they wanted to fit in with the majority culture. If they failed, their lives on board were lived in seclusion; they sat at their own tables for meals and went back to their rooms alone once their shift was up. Here in Korea, though, on the far side of the world, all of them were, at least for a time, Yankees.

  The Koreans, the supposed aliens in this story, may have been baffled by much the Americans said and did, but they shared a passion for two crucial items: team building and barbecue. Sometime in December, shipbuilders welded up a turbocharged version of a barbecue grill and presented it with much ceremony, featuring incomprehensible speeches and a long line of bowing men.

  The Americans took the gift to heart and installed the grill on the roof of one of their residences, where they threw communal pork-outs every Sunday—and one memorable blowout on New Year’s Day, 2001. A particularly frigid wind swept across the roof, which kept them all huddled close around the glowing heat of the grill. The beer was nearly frozen but, as Doug pointed out, still warmer than the air.

  The Sunday BBQ ritual—which they would continue, albeit without the beer and cocktails, once the rig got under way—was a small, good thing; due comfort after the mind- and body-numbing work of typing procedures in the cold hours upon hours through the week. They all felt the release when they boarded the bus back to their temporary apartments in buildings with names they never learned to pronounce. The apartments were pleasant but small, not built for American rig workers, who even by American standards tended to be somewhat oversized. But the lack of elbow room was almost made up for by the abundance of gadgets. In Korea, doors don’t have keys, they have electronic keypads; peepholes had long since been replaced by miniature video cameras; and even the toilet seats buzzed and blinked. As some discovered the wet way, the pushbutton nozzle affixed beneath the seat was not to clean the toilet bowl. But the gadget many of them looked forward to the most was the radiant floor heat. As soon as they walked through the door, they kicked off their shoes and let the floor warm their soles.

  Some crew members found other ways to stay warm.

  Brothels in Korea took three different, notably diverse forms: For those who were short on funds, or merely cheap, the prime option was certain barbershops, their special nature marked by having two barber poles out front instead of the usual single one, and a dust-covered barber chair inside. In a dim back room, an attendant told the customer to strip and lie faceup, then placed a hot towel over his eyes and sternly admonished him not to take it off. A story circulated about one worker who ignored the edict and returned to his apartment psychically scarred after catching sight of the paunchy, middle-aged woman with gray pubic hair climbing over him. “I was trapped,” he protested to all who would listen, still traumatized. He only perked up later when a naïve young crew member who’d never before been out of the United States, or even Mississippi, happened to ask him if he knew a good barbershop. “Definitely,” he responded, and sent the kid to the place with the two barber poles: “Just do what they tell you.”

  For those who wanted sex without a blindfold, there was a slightly more posh option: coffee delivery services. A phone dispatcher took your order for what seemed like a very expensive ration of coffee, and a few minutes later an attractive young woman appeared at your door with a cup of joe and a handful of condoms.

  Feminine companionship could be found without such a stark quid pro quo. Abundant nightclubs with familiar names, American music, and English-speaki
ng hostesses were packed with pretty girls who possessed good grammar, tight clothes, and Philippine visas stamped “vocalist” or “musician.” The surprise was that these girls could really sing or play their instruments. In an attempt to limit the exportation of sex workers, the Philippine government required all women traveling on such visas to demonstrate their musical abilities at the passport office. Those who failed the audition were returned home to grinding poverty, while the talented were put on an airplane to pursue dreams of fame, fortune, or—failing that—an American or European husband.

  Instead they wound up singing for rig workers and hustling drinks to men with little interest in their vocal talent. They got a cut of every outrageously priced glass of heavily watered Kahlua and cream they lured a man to buy for them, but an even bigger cut if a customer purchased their time for the entire evening—an evening that began with a little drunken making out in the bar and inevitably progressed to the hotel room bed. The decision how far to go was up to the individual bar girls, but the prospect of finding a rich American husband could be a powerful motivator. The following morning, about a half hour after the 5:30 bus left for the shipyard, there’d be a secondary exodus of young women in rumpled party clothes emerging sheepishly from the crew apartments.

  The long days and long nights continued through the winter as the Horizon approached completion. The two mirror-image crews of 126 needed to sail the rig to the Gulf had been assembled, and after months of paperwork, some adventures and misadventures, a few hangovers, and rumors of one or two cross-cultural pregnancies, the documents were signed, the Koreans bowed, and the Deepwater Horizon finally belonged to the Americans. This high-tech cross between a neighborhood, an industrial park, and a factory would become at least as much a home to them as the ones they’d left in California, Texas, Alabama, or New York.