The 100,000 tons of steel floating in the Gulf of Mexico about 80 miles southeast of the Louisiana coast symbolizes the hopes of oil and gas companies.
A deep-sea platform called Appomattox and owned by Shell, this chunk of metal collects oil and gas from reservoirs thousands of feet below the ocean floor. Equipment on platform pipes delivering fuel to shore.
Political and business leaders have pledged to reduce global warming emissions to net zero by 2050. But oil companies like Shell are confident the world will need oil and gas for decades to come. To meet this demand, they are expanding offshore oil and gas drilling into deeper and deeper waters, especially here in the Gulf of Mexico.
Oil executives argue that offshore production is not only important for powering cars, trucks and power plants, but is also better for the planet than drilling on land. That's because these operations emit far fewer planet-warming greenhouse gases than producing the same amount of oil and gas from land, according to industry estimates.
“The world will continue to need oil in 2050,” Shell CEO Wael Sawan said in a recent interview. “We have to reduce emissions more and more,” he said.
According to a report released last year by the National Ocean Industries Association, extracting a barrel of oil from the Gulf of Mexico produces one-third of the greenhouse gas emissions than producing a barrel of oil on U.S. soil. Or less. , an industry group for offshore oil, gas and wind businesses. (These figures do not include emissions produced when fossil fuels are burned in engines or power plants, which are far greater than emissions from oil and gas production and refining.)
Oil production in the Gulf of Mexico has declined for several years since the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion caused the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history. However, oil production in the Gulf region has been increasing over the past decade. The renewed interest in overseas production is part of a larger trend. The United States recently set an oil production record by extracting more crude oil than any other country.
America's surging oil and gas production has alarmed climate activists and scientists who want the energy industry to shift more quickly to clean fuels and technologies such as wind, solar power and electric vehicles.
“Today we’re not talking about stopping oil production,” said Brettny Hardy, senior staff attorney for the oceans program at Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental law group. “But no matter how you look at it, there is a desperate need to accelerate the transition to clean energy. “What the industry is doing now will not help with that transition.”
For many environmentalists, the potential for disaster from marine fossil fuel production is significant. Spills from the BP-operated Deepwater Horizon rig have caused significant damage to marine life, fisheries, and Gulf of Mexico beaches.
The spill helped bring attention to Rice's whales, which live only in the Gulf of Mexico and are listed as endangered by the federal government. Accidents such as the Deepwater Horizon spill and ship strikes have left fewer than 100 whales left.
“There is good reason to be concerned and anxious because we have been burned once by Deepwater Horizon,” said Najmedin Meshkati, an engineering professor at the University of Southern California who served on the National Academies committee that studied the spill.
The Biden administration had planned to scale back lease sales for oil drilling in the Gulf, which environmentalists said would help protect Rice's whales. Last August, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management reduced the leasable area from 73 million acres to 67 million acres.
But last November, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit rejected the administration's plan. A month later, oil companies offered $382 million for the rights to drill for more oil and gas.
Oil industry executives say offshore oil operations are now much less risky thanks to technological advances and improved standards and regulations. “Offshore oil and natural gas exploration and production is the safest it’s ever been,” said Holly Hopkins, vice president for upstream policy at the American Petroleum Institute, a trade group.
Energy companies prefer drilling in the Gulf because of the abundance of oil and gas there. This is especially true deep beneath the ocean. By the end of 2023, the number of deepwater offshore platforms in the United States was more than three times the number in shallow waters, according to data from the American Petroleum Institute. It was pretty much the same as it was just 14 years ago.
Federal government analysts estimate that oil production in the Gulf of Mexico will increase through 2027. Natural gas production in the Gulf of Mexico is expected to remain largely flat through the early 2030s.
Shell is the largest oil and gas producer in the region's waters. According to the company, its super-large presence in the Gulf is on display on the Appomattox, which has a displacement larger than that of the world's largest aircraft carrier.
The platform went online in 2019 and can accommodate up to 180 people. Once a ship drills a well nearby and connects that well to the platform via a pipe, the device stays in place as the equipment separates the oil, natural gas and water.
Shell recently launched Whale, a compact floating platform that can accommodate up to 60 people. Another unit, Sparta, is in development. London-based global energy giant Shell operates a total of nine active platforms, including four with rigs on board, in the Gulf of Mexico.
When a reporter visited Appomattox recently, about 130 people were working on board, including oil and gas engineers, cooks, groundskeepers, medical staff and a laundry facility operator who spins washers and dryers 24 hours a day.
Crew members live on the platform for 14 consecutive days and work 12-hour shifts. They return to their homes around the world for two weeks and then again for 14 days.
I know many people think their industry is destroying the planet, but there is a sense of pride among the riders.
“There’s another aspect that people don’t talk about,” said Matt Flanakin, ballast control operator at Appomattox for Shell. “We know we need to reduce carbon emissions. But we still need fossil fuels.”
The platform floats above the deep blue sea with little else visible. Occasionally a drill rig ship will appear in the distance. These ships are scouring the ocean floor for sources of oil.
Rich Howe, Shell's vice president of global deepwater operations, said the platform creates an artificial reef that attracts schools of fish and dolphins to Appomattox.
Shell is not alone in its international expansion. BP, Chevron and other energy giants also have expansion or plans to expand operations in the Gulf of Mexico.
“This is the cradle of the world’s deep oceans,” Mr. Howe said. “It’s where many technologies were born.”
The Gulf Coast has an extensive network of pipelines and equipment that helps deliver oil and gas directly to onshore facilities with little to no processing through pipelines. This will help extract oil and gas from the Gulf's underground reservoirs more efficiently, ultimately reducing emissions.
Technology has also reduced the need for offshore workers to travel by helicopter to platforms and rigs. Some control room operators work remotely from land. And the companies say they are minimizing the amount of natural gas they burn in a process called “flaring.”
“We want to be as safe, as cheap and as low-carbon as possible,” said Andy Krieger, senior vice president for the Gulf of Mexico and Canada at BP, which has five platforms in the Gulf of Mexico.
But plans by oil giants, especially those based in Europe, to invest in overseas production are seen by some climate experts as a retreat from corporate investments in renewable energy in recent years.
Shell's CEO, Mr. Sawan has made it clear that the company must focus on the businesses it knows best, including oil, natural gas and hydrogen. He said Shell should allow other companies, including those with which it has financial and commercial relationships, to develop renewable energy sources such as solar power.
That doesn't mean Shell isn't interested in new parts of the energy sector, he added. He cited electric vehicle charging as an area the company plans to expand into. To that end, Shell recently announced it would close 1,000 fuel stations in 2024 and 2025, equivalent to about 2% of its retail outlets, and expand its electric vehicle charging network from about 55,000 currently to 200,000 globally by 2030.
Mr. Sawan said this at a recent energy conference in Houston. “Ultimately, the real intention here is to bring out the multidimensional nature of the energy transition and get this conversation moving, which seems obsessed with ‘energy transition.’ Is it oil and gas, or solar and wind?' That’s all, and we need a lot of them.”