Seún el parecer de Businessweek ¿ Cuanto de ese petroleo estará o llegará hasta el territorio Mexicano ? Lo peor es que aunque llegue no hay ni como sacarlo.
Businessweek
Por Stanley Reed
It may be one of the biggest oil finds of the year, if not the decade. In recent weeks, executives at BP (BP)'s exploration centers in Houston and London have been closely tracking the progress of a very deep well that BP contractors were drilling into the seabed of the western Gulf of Mexico. In late August the exploratory well, known as Tiber, was completed. On Sept. 2, BP announced that it had made a "giant oil discovery" in the gulf. BP's chief of exploration, Michael Daly, terms the Tiber find "very significant" and says it is even "better" than the Kaskida field, another huge BP property in the Gulf of Mexico, with an estimated 4 billion to 6 billion barrels of oil in place.
BP has struggled recently, the result of highly publicized battles with its Russian partners and a series of accidents in the U.S. at its Texas refinery and on Alaska's North Slope. Now it is getting a shot in the arm from its gulf finds, which are just coming onstream with highly profitable oil. The London company's two-decade commitment to the gulf has also helped resurrect a region that was being dismissed as "the Dead Sea" in the early 1990s, after companies hit a series of dry holes. "With respect to the Gulf of Mexico, BP has done very, very well," says Richard Gordon, president of Gordon Energy Solutions, an Overland Park (Kan.) oil and gas consultancy.
Tiber and Kaskida will take years to develop, and BP runs the risk of cost overruns, another crash in the price of oil, and unforeseen, expensive challenges in extracting all that crude. But when a field produces, the payoff can last for years. BP's star gulf property, a massive oil and gas field about 140 miles southeast of New Orleans called Thunder Horse, is already raking in cash for the company and for its minority partner in the project, ExxonMobil.
Visitors to the BP production platform must first board a helicopter at an airstrip at Houma in the Louisiana bayou. Dodging thunderstorms, the chopper flies over a seascape that reveals the history of the gulf oil industry, as the platforms evolve from shack-like structures in shallow water to massive, deepwater drill ships farther out to sea. Finally, a monstrous gray platform floating on four red legs comes into view. The size of a sports stadium, the Thunder Horse platform is tethered to the ocean bottom by huge chains in 6,000 feet of water and is one of the biggest in the world.
For Andy Inglis (pronounced Ingalls), BP's exploration and production chief and Daly's boss, Thunder Horse is worth all the snafus and delays the company had to overcome before it could coax oil from the seabed far below. The company and its suppliers had to devise dozens of new components and materials for the platform, such as valves and coatings to withstand the searing temperatures and intense pressures on wells that must go through four miles of seabed. In 2005 a hurricane left the platform listing to one side, and in 2007 a mass of equipment connecting up the wellheads on the sea floor had to be brought back to the surface to fix faulty welds.
WORKING ON THE FRONTIER
Now, the property is finally ramping up to its 300,000-barrels-per-day target—making it the No. 2 producer in the U.S. after Alaska's Prudhoe Bay. The oil from this gulf field is among the most profitable in BP's portfolio. Fadel Gheit, an analyst at Oppenheimer (OPY) in New York, figures that at a price of $60 per barrel, BP will earn pretax profits in the mid-$20s per barrel from Thunder Horse, perhaps four times what it earns in high-tax Russia.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_37/b4146000578301_page_2.htm
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