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Petrobras News Agency

Marcos Bueno de Moraes still recalls those tense days of drilling. Geophysicists at his firm, the Brazilian oil company Petrobras, had used a novel 3-D seismic technology to probe for oil trapped underneath the seafloor, 180 miles off the coast of southeastern Brazil. It was the mid-2000s, oil prices were just beginning to recover after dragging bottom for more than a decade, and cost cutting was still gospel in the petroleum industry. But with preliminary soundings pointing to a massive cache of crude, the corporate brass overruled the bean counters and took their biggest gamble yet: prospecting four and a half miles beneath the surface of the Atlantic. 

From his desk in the company’s concrete-block office tower in downtown Rio de Janeiro, Bueno, an exploration geophysicist, was tasked with interpreting seismic data streaming in from a battleship-gray exploration vessel moored in the open seas, more than an hour’s helicopter flight away. There, discovery crews working day and night had lowered a drill rig through 7,200 feet of water and were trying to break through another one, two, maybe three miles of sand, rock, and a massive crust of prehistoric rock salt to what might—or might not—be a major deposit of “pre-salt” oil below.

Although the potential payoff was huge, the risks were enormous too. In the wake of the BP blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, we now know just how enormous, but even then the perils of going after oil in ultradeep water were no secret to prospectors. Water pressure at those depths is more than 200 times that of the atmosphere at the surface, and no one knew what all the heat, gas, and salt below the seafloor might do to the drilling equipment. “If the pressure was too great and the right precautions not taken, the well could have blown and even set the drill platform on fire,” Bueno recalls. After more than a year of drilling, they had hit nothing. “I remember it was on a Friday that we had to decide: Do we scrap the whole experiment or keep going?”


In 2010, after seeing crude oil hemorrhaging from the floor of the Gulf of Mexico, fish and seabirds marinating in black sludge, and Big Oil on the public pillory, the notion of gouging the deep ocean floor for fossil fuels seems reckless, if not criminal. Yet Petrobras’s gambit in the high Atlantic is a striking example of how far oil companies are willing to go in these days of energy uncertainty to tap the earth’s dwindling reserves of oil. Explosive growth in the world’s emerging economies has lit up patches of the map that barely flickered a few decades ago, jacking up the demand for power and straining known oil reserves to the limit. India and China will consume 28 percent of global energy by 2030, triple the juice they required in 1990, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. China is set to overtake the United States in energy consumption by 2015. And as the global recession seems to ease, oil demand is racing upward.

The result is a scramble for new sources of crude in seemingly impossible places. The hunt for extreme oil proceeds apace in the ultradeep waters off the coasts of Ghana and Nigeria, in the sulfur-laden depths of the Black Sea, under the polar ice caps, and in the gummy tar sands of Venezuela’s Orinoco Basin and Canada’s McMurray Formation (see the related DISCOVER story, "The End of Easy Oil"). The Gulf debacle has shaken national governments, but it has hardly deterred them. Mexico is taking advantage of the fallout from the disaster next door—and the suspension of cross-border prospecting—to buy time for its national oil company, Pemex, which plans to beef up its own deepwater capabilities. A month after Deepwater Horizon exploded, the Australian government reaffirmed its commitment to ocean drilling, putting 31 offshore blocks up for bidding, 17 of them in deep waters. While pundits and regulators issue encomiums to safety, the most noticeable shifts in the “post BP” oil industry are a fat discount on rental rates for offshore platforms no longer needed in the Gulf and the exodus of idled rigs heading to other waters.

Next page: Charging ahead into the depths