>
> WASHINGTON (AP) -- Results from a deep-water test well in
> the Gulf of Mexico suggest a new pool of oil and gas that
> could boost U.S. reserves by as much as 50 percent.
>
> Chevron Corp. on Tuesday estimated the 300-square-mile
> region where its test well sits could hold between 3
> billion and 15 billion barrels of oil and natural gas
> liquids. Analysts are calling it the most significant
> domestic discovery since Alaska's Prudhoe Bay more than a
> generation ago.
I can't tell from the (intentionally?) vague article but I wonder if it's in one of those 36-mile by 6-mile Coastal Petroleum parcels up and down the Gulf Coast of Florida. The words "deep-water" suggest it's not, they're all up on the coastal shelf less than 200 meters deep, but that's pretty vague. Here
http://coastalmap.marine.usgs.gov/ArcIMS/website/USA/GoMex/gloria/viewer.htm
is a cool map viewer that, if you turn the right layers on, shows bathymetry and lease parcels way out to the middle of the Gulf.
Once I mapped one of those Coastal Petroleum parcels off the legal description on the deed. Roughly speaking it ran from six miles off-shore all the damn way up to the beach - and also, all the way up into Tampa Bay.
Guess what the price recorded on the deed as paid to the State of Florida in the 1940s for undersea drilling rights on each 216-square mile parcel was: Ten dollars "and other good and valuable considerations."
What I was mapping was encumbrances - oil drilling rights to Coastal, 50% mineral rights to the Internal Improvement Trust Fund of the State of Florida, and so on - which ran across the site for a bunch of apartments built on fingers of landfill on the Tampa Bay side of South St. Petersburg. The Coastal deeds ran Gulfward from the Mean High Water line _where it existed in the 1940s when the deed was perfected._ Since the apartment complex was built across landfill in part over what had been submerged lands in the 40s, Coastal Petroleum still retained the theoretical right to erect oil derricks in these people's back yards.
At the time this was purely a theoretical right; the consensus was that Hell would freeze over before the Florida legislature would ever repeal the State law that prohibited close offshore drilling. This was in the earlier days of offshore drilling technology where you'd see spills like that one from wells within five miles of the California coast in 1969 which coated a twenty-mile stretch of Pacific beach with an inch-thick layer of crude oil. I'll bet Californians really dug that. But last year I read a story in the local paper - here it is:
http://www.sptimes.com/2005/06/13/Worldandnation/Oil_rigs_thirsting_fo.shtml
about how the Federal ban on offshore oil drilling in the Eastern Planning Area off the Gulf Coast might soon be reversed. If the Federal ban is overturned, the Florida state (our Gov., the hon. J. E. Bush) ban will probably fold as well.
Yours WDK - WKiernan at ij.net