Greater Baton Rouge Business Report
Daily Report Staff
As crude oil prices continue to plummet, some oil companies are talking about scaling back operations and job cuts. But in the Gulf of Mexico, USA Today reports, business is booming.
Whoever is warning that slumping crude prices will curb oil production hasn't told the tenants of the bustling Port Fourchon on Louisiana's coast. There, cranes line two enormous slips, expanding capacity and building more facilities. Louisiana-based Bollinger Shipyards is constructing four massive dry docks able to serve 300-plus-foot vessels. Workers drive pilings into the ground for what will be the expanded site of Schlumberger, an oil-and-gas technology supplier.
Photo: Edmund D Fountain, for USA TODAY
All this activity soon will cater to huge floating facilities in the deepest waters of the Gulf of Mexico as they drill for and produce crude and other products.
"It's an unprecedented time," Port Director Chett Chiasson says. "This is the busiest it's ever been."
Even as crude's rampant price plunge rattles the industry—as of this morning the price per barrel still was hovering around the $50 mark—the Gulf of Mexico is on the brink of an unprecedented oil boom. Nearly five years after the Deepwater Horizon disaster briefly paralyzed gulf drilling, analysts predict deepwater oil production is headed into one of the biggest growth spurts in history.
Production is likely to reach a peak of 1.5 million barrels of crude a day by 2016, surpassing the previous record set in 2009.
In 2015, production will jump 21% from 2014 levels and grow even more in 2016—adding to America's already bulging oil production, says Imran Khan, a deepwater Gulf of Mexico analyst at energy consultants Wood Mackenzie.
Meanwhile, the number of permits for deepwater drilling increased from 14 in 2010 and 274 in 2011 to 603 in 2014, according to the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, which oversees the drilling. Read the full story.
