Good News on Energy: The Latest From Shell

. . . on the Perdido Platform in the Gulf Coast. It's fascinating stuff, originally put together by the people who are investing millions in trying to keep our economy functioning and the country secure until we can perfect the next generation of energy sources Big Bad Scary Oil and Natural Gas People.

I hope it makes Engineering Marvels soon on The History Channel; the whole thing is quite an accomplishment. Here's a teaser, from my spies:

The Shell-operated Perdido Regional Development Spar has arrived in the ultra deepwaters of the Gulf of Mexico and is currently being secured to the seafloor in about 8,000 feet of water. Once completed, the Perdido spar will be nearly as tall as the Eiffel Tower, and weigh as much as 10,000 cars. Perdido will be the deepest oil development in the world, the deepest drilling and production platform in the world, and have the deepest subsea well in the world; positioning the spar into place required carefully-orchestrated maneuvers.

Perdido will be a fully functional oil-and-gas platform with a drilling rig and direct vertical access wells, full oil and gas processing, and remote subsea wells. The facility is designed to produce 100,000 barrels of oil per day, and 200 million standard cubic feet of gas. The production from these fields will be transported via new and existing pipelines to U.S. refineries.

The Perdido Spar will bring in production from three fields: Great White, Silvertip, and Tobago. These fields are located in ten Outer Continental Shelf blocks in Alaminos Canyon, approximately 200 miles south of Freeport, Texas. This development will provide the first Gulf of Mexico commercial production from a Paleogene reservoir.

All three fields have been granted production units from the Minerals Management Service, and the accumulations are completely in U.S. waters, some eight miles north of Mexico's international border. The first production from Perdido is expected around the turn of the decade.

That makes me feel a lot better— and even more resolute in resisting the Gang of Ten plan, which doesn't even allow drilling off of Texas (or any other states that might have oil nearby).

For more info on the Perdido project you can drop byhere, where they even have some helpful maps.

And you can follow the project as it unfolds right here.

More later; but it's nice to see that every dollar the oil companies have pumped (so to speak) into R&D on domestic production hasn't just gone to government pork.

Via one of my contacts at API.

I had no idea, BTW, we were only a few years away from bringing production online in this part of the Gulf. Keep in mind that this area has reserves of petroleum competitive with those in ANWR. It's critical that this project be brought to completion on-schedule—not just for this country, but for the developing world. And, of course, for emerging countries such as China and India, that are experiencing their own Industrial Revolutions: the cleaner we can extract/use coal and natural gas and petroleum, the better. The cleaner our cars and A/C run, the better. Because the planet cannot afford for them to depend upon second-rate, polluting technologies and inefficient, decades-old means of energy generation. (Believe me: I'm an allergic girl who remembers what the air was like in certain parts of L.A. County in the 1970s and 1980s. There were days when I felt sick; I just couldn't breathe.)

We have to do this, because we will do it in a more environmentally responsible fashion than nearly any other country out there. We need to do it, because we know how.