It's said that all arguments about life date back to the Greek philosophers Parmenides and Heraclitus of the 4th century BC. Simply put, Parmenides believed that things are as they are, Heraclitus that things are as they seem.
More than 2,000 years later, the Princeton mathematician Goedel may finally have resolved the issue by stating that every axiom is based on one or more unproven assumptions. Why do parallel lines meet at infinity at both ends, when they might just as well meet at infinity in one direction and end an infinite distance apart at the other? The point is, progress is often slow.
This type of debate mattered little over the course of history until modern economics developed the theory of the time value of money. The performance of companies and societies is measured not only by the greatness of their ideas, but also by the efficiency with which they use money. If the efficient use of money is the new yardstick, then the speed with which new technologies are evaluated and applied in the oil industry must be improved.
I recall working, more than 30 years ago, as a young engineer on the Zakum subsea production project in the Persian Gulf off Abu Dhabi. We had a subsea wellhead, flexible flow lines, two subsea separators, a seabed generator, an underwater battery pack, electrical connectors that could be made and broken underwater, a floating flare and three ways of intervening downhole from a floating support vessel. The whole development program took place in about 50 ft (15 m) of water. The project was a technical success, and Seal Petroleum was even set up to market subsea production equipment.
I don't think Seal petroleum sold much equipment, or lasted very long. For the next 20 years, technology largely ignored the subsea approach. Fixed platforms became larger, and were installed in deeper and more inhospitable waters. But the scene began to change in the late 1980s. Alarmed at the high cost of fixed platforms in genuinely deep water, companies again began evaluating subsea production systems. Many of the same questions were again addressed: how to intervene downhole from a floating vessel, how to process oil and gas production on the sea floor, how to make final connections with flexible pipe, how to power and control equipment on the seabed many miles from a host facility. I have to admit it was amusing to show photographs of Zakum, explaining to a generation of new engineers that these were not new questions. But to everyone's credit, there was genuine interest in finding out what had been learned, and what was still needed.
But if the efficient use of money really is the yardstick, then the funding of research also needs to be re-evaluated. Research rarely gives quick results. A multiplicity of enterprises competing for research dollars may be the right answer. But surely, some overarching direction - beyond that provided by consideration of profit and loss on the short-term balance sheet - also must be required. After all, private enterprise neither built the Sputnik nor put the first person on the moon.
If Keynes is not taught in engineering school, then neither is Plato on the curriculum of most MBA programs. There is a danger that the wider debate is forgotten and lost. Companies exist as part of society to fill social needs. Balance sheets are our best measurement of how efficient companies are at achieving this end. History has not been kind to countries and societies that have tried to develop alternative measures. But the balance sheet is only the measure of success, not the end in itself. The successful balance sheet is not created by the accountant or the lawyer, but by the consumer. It seems to me that the people demonstrating in Seattle, Wash., against free trade may have had the best of intentions, but perhaps aimed at the wrong target?
Which brings us back to the conundrum posed by Parmenides and Heraclitus. Today, this is more often asked as the question: "Is it possible to step into the same river twice?" Goedel's answer is simple: "It depends on how you define the river."

Cyril E. Arney, cyrilearney@yahoo.com, is a technical consultant based in Houston, Texas, who specializes in offshore and deepwater technology development.

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