New life for a dead sea?

The Atlantic Ocean is the world’s youngest ocean, but it’s been around long enough to generate some extremely large hydrocarbon provinces. West Africa and Brazil have been hotbeds of exploration and development for years. And the east coast of Canada is starting to emerge as a major province.

And then there’s the U.S. It’s not like the geology stopped at the international boundary. But that boundary is where the politics started.

According to testimony by Walter Cruickshank, deputy director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) for the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI), activity in the U.S. portion of the Atlantic prior to the moratorium included the acquisition of 2-D seismic “in all areas of the Atlantic.” Cruickshank testified at a House of Representatives subcommittee meeting on Energy and Mineral Resources in January. The hearing was titled “The science behind discovery: seismic exploration and the future of the Atlantic OCS.”

“The technology for acquiring and interpreting [these] data has been eclipsed by newer instrumentation,” Cruickshank testified. “Modern 2-D and 3-D datasets are acquired using better acoustic sources and longer receiving cables to better define subsea stratigraphy.”

So why has no seismic been shot since 1988? According to the Huffington Post, conservationists began bending the ears of Congress and the White House in the 1980s, leading to a ban on Atlantic production that now extends until 2017. The ban was lifted in 2008, and President Obama committed to allowing drilling off of the Virginia coastline in 2010, according to the New York Times. But the Macondo tragedy seemed to set back progress indefinitely.

FIGURE 1. The planning area extends from Delaware to central Florida. (Source: BOEM)

However, that same year Congress directed the BOEM to prepare a Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) to open the way for a comprehensive review of potential environmental impacts of geological and geophysical (G&G) activities off the Atlantic coast. “Given the potential broad scope of future surveys and their potential effects, BOEM determined that a PEIS under the National Environmental Policy Act was needed before the permitting of any large-scale G&G surveys could be considered,” the BOEM reported. The organization worked with the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and other agencies to develop a mitigation strategy focused in large part on the effect of seismic surveys on marine mammals.

The results of the PEIS were released Feb. 27, 2014, sparking a firestorm of commentary both pro and con. But the way forward seems to be getting clearer—to hold a lease sale, a government needs interested buyers. Getting buyers interested requires G&G data. Getting G&G data requires conducting operations in a way that doesn’t harm marine life.

The G&G industry is more than ready to show what it can do.

The need for data

The U.S. portion of the Atlantic Ocean is like a black hole in the universe—no one really knows what’s out there. According to the Times, 51 wells have been drilled off the east coast, but none of them were commercial successes. The DOI estimates that reserves of 3.3 Bbbl of oil and 8.8 Tcm (312 Tcf) of gas could reside in the area currently under investigation (Figure 1). But these estimates are based on decades-old seismic data.

Richie Miller, president of Spectrum Geo Inc., testified at the January hearing about the benefits of using modern-day seismic technology in this unexplored region. “Seismic surveys are the only feasible technology available to accurately image the subsurface and help us better understand what lies below the surface of the earth before a single well is drilled,” he said. “It is an amazingly useful scientific tool that allows us to accurately image the earth’s crust down to depths in excess of 40,000 ft [12,192 m], or more than 8 miles [13 km], below the ocean floor. Seismic surveys that use modern data acquisition techniques and then process [those] data by applying massive computing power are able to produce subsurface images that are much clearer and more accurate than those from decades ago, or even five years ago.”

Miller noted that geologists and geophysicists have reason to believe that there is much more oil and gas in the Atlantic than has been estimated by the DOI. “First, the Atlantic Margin is proving to be quite productive in hydrocarbon production in areas like West Africa, Brazil and Nova Scotia,” he said. “Second, exploration and development activities generally lead to increased resource estimates.”

Finally, he noted, modern seismic surveys reduce risk—both economic risk in E&P and associated safety and environmental risks. “It also provides greater certainty by increasing the likelihood that exploratory wells will successfully tap hydrocarbons and helping us avoid drilling for oil and gas in areas where we won’t likely be successful.”

What about the whales?

The effect of marine seismic operations on marine mammals has become a hot topic in recent years. Many of the articles that resulted from the Feb. 27 announcement blared headlines about using explosions in the ocean to find oil and gas. The facts are not quite so sensational.

Miller spoke to E&P after the hearing about some of the questions and comments that came up. Surprisingly, whales didn’t come up much. “They do not bring it up because we have so much science behind it,” he said. “It is one of the mitigation factors in the PEIS. [Several industry organizations] are looking at those measures right now.”

Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.) is chairman of the subcommittee and led the January hearing. Regarding the PEIS, he commented, “It seems like there are restrictions that I wouldn’t have put in, but I think that the companies conducting the surveys are able to work around and within those restrictions. The touted danger toward marine mammals is exaggerated, but if nothing else, not just to prevent any potential harm but to eliminate the perception that there is any harm, it’s worth taking extra precautions. If that’s what it takes to move forward, then I think industry can certainly work around that.”

Miller added, “There is no reason that the industry can’t work within the same guidelines that we have in the Gulf of Mexico. We feel we can work to those guidelines, where we’ve never had a mammal incident.”

The next steps

Already the BOEM has extended the comment period on the PEIS to May 7 from the original date of April 7. Industry groups tend to feel that the mitigation suggestions are too harsh, while environmentalists think they’re not harsh enough. Geophysical contractors, meanwhile, are watching events unfold with curiosity and, perhaps, a bit of anticipation.

But they’ll have to be patient. The next step is the record of decision, which will be issued at the end of the comment period. Then new permits will need to be filed. But before contractors apply for permits, they need assurance that there will eventually be a lease sale held in the region; otherwise, their data will be almost useless.

“We don’t know what the permitting procedures are because they’re all going to be new,” Miller said. “We’ll be dealing with the NMFS [for the first time]. The whole industry is waiting to see what that process is going to be.”

But he’s optimistic that contractors can start acquiring data as early as 2015. It’s likely that many of these datasets will cover vast tracts of water. “There’s a need for a new regional grid to understand the basin that needs to be acquired regardless of the prospectivity of a specific small basin,” Miller said. “There’s quite a bit of information in the public record that most companies will access. They’ll need to start to work on that to define a program, but it’s also up to the companies that are interested in new data.”

For Spectrum, which filed the first permit to acquire data in 2008 prior to the Macondo moratorium, the potential is enormous. “We brand ourselves as a multiclient frontier player, and the Atlantic is a classic frontier area,” Miller said. “Obviously we’re looking at opportunities.”