BP/Petrobras "Giant" Gulf Oil Find Shows Desperation For New Fields.

BLOOMBERG.
BP Plc’s “giant” oil discovery beneath the Gulf of Mexico that it shares with Petrobras and Conoco Phillips shows the lengths producers will go to replace dwindling reserves. Restricted access to deposits in the Middle East, Russia and Venezuela and advances in technology have spurred a shift toward harder-to-access reserves that would once have been unreachable. BP’s 62 percent net entitlement could be up to 500 million barrels,” said an analyst “Nice, but no game changer.”

The Technical Problems Of Deep Water Drilling In The Gulf's New Tiber Prospect.

BLOOMBERG.COM.
For me, a fascinating description of deep water drilling challenges.
“The rocks that are getting drilled are very tough rocks to extract oil from, and indeed nobody has really done it yet from this particular formation in the Gulf of Mexico,” Neil McMahon, a London-based analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. said in an interview. “The development costs and exploration costs could be quite expensive relative to what we’ve seen in the past.
Geologists and engineers didn’t know if oil that far beneath the seafloor could be tapped until 2006, when Chevron Corp. completed the first ever successful test well at those depths.

Petrobras Announces Shared Gulf Of Mexico Find.

BLOOMBERG.
Petrobras announced a major discovery in the Gulf of Mexico by it partner BP, PLC. Petrobras has a 20 percent stake in the Tiber Prospect field. The “giant” Gulf discovery MAY contain more than 3 billion barrels of oil.
The well is located about 250 miles (400 kilometers) southeast of Houston. It was drilled to approximately 35,055 feet (10,685 meters), greater than the height of Mount Everest.