Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Santos Basin off the shore of Brazil have been particularly promising. In
September 2009, BP announced that it had found oil in its Tiber well in
the Gulf of Mexico - one of the deepest holes ever drilled. This involved
drilling down from the Tiber well itself sitting on the seabed 1259 metres
below the ocean surface a further 8426 metres below the sea bed to find
oil. This oil is almost as far below sea level as Mount Everest is above it.
But in April 2010 the same rig that drilled the Tiber well - the
Deepwater Horizon
, under contract to BP - sank following an undersea
explosion that killed eleven crew, and released millions of gallons of oil
into the Gulf of Mexico. With the well still leaking five weeks later, the
Obama administration called the BP spill the worst environmental disas-
ter in US history.