Hope, change, deja vu, fertilizer.

In a move certain to distress those who believe that oil spills are caused by presidential proposals to drill offshore, last week the Obama administration announced a new offshore oil and gas lease sale.

Tied to this most generous offer of new leases is a plan to increase the minimum bid from $37.50 to $100 per acre, to "ensure that taxpayers receive fair market value for offshore resources".  This will certainly stick it to the big oil companies who, according to the narrative, curiously spend millions to acquire leases on which they have no intention of drilling.  The fact that oil and mineral leases represent one of the largest sources of nontax revenue to the treasury is apparently beyond the scope of the article.  

The more jaded of you may recall that the president blocked construction of the Keystone XL pipeline the week before, citing the need for further environmental studies, in addition to the three years of existing environmental studies.  In addition, the threat of US sanctions has Iran threatening to block the Strait of Hormuz, and with it much of the middle east's oil production. Other than that, there is really no reason to ramp up domestic production, after all, if we did that, it would be years before we produced any new oil from new drilling, right?

But don't you go thinking that the Obama administration is not in support of offshore drilling, far from it!  In fact, if we go back to April of 2010, mere weeks before the BP spill, Obama proposed opening the eastern Gulf of Mexico, the north slope of Alaska, and areas along the Atlantic coast to drilling for the first time, which was a bold plan.  It was, however, a stupid idea when GW Bush proposed additional drilling in 2008, and at the time a particular Illinois senator called it a capitulation to the oil industry, but no matter.  

For those who work in the industry and live and die by drilling contracts, empty promises to develop offshore resources mean nothing when they are accompanied by a consistent full-court press of government interference in offshore oil and gas production. It’s going to be a long election year.  

Why helicopters?

Helicopter lease rates in the Gulf of Mexico can easily run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars a MONTH, with added surcharges for fuel, extra hours, and night flights... how can anyone afford to pay such rates, and why does everybody seem to travel by helicopter in the gulf?  


1. Particularly in support of drilling operations, time is money. A deepwater drilling rig may lease for over $500K/day, and if the drilling project is held up for a day because the rig needs a part or a specialized contractor to move forward, the added expense for helicopter support is a mere rounding error in the drilling budget, which is in the multi millions for each well drilled.  


This brings up an interesting point.  If oil companies are making those obscene profits, do you imagine that any of those profits are rolled into further exploration, which is obscenely expensive?  And do you think that each time they drill a hole that they actually HIT something that gives them a big payoff?  Sometimes. And sometimes they're just out several million for a dry hole.  It happens.  


2. Drilling and production operations are quite geographically dispersed even in the Gulf of Mexico, and the tendency is to move toward deeper water, further and further out.  If you have twenty or thirty people spread out at various locations up to 150 miles offshore, a relatively fast crew boat (20 knots or so) can take 18 hours to do a crew change, while a couple of helicopters can pull the same crew change before lunch gets cold.  A large drilling operation can easily have 80-100 people on board one rig.  Figure in additional overtime costs for paying your outgoing crews for the delay, and the high rates for third party contractors waiting on transportation, and the helicopter again begins to look like a pretty good deal.  


3. Some deepwater exploration projects are served by increasingly larger and more expensive aircraft such as the Sikorsky S-92, which sells for around $20 million per copy.  There are reasons for this too, and reasons that companies are willing to pay a premium for such aircraft.  


One is that newer and more capable aircraft are safer, with additional power and up to date survivability equipment if the worst happens and the helicopter does go down.  Top tier companies are willing to pay a premium for the safety of their people, mindful of the costs of cutting corners and the price of liability and lawsuits.   


The second is a function of distance offshore.  The FAA limits a two-pilot crew to ten hours of flight time per day.  If a round trip to a location 250 miles offshore takes 4 flight hours, then you get two trips per day, per helicopter, period.  


So the ONLY way to increase your throughput of people in and out of your deepwater properties is to use faster aircraft (more flight time per day) or bigger aircraft (more seats on each flight).  


And now you know. 

To the boats

My current contract involves crew and cargo transport to a fleet of boats which operate 150-250 miles offshore.  I've attached a couple of videos of boat landings as seen from the helicopter.

There is a lot of camera bouncing in the first video where I attached the camera to the dash with some velcro. The helicopter doesn't bounce like that, but the camera sure did at the bottom of the approach.

The second video where the camera was mounted to my headset shows is less shaky, but the door post blocks some of the video!

In the shots where you can see inside the cockpit some of the screens look very strange, like the video is being drawn right before your eyes, that has something to do with the camera frame rate and the refresh rate on the screens.  Through regular eyeballs it would just look like a normal screen display.