22 May
Tyler Priest, “Shell Oil’s Deepwater Mission to Mars” PDF

Overview: This narrative provides a detailed, step-by-step historical reconstruction of the Shell’s greater Mars project, from the acquisition of the original leases in 1985 to the installation of the Mars B-Olympus TLP in 2014. The story of deepwater Gulf of Mexico can be told through the story of Mars. Its April 1989 discovery was the largest in the United States since Prudhoe Bay in 1968. It was the deepwater “basin opener,” the project that confirmed voluminous sand supply off the edge of the continental shelf and established the deepwater as a bona fide play for the industry. Oil production from Mars was so prolific that its oil became a benchmark for pricing medium sour crude on the U.S. Gulf Coast. The large quantities of crude transported by the Mars pipeline to Fourchon, Louisiana also helped sustain the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port (LOOP) and its Clovelly storage terminal. More than any other project in the Gulf of Mexico, Mars documents the wide-ranging innovations that have propelled the industry into ever-deeper waters and new geological frontiers. It provides a window into the evolution of geophysical technology and interpretation, drilling and well completion, platform and facilities design, workforce organization and culture, process engineering, subsea engineering, reservoir engineering, pipelining, project management, disaster management, and safety management. Mars marked the transition from fixed to floating production platforms in deepwater, and from “conventional” deepwater to subsalt deepwater. It also had a starring role in the industry’s recovery from two traumatic disasters, Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the Deepwater Horizon/Macondo blowout and spill in 2010. Finally, the 2014 installation of a second, state-of-the-art production facility in the same field once again placed Mars in the forefront of offshore development. In the late 2010s, thirty-five years later, it remains one of the most productive basins in the Gulf at the cutting edge of technology.
The report draws on oral history interviews, technical papers, and Shell publications, both internal and external, to provide a unique perspective on the unprecedented challenges to managing a frontier project of this magnitude and duration. The purpose is to achieve an in-depth understanding of the interrelated investment, operational, and technical decision-making that went into the development of one of the largest and most valuable assets in the Gulf of Mexico. A lifecycle narrative of a deepwater oil project like Mars reveals how a technically and commercially successful organization learns and innovates in one of the most challenging environments in the world. Not merely a business venture, Mars was a massive, interdisciplinary, geoscience and engineering project carried out over a span of decades, much like the human quest to explore the planet Mars, only more successful. A close examination of such a project through time provides insight into the evolution of corporate exploration and production (E&P) strategy and the development of technical competencies. The case study also demonstrates the role of culture and contingency. The Mars prospect was technically controversial. There was at least an even chance that Shell never would have drilled it. Hunches in addition to cold calculations of risk and return, and personalities as well as organizational machinery, help explain why it eventually did.
*This is a revised version of BOEM OCS Study 2022-077, History of the Gulf of Mexico Offshore Oil and Gas Industry during the Deepwater Era, Volume 2: Shell Oil’s Deepwater Mission to Mars
Joel Hewett, “The Shape of These Monsters: From Fixed to Floating Offshore Oil and Gas Production, 1976-2006” PDF
