Tyler Priest

Offshore development is one of the most important but least analyzed chapters in the history of the petroleum industry, and the Gulf of Mexico is the most explored, drilled, and developed offshore petroleum province in the world. This essay examines offshore oil and gas development in the Gulf of Mexico, highlighting the importance of access and how the unique geology and geography of the Gulf shaped both access and technology. Interactions between technology, capital, geology, and the political structure of access in the Gulf of Mexico generated a functionally and regionally complex extractive industry that repeatedly resolved the material and economic contradictions of expanding into deeper water. This was not achieved, however, simply through technological miracles or increased mastery over the environment, as industry experts and popular accounts often imply. The industry moved deeper only by more profoundly adapting to the environment, not by transcending its limits. This essay...

This essay analyzes the rise and decline of organized labor in the oil refining industry along the U.S. Gulf Coast and explains how union organizing in the American South was not quite the abject failure southern labor historians that have portrayed it to be. As was the case across this racially segregated region, labor organizing in refining, beginning in the Great Depression, consisted of a dual struggle, by all workers for dignity, job security, and workplace control, and by racial minorities for workplace equality. During 1945–1955, the Oil Workers International Union (OWIU) and its successor, the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers (OCAW) union, built on it organizing success to obtain concessions on wages and job security in most of the major Gulf Coast plants. Although Gulf Coast refineries remained segregated and simmered with racial tensions, they also had lower racial barriers to employment than in other southern industries, thanks in part to the union movement. OCAW, howeve...

rhetoric for themselves, had long been exploiting their labor force. In fact, he suggests, the citrus industry has played a profound role in the formation of racial ideology in the state by suggesting that some races (particularly Mexicans and Mexican Americans) were uniquely suited for agricultural work but did not need the protection of unions. Taylor, Lange and, to a lesser degree, Steinbeck turned citrus’s image on its head by arguing that the industry had in fact stolen away the dreams of small farmers when it created enormous factory farms dependent on an underpaid workforce. The exploited worker thus “seemed to jeopardize something vital in American mythology—that its genesis and strength came from the soil and expansion westward” (p. 236). Sadly, neither the state nor the federal government chose to intervene in the often hostile relations between citrus workers and employers. The introduction of bracero labor from Mexico during World War II only widened the gap between the promise of labor in the citrus groves and its grim reality. This failure laid the foundation for California’s farmworker movement, which erupted in the 1960s as agricultural workers again tried to seize their part of the California dream. Orange Empire is a valuable contribution to a growing literature on California agribusiness and on race relations and employment in California. Sackman’s work has larger implications for the history of other specialized forms of agriculture, particularly across the American West. What about the apple, sugar beet, or potato industries, for example? How did work, race, and gender relations across industries shape the California and the West we know today? In exposing the very human agency behind a supposedly “natural” product, Sackman opens the door for a larger appreciation of the complex interactions between people and their environment.

One salutary feature of these oil histories from political scientist Timothy Mitchell and geographer Matthew Huber is that they avoid the word “crude” in their titles. After a series of books and documentaries in recent years riffing on this theme—crude politics, crude democracy, crude impact, crude awakening, crude world, crude domination, and crude reality—it is refreshing to see new contributions that frame the subject somewhat differently. Mitchell intends to trace oil’s “materiality” (p. 2), and Huber attempts to demonstrate its “ordinariness” (p. xi). Although they offer original observations on oil’s relationship to “democracy” and “freedom,” both studies nevertheless fail to dispel the impression that oil has almost magical powers to bless, or more often “curse,” societies. Crude in substance if not in name, these studies caricature rather than clarify the role of oil in modern history. Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy, which in the last few years has become a gateway text into oil for many social scientists and cultural theorists, is anchored by one big idea: that modern democracy and mass politics are inseparable from carbon-intensive forms of social and economic development. The opening chapter on “Machines of Democracy” explains how the nineteenth-century emergence of industrialization, imperialism, and democracy were linked to the exploitation of coal, which provided energy in such exceptional quantity and density that it reordered social relations on a global scale. Coal liberated populations, first in England and then elsewhere, from dependence on biomass energy gathered from large areas of land. It also created demand for new sources of organic energy to provide industrial inputs and sustain industrial workforces, setting in motion agrarian and colonial transformations beyond Britain and Western Europe.

... when Hurricane Ida so battered the rig on November 9 that it had to be towed in for repair. ... On the morning of April 20, Robert Kaluza was BP's day-shift company man on the Deepwater Horizon. On board for the first time, he was serving for four days as a relief man for Ronald ...

Work continued on a plan to increase the renewable, sustainable fuel sources available to power operations at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. A team of researchers from multiple institutions collaborated to create a tool that would allow the UI to evaluate its alternative energy options more effectively.

Part I: The first challenge: Creation of the modern offshore industry in the Gulf of Mexico. Before the dawn. Beyond the horizon. A maturing system: the Gulf of Mexico in the 1950s. New sophistication: Platform design and pipelining innovations during the 1960s. Wading into deep water: The evolution of platforms during the 1960s and 1970s. Part II: The challenge of new and extreme environments: Depth, earthquakes, ice, and fire. Brown & Root Marine goes abroad. Mind stretcher of the century: Project mohole. Inner space pioneer: Taylor Diving & Salvage. Offshore California and Alaska. A crash program in Mexico's Bay of Campeche. Part III: The North Sea's challenge: Rough waters, hostile conditions. Confronting a monster: The early natural gas industry. Ekofisk and the challenge of early North Sea oil. Ring master at the Forties Field. Project management in a boom era. Epilogue. Index.

Introduction The "Starch in the Steel": Manganese Metallurgy and Commerce Far-Flung Sources: The Creation of a World Market, 1880-1914 "More Than a Pawn in the Game of War": Global Instabilities, 1905-1919 Filling Big Orders: The Diversification of Supply, 1919-1930 Internationalism vs. Self-Sufficiency: The Making of U.S. Mineral Policy, 1919-1939 Tempting the Brazilians: The Diplomacy of Minerals and Steel, 1930-1945 Extending the Quest: The Crisis of the New Order, 1945-1949 New Frontiers: Restructuring World Supply, 1948-1965 Epilogue and Conclusion Bibliography Tables Maps

The story of deepwater Gulf of Mexico can be told through the story of Shell Oil's Mars Project.  Mars was one of the earliest prospects to be drilled and developed on some of the first federal deepwater leases offered in the early 1980s.  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.  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 marks 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.

This essay is part of a multi-media website,  https://dsps.lib.uiowa.edu/mars-deepwater-gulf/, devoted to documenting, analyzing, and displaying the history of this American energy asset and others in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico. 

The website features the following resources:

• Two historical essays:  “Shell Oil’s Deepwater Mission to Mars,” by Tyler Priest; and “The Shape of These Monsters: From Fixed to Floating Offshore Oil and Gas Production, 1976-2006,” by Joel Hewett.
• A 30-year timeline of significant moments in the history of Shell’s greater Mars development.
• A photo gallery of the Mars TLP and its people, equipment, and projects.
• A video collection featuring the Mars, Ursa, and Olympus tension-leg platforms, along with many others in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico (more than 80 total).
• A series of graphs that illustrate the evolution of deepwater projects and production in the Gulf of Mexico.
• A series of Gulf of Mexico maps, including:  an interactive ArcGIS Gulf of Mexico Map that displays Gulf of Mexico leases, platforms, pipelines, and boundaries; an interactive ArcGIS Deepwater Gulf of Mexico Story Map that highlights 17 major deepwater facilities; and an interactive ArcGIS Onshore Oil and Gas Infrastructure Map that displays onshore, lower-48 U.S. oil and gas infrastructure and its offshore connections.
• A “Martian Stories” site for oral histories and personal recollections.

This essay examines the intimate historical relationship
between two of south Louisiana’s most important industries,
shrimping and offshore oil. Analyzing the social, cultural,
and labor dimensions of environmental change, the
essay argues that petroleum did not undermine the environmental
sustainability of shrimping, as many scholars assert,
but rather evolved in an intimate and complementary
relationship to it. The organization of labor, transportation,
and physical space by shrimp and petroleum were mutually
reinforcing, the products of a similar social ecology of waterborne
extraction and commerce. The essay also explains
how the close bond between shrimp and petroleum found
cultural expression in the Louisiana Shrimp & Petroleum
Festival, long held each Labor Day weekend in Morgan City,
Louisiana. Ultimately, the threat to the local survival of
these industries came not from oil-driven environmental
degradation and resource depletion, as often implied, but
from global competition and industry migration.

Offshore development is one of the most important but least analyzed chapters in the history of the petroleum industry, and the Gulf of Mexico is the most explored, drilled, and developed offshore petroleum province in the world. This essay examines offshore oil and gas development in the Gulf of Mexico, highlighting the importance of access and how the unique geology and geography of the Gulf shaped both access and technology. Interactions between technology, capital, geology, and the political structure of access in the Gulf of Mexico generated a functionally and regionally complex extractive industry that repeatedly resolved the material and economic contradictions of expanding into deeper water. This was not achieved, however, simply through technological miracles or increased mastery over the environment, as industry experts and popular accounts often imply. The industry moved deeper only by more profoundly adapting to the environment, not by transcending its limits. This essay diverges from celebratory narratives about offshore development and from interpretations that emphasize the social construction of the environment. It challenges the storyline of market-driven technology and its miraculous ability to expand and create petroleum abundance in the Gulf.

... 4 J. Bourne, Jr., Gone with the Water, in: National Geographic 10, 2004, pp. 88-105; LLCarstensen (ed.), Drawing Louisiana's New Map. ... 28 For more on the history of oil, politics, and corruption in Louisiana, see G. Jeansonne, Leander Perez. ...

This essay analyzes the introduction and development of digital technology in the geophysical exploration for oil and gas. Beginning in the 1950s, technological advances in petroleum seismology transformed oil exploration into a high-tech business and turned the Gulf of Mexico into one of the most active oil-hunting areas in the world. The development of marine geophysical operations and a new model of contracting in the 1950s opened up new offshore vistas. The early introduction of magnetic tape recording and common-depth-point shooting in the late 1950s, closely followed by digital processing and recording in the early 1960s, led to continual improvements in seismic processing and interpretation, from the deconvolution of signals caused by reverberations in water in the late 1950s, to the direct detection of hydrocarbons in the late 1960s, to three-dimensional seismology in the late 1970s, to the emergence of full wave-form inversion in the twenty-first century. The fifty-year project of digital innovation has had its greatest impact on the water, where the marginal costs of applying novel ideas and ex-pensive new technologies were lower offshore than on land. The proving ground for digital seismic technology was the US Gulf of Mexico. But geophysical techniques pioneered in the Gulf have also helped to open other deepwater basins around the world to petroleum extraction.

Open Access URL:  https://prism.ucalgary.ca/ds2/stream/?#/documents/90404917-334a-4428-98d1-a15093396508/page/195