The Oil Drum

Anadarko is a good outfit. They also have a very large onshore exploration program.
  Depwater Gulf of Mexico has been of interest to the oil business for years. H. Ben Carsey published an analyses of the prospects in the mid-sixties. He was a Humble geologist (now Exxon) and was cited in Halbouty's book" Salt Domes of the Gulf Coast and Mexico". Halbouty's second edition includes a map of all the offshore salt dome prospects, and there are dozens. There are a number of drilling problems unique to ultra deep water. How do you keep a string of pipe rigid enough to drill in a fith of a mile or more of water, and how do you hook up wells to a pipeline when human's can't dive? The answer to the first has been drill motors located at the end of the drill pipe like in horizontal drilling and the answer to the second has been robotics. Needless to say this is all extremely expensive cutting edge stuff.
   The shallow gulf waters are gas-prone, in other words in the US waters there is a whole lot more gas than oil. Lake Washington and Mobile Bay are the only giant fields, although  sveral other domes have produced a little oil. Hurricane Katherine and Rita really whacked them. The deeper stuff in the Green Canyon area had the platforms whacked too. But the deeper stuff that is the exploration frontier may be produced without a rig reaching to the seafloor. The continental slopes have a lot more oil that the shallow Miocene offshore trend.
   I'm guessing that the deep continental shelf is going to be the major oil companies last hurrah in exploration. Overseas has been shut off by national oil companies, and they can't make money on smaller fields. But, they still can make money by purchasing companies. If the prospects are as good as I think, Anadarko will now become a target for the multinational oil companies. Although this fancy technology may slow the exhastion of conventional oil, it won't stop resource depletion.