Nothing to do with the ME. Back in the late 80's, the joke in industry was that the Gulf of Mexico was "the Dead Sea" because it appeared to be at the tail end of the exploration creaming curve. Since then, several new deep-water plays have resuscitated the patient.

Actually just came across that explanation in Mills's book. Huh. So what are the hurricanes in this analogy? Nurse accidentally kicking the drip IV out?

Yeah, I guess, but they put the IV back in pretty quickly.

I know of at least one example where after restart the field production rates were surprisingly robust.

I think the hurricane factor in the GOM is a bit over hyped by some on TOD.

Some smaller, older shelf fields with heavily damaged infrastructure were abandoned because the remaining potential didn't justify the costs of rebuilding. I think most, if not all, of the deep water fields were brought back online. Even the unfortunately named and rather small "Typhoon" field, which had it's spar totaled by Rita, is being redeveloped by a smaller company.

The most significant effects of the hurricane threat to the offshore GOM is higher costs associated with new engineering and operational requirements by the MMS (undoubtedly a good idea), the costs of evacuations and pause of operations every season, and the losses associated with temporary shut-in and repair costs.