When momentum looses forward motion, oil bulls point to Chinese demand as being the floor under which oil can always stand.
Persuading all OPEC nations to go along would establish a floor under oil prices.
High crude oil prices also put a floor under alternative energy sources and their producers.
The test well, Jack-2, delved through 7, 000 feet of water and 20, 000 feet of sea floor to tap oil trapped in tertiary rock laid down 60 million years ago.
BP, which had been leasing the rig from Transocean, says the safety device that was supposed to cut oil flow on the ocean floor in the event of a well blowout did not perform its function.
Transocean ( RIG - news - people ), says the safety device that was supposed to cut oil flow on the ocean floor in the event of a well blowout did not perform its function.
Oil seeps naturally from the gulf floor, and natural bacteria exist in the water that eat it.
At these depths, everything must be done with remote-control robots that install the blowout preventers, submersible pumps and other devices to manage the flow of oil and water on the ocean floor.
Chevron miscalculated its drilling of its Frade field last November, an oil well just under the ocean floor in the Santos Basin in Brazil, about 70 kilometers off coastal Rio de Janeiro.
At stake were lucrative new oil and gas fields -- by some estimates ten billion tons of oil -- on the Arctic sea floor.
But, in 1967, American drillers working for Texaco discovered that two miles beneath the jungle floor lay abundant reserves of crude oil.
Video footage from the sea floor showed the sinuous heave of oil into the sea weakening as the mud was pumped in.
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These breakthroughs allow oil to be sucked economically from far beneath the ocean floor, and out of depleted and formerly abandoned wells.
Things get murkier still when oil companies drill deep below the surface of the ocean floor, since even robots can't go down there to see what's going on.
Peter Donovan, an oil-options broker at Vantage Trading working on the floor of the New York Mercantile Exchange, said some traders quickly exited positions after the erroneous report of a terrorist attack.
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Unlike these rival claimants to the South China Sea, Taiwan has not cast under the ocean floor for an estimated 213 billion barrels of oil and 20 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.
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The caisson could not simply be capped, because the oil pressure would blow its suction pile out of the sea floor.
Norway's biggest oil company, Statoil, is already burying CO2 under the sea floor.
The Parts Dept. was on the first floor and one of my jobs was to take cans of oil on a trolley down to the petrol station below for sale to motorists buying petrol.
And much of the oil that has leaked out of the Jessica will end up on the sea floor where it will pose further threats.
The need to drill for oil in 5000 feet of water and 20, 000 feet below the ocean floor is a dramatic illustration of how the low hanging fruit are long gone and the lengths to which our addiction to oil will drive us.
For the smaller fry in the oil industry, the area represents their best chance to get in on the ground floor and reap potentially huge rewards in the future.
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Anything substantially lower will indicate that oil is escaping through some broken piping and flowing into other rock formations below the sea floor with the possibility that it could find a way to burst through the floor into the sea from a different location.
The problem is not that there is no oil left the government reckons that 16 billion-25 billion barrels remain beneath the ocean floor but that it is becoming harder to extract.
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Its colonnaded halls house every kind of product, from designer boots to retro bicycles, and the food hall on the ground floor is a vision of plenty: sushi rolled by hand, smoked sturgeon, rare teas and olive oil.
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