ABSTRACT

The first offshore oil wells were drilled in the 1890s from piers extending from the southern California coast. The first offshore oil field in the Gulf of Mexico was

developed in the late 1930s and the first producing well out of sight of land was completed 12 miles off the Louisiana coast in 1947. By the end of 1982, approximately 27,000 wells had been drilled in U.S. coastal waters (American Petroleum Institute, 1982). In 1983, there was a total of 4056 offshore platforms in operation in U.S. waters, 3600 of them off Louisiana (Essertier, 1984). A total of 1320 offshore wells was completed in 1982, and it is expected that 1485 wells will be completed offshore per year by 1985 (Offshore, 1983). Oil and gas production from the Federally controlled U.S. outer continental shelf (OCS) currently accounts for 8% of total domestic oil production and 24% of domestic gas production. The U.S Geological Survey has estimated that as much as 33.8% of the nation’s undiscovered recoverable oil and 28.1% of natural gas may lie beneath U.S. coastal and outer continental shelf waters (Kash, 1983).