Deep drilling off Florida Keys months away?

By midsummer, a Spanish oil company, on a huge Italian-owned semi-submersible rig made in China, will be drilling for oil about 40 to 60 miles from Key West in the Straits of Florida.

And because of the 50-year-old trade embargo against Cuba by the United States government, none of the approximately 220 crewmembers working aboard the vessel will be Americans. Also, if disaster strikes and there is an oil spill that threatens the Florida coast and reef, U.S. companies would be barred for the most part from helping stop the leak.

Jorge Piñon, visiting research fellow at the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University, explained to an audience of about 100 people in St. Columba Episcopal Church in Marathon that growing world demand for oil has led international energy companies to Florida's backyard. Most of this demand is coming from China and India.

China, said Piñon, will eventually surpass the United States as the world's largest importer and consumer of fossil fuels.

'Oil man'

Piñon has no trouble describing himself as an "oil man." He has more than 30 years experience working in Latin America and Europe for companies like British Petroleum and Amoco, before it was bought by BP in 1998.

He also had no trouble keeping his audience's attention during the Thursday afternoon presentation, which was part of the Friends of the Marathon Library "Books and Coffee" lecture series. He spoke for more than two hours, much of the time fielding questions from the audience.

The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that there are about 4 to 5 billion barrels of oil in the roughly 18 "blocks" that Cuba plans to lease to international energy companies in the Straits of Florida.

The Cuban government and Repsol, the Spanish oil and natural gas firm that will be first to drill there, think the number is much higher - around 20 billion barrels. That would be a significant find, since the United States' total oil reserves is about 22 billion barrels, Piñon said.

Piñon also said there may be what the industry calls "elephant" fields - large reserves of oil - on the outskirts of very deep pockets on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico.

Repsol will be drilling from a rig called the Scarabeo 9. It is being built in China and is owned by Italian oil company Eni SpA. Drilling is expected to begin by the middle of the summer in an area known as the Jaguey prospect, which is about 60 miles south of Key West.

After Repsol, companies like Statoil of Norway, ONGC of India, Petrôleus of Venezuela, Brazil's Petrobras and Russia's Gazprom are expected to drill in 17 other Cuban-owned leases in the Straits of Florida.

The Scarabeo 9 will drill in a water depth of about 6,500 feet, about 1,000 feet deeper than the Macondo prospect, which gushed almost 5 million barrels of crude during the spring and summer of 2010 when the DeepWater Horizon semi-submersible rig exploded.

Piñon tempered concerns about the possibility of a similar spill with the Scarabeo 9 rig. He said most of the companies planning to drill aboard the vessel have a history of deepwater drilling and drill in U.S. waters.

"These are not Mickey Mouse companies. Most of them have experience operating in the Gulf of Mexico," he said. 

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