Mr. Gabrielli said the company was keeping its international expansion spending at $16 billion, so that it could focus on developing deepwater fields at home.
At the beginning of the last decade, fewer than 20 drilling ships were capable of finding and developing deepwater oil; today there are well over a hundred.
But BP has also been the leader in developing deepwater oil fields in the gulf, and these properties produce some of the most profitable oil in the company's portfolio.
The demand for oil has so far kept rising; and as long as the crude price is above $80 a barrel, the big oil firms will have the money and the incentive to keep developing deepwater fields, and thus to keep ordering its rigs.
They will spend perhaps $10 billion in the next five years developing deepwater fields in the Gulf of Guinea and will find, if they are lucky, 8 billion barrels of oil there.
Initially, few restrictions were placed on the developing deepwater fisheries (Geen, Brown and Pascoe 1991), a situation now much changed.
Initial objectives were to relieve the pressure on inshore fish stocks and to prevent over-capitalisation in the developing deepwater fisheries.
Because it takes so long for companies to explore and then develop a deepwater oil field, the oil and gas from those leases is just beginning to flow.
These are yet to be turned into flowing crude, but they are largely in shallow water, making them easier and cheaper to develop than deepwater reserves.
The FIG would prefer to develop a deepwater port for this purpose, but wants the oil companies to pay for it—something the firms will balk at until it is clear how much oil they can get.
To develop a deepwater oil field, geologists first sift through terabytes of data collected by undersea seismic devices.
