Hibernia Oil Field

In my petroleum geology class, we have been discussing the Hibernia Oil field and its contribution to the world's petroleum production. The Hibernia oil field is Canada's largest offshore oil operation and is located 315km SE offshore of St. John's, Newfoundland. The platform itself is the world's largest physical offshore oil platform and is made of 37,000 tons of integrated topsides that is all mounted on a 600,000 t gravity base structure (which means that the platform itself sits on the ocean floor due to the very shallow depth on the Grand Banks and has very large tanks filled with magnetite ballast that weigh 1.2 million tons, securing the rig in place). There is enough storage on the platform to hold 1.3 million bbl of crude oil. We learned in class that the Hibernia platform produces enough oil in one year to supply the entire world for one day. In other words, it produces 0.00274% of the worlds oil supply. If you want to put the world's petroleum usage into physical parameters, each day the entire world uses enough oil to fill a tank that is the size of the whole SMU campus and that is 100m high. It is amazing to think that we have been consuming this amount of oil on a constant day to day basis.

Exploration drilling of the Hibernia oil field began in the 1960s and lasted for a few decades before, in the mid-1980s, Mulroney said that the main commercialization of Hibernia was going to be done by Petro-Canada. At the time, Petro-Canada was a crown-corporation but has since been privatized. It took several years to get the production up and running, and only with the help of a few competitor oil companies assistance (which were Mobil; now ExxonMobil, Chevron, Murphy, to name a few) was the field able to begin major production. The production began on November 17, 1997 and has proven to be very successful ever since. There is a fleet of tankers that travel continuously back and forth between the platform and the Avalon Peninsula transporting the crude oil. I find this oil field interesting because of its close proximity to Halifax, and how much crude oil it actually produces. It has been good for the economy of Newfoundland as well with the depletion of the fish in the Grand Banks.