424 



2. Continental Oil - an inverted funnel storage facility being 

 installed offshore Dubai. Built by Chicago Bridge & Iron. 



3. Santa Fe International - prestressed concrete cylinders laid 

 on the ocean floor. 



4. Bethlehem Steel - bottom supported, large diameter bottles, 

 A second innovation is specifically designed for non-water, 

 soluble refined products storage. 



Standard Oil (New Jersey) will conduct a research program this summer 

 for the purpose of testing a new type of icebreaking device and to ply the fabled 

 Northwest Passage. The S.S. Manhattan, the largest U.S. merchant marine 

 ship, is being outfitted for this journey. An icebreaker designed at The 

 Massachusetts Institute of Technology is being attached; the MIT device lifts 

 the ship over the ice and then proceeds to crash down on the ice floes. Present 

 icebreaking devices merely attempt to crash through the ice, head-on. We 

 believe that the MIT breaker, as well as the recently developed Canadian Alexbow 

 system, in which the breaking prow lifts the ice from underneath through the 

 natural buoyancy of the ship, will be able to penetrate thicker ice masses than 

 conventional icebreaking systems. If the results of this summer's program 

 prove favorable, it would open a channel for North Slope crude to the Eastern 

 Seaboard. Standard Oil (New Jersey) and British Petroleum, who recently 

 acquired 9, 700 Sinclair service stations from Maine to Florida would benefit 

 most by the opening of the Northwest Passage. Longer range, huge submarine 

 tankers which could deliver North Slope and Canadian Arctic crude to Europe via 

 an undersea North Pole route, are being investigated. 



Drilling in offshore areas is creating a paradox. On the one hand, it is 

 bound to become more expensive. On the other, costs of associated drilling op- 

 erations are decreasing materially. The science of drilling for oil offshore is 

 still in its infancy and there will certainly be tremendous breakthroughs in the 

 future, both in terms of available technology and in lowering the costs per well 

 drilled. 



Santa Barbara Oil Spill 



The recent blowout of a well offshore California in the Santa Barbara 

 Channel was a rare, but most unfortunate accident. It was reported that this 

 was the first occurrence of a wild oil well causing mass pollution problems since 

 offshore California drilling began some sixty years ago. As a result, stringent 

 new rules have currently been issued in order to obviate, or at least, lessen the 

 chances of this situation recurring. Methods are needed to cope with the special 

 problems associated with the complex faulting in the Channel. Furthermore, 

 offshore drilling regulations have not been updated in many years. These new 

 rules encompass the following provisions: 



1. More frequent testing of blowout preventors. 



