Abstract
This chapter discusses challenges and obstacles faced by the offshore industry while creating modern offshore industry in the Gulf of Mexico. The chapter focuses on Brown & Root, a Houston-based engineering and construction firm thatbegan as a road-building company in central Texas. The Great Depression curtailed most road building, forcing the Brown brothers to scramble for work. The company turned the corner in 1936, when it won the contract to construct the Marshall Ford Dam (later renamed the Mansfield Dam) on the Colorado River above Austin. This project propelled Brown & Root to a new status as a significant regional construction firm while also expanding its engineering capacities. The company took its first step out into the water on a project for Humble Oil & Refining Company in Galveston Bay in the late 1930s. Until then, Brown & Root's experience in oil-related construction consisted of small "set up" jobs to prepare drilling sites, and constructing roads in the newly discovered Conroe, Texas, oil field about 30 miles north of Houston. In a path-breaking project for Pure Oil and Superior Oil beginning in 1937, Brown & Root constructed a mammoth wooden platform complex for the Creole field about one mile out in the Gulf south of Cameron, Louisiana. In March 1938 this site produced the first oil in the open waters of the Gulf of Mexico. This was both the climax of the developments in offshore drilling in the 1930s and the forerunner to the dramatic surge in such activity after World War II. It is mentioned that government regulation of all structures in navigable waterways required greater concern for safety and control of pollution. Brown & Root nonetheless reaped lasting benefits from its early start in the Gulf in the 1930s. One careful study concluded that "approximately 25 wells were drilled from conventional pile foundations in shallow water off the Gulf Coast from 1937 to 1942. '' In its work for Humble Oil and Pure Oil, Brown & Root constructed the platforms used to drill about half of these wells.