Abstract
This chapter discusses the expansion of the U.S. offshore oil industry amidst new challenges and extreme environments such as extreme water depths. From the late 1950s through the first energy crisis in 1973, Brown & Root Marine's offshore achievements helped develop an international offshore oil and gas industry and the transport systems that linked supply and demand. The extension of the U.S. political influence in the postwar period over all the regions, including the oil-rich Middle East, facilitated the expansion of the U.S. offshore oil industry into foreign waters. Although exploration and development concentrated on protected and shallow waters similar to those in the Gulf of Mexico, each producing area presented different challenges to the innovative spirit of offshore engineers. Two regions were especially important—Venezuela's Lake Maracaibo and the Middle East's Persian Gulf, where enormous oil deposits justified path-breaking departures in the scale and cost of offshore projects. Venezuela's Lake Maracaibo witnessed the biggest boom in offshore oil in the 1950s. Brown & Root became involved in all aspects of oil development in the lake, from driving concrete piles, to moving derricks, to laying pipelines, to building and installing gas compression and injection stations. Under the new management of vice president L.E. Minor, Brown & Root's pipeline division aggressively pursued offshore projects overseas. As more international projects came along, Hal Lindsay, head of Brown & Root's Marine Operators, began giving those that demanded innovative design thinking to the new marine design group under H.W. Reeves. Many of the young engineers in this group received their first assignments in Venezuela. By the mid-1960s, Brown & Root Marine had taken on highly diverse engineering and construction assignments around the world and in sundry kinds of natural environments. The company's success at solving engineering and construction problems posed by offshore work in the shallow, calmer waters of the Gulf of Mexico, Lake Maracaibo, and the Persian Gulf paved the way for its future success in meeting the more extreme challenges posed by cold weather, ice, earthquakes, rugged waters, and ever greater depths.