Canada's Victorian Oil Town: The Transformation of Petrolia from Resource Town into a Victorian Community (review)

496 During this entire period (1945–2000), Shell really did put together an extraordinary research and development team at Bellaire. In 1956, M. King Hubbert, associate director of Bellaire, predicted that oil reserves in the United States would peak in 1970, which they did. Shell scientists and engineers broke dozens of records for depth of exploration and depth of production, seismic technologies, and sizes and designs of offshore platforms. And they were the low-cost offshore producer. While The Offshore Imperative is great at engineering and rich in personal stories and interviews, it could have been stronger in conceptual content. While Priest periodically ties events at Shell E&P (exploration and production) to the larger world of OPEC and environmentalism, he doesn’t really draw out any managerial or business-strategy framework. He is light on criticism, moreover, when Shell makes big mistakes in overbidding, or underdiscovery, burning up millions or billions of dollars. And some readers may be frustrated by the paucity of information about Shell Oil and the successful downstream activities of petrochemicals and retail motor fuels. Still, the story Priest tells is a rich and exciting one around a technology revolution. Bullwinkle, for example, was a 1,365-foot-high steel platform, built on a 50,000-ton base, floated out on a gigantic barge and dropped over sideways onto giant mud mats, landing 2.9 feet from its target location. It hosted 40 production wells and won the American Society of Civil Engineers Achievement Award. Shell wasn’t the only company that did this sort of thing, but it usually did it first!