A high-ranking Halliburton executive Tuesday said he doesn’t believe drilling in the offshore — both in shallow water and deepwater — can remain at a standstill for long as a result of the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico (GOM).

“It cannot afford to be dead,” said Marc Edwards, Halliburton senior vice president, at the Natural Gas Roundtable in Washington, DC. “There’s a lot of oil in the offshore environment around here, and if we are truly to have a policy that develops energy security, it cannot be ignored.”

Edwards expected and received a “less hostile reception” from the energy executives at the gas roundtable than his company has received from the Obama administration, Capitol Hill lawmakers and state officials. “I had to think twice about coming up here under the circumstances,” he admitted, and added that it was a “welcome relief from many of the issues that we’re working on right now.”

Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, at a recent hearing expressed concern about the cementing services, which Halliburton provided, playing a possible role in the fatal rig disaster. Edwards declined to comment on this.

“I’m not going to get drawn [into] commenting on specifically what led up to the incident in the Gulf of Mexico…It’s inappropriate at this stage here to stand up in front of you all when all the facts have not come out to actually state what is the cause of this particular incident,” he said. But Edwards agreed that the “ultimate safeguard” — the blowout preventer — “failed to stop the events that we saw take place.”

In the end, Edwards said he believes investigators will find out that there was not one single cause but rather that it was a combination of events that led to the blowout and spill.

Aside from the disaster in the GOM, the company is “battling” efforts on Capitol Hill to require companies like Halliburton to disclose the chemicals that they use in their hydraulic fracturing (hydrofracing) processes.

“Now my comeback to that is somewhat akin to [the federal government] asking Coca Cola to disclose to the public the formulations for Coke,” he said. He noted that Halliburton complies with state regulations, the requirements of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and “we do state and list [on our website]…the hazardous chemicals that are involved in pumping [hydrofracing] treatments in the ground.

“Let me be very clear the chemicals and [components] of our system [are] no more dangerous than what you [would] find under your kitchen sink,” Edwards told the energy executives. And “we are looking at ways of making sure that the chemistry that we pump down holes is greener than before.”

Legislation is pending in the Senate and House that would subject hydrofracing to federal regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974 (SDWA), and would require the disclosure of chemicals used in the hydrofracing process (see Daily GPI, June 10, 2009).

The oil and gas industry is the only industry exempted from complying with the SDWA. Hydrofracing, which is used in almost all oil and gas wells, is a process where fluids are injected at high pressure into underground rock formations to blast them open and to recover gas from shale gas formations.

Shale gas is a “big part of our energy future,” Edwards said, adding that it’s “more than just a bridge fuel.” He estimated that there’s enough natural gas supply to at least last 100 years into the future.

He believes unconventional gases, such as shale gas, will become conventional in due time.

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