What Bush should be calling for is a revival of the old US shipbuilding industry.
Oh, wait, that would require finding people who actually work for a living, people who labor, working class people, people who join trade unions, people who vote Democratic.
People who need to learn the trades like metal working: welding, machining, forging, smelting, pipe fitting, and all the old union jobs.
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Demand is so high that shipbuilders, the biggest of whom are in Asia, have raised prices since last year by as much as $100 million a vessel to about half a billion dollars.
“The crunch on rigs is everywhere,” said Alberto Guimaraes, a senior executive in charge of developments in the Gulf of Mexico at Petrobras, the Brazilian oil company that has discovered some of the most promising offshore oil but has been unable to get at it.
“Almost 100 percent of the oil companies are constrained in their investment program because there is no rig available,” he said.
As a result, drilling costs for some of the newest deepwater rigs in the Gulf of Mexico — the nation’s top source of domestic oil and natural gas supplies — have reached about $600,000 a day, compared with $150,000 a day in 2002.
These record prices have spurred a new wave of drill-ship construction, and could lead to a renewed wave of offshore oil exploration that would eventually bring more supplies to the oil market, and push down prices.
Already, 16 new drill-ships are scheduled to be delivered to oil companies this year — more than double the number delivered over the last six years combined. In fact, 75 ultra-deepwater rigs should be delivered from 2008 to 2011, according to ODS-Petrodata, a firm that tracks drilling rigs.
Shipyards from South Korea to Norway are working overtime to meet a huge influx of orders.
Robert L. Long, the chief executive office of Transocean, the world’s largest drilling company, said he has nine deepwater rigs under construction, eight of which are already under contract for periods ranging from four to seven years once they leave the shipyards. He expects to receive the ships between the beginning of 2009 and the end of 2010.
Transocean believes the deepwater market will continue to be constrained until at least 2012. Over three-quarters of the drill-ships currently under construction have already been contracted to oil companies eager to benefit from triple-digit oil prices, Mr. Long said.
Petrobras, whose full name is Petróleo Brasileiro, is expected to drive much of the growth in the booming new market. The company has outlined an aggressive program to increase its drilling capacity, and plans to contract or build 69 deepwater drill-ships by 2017.
Brazil stunned the oil world when it announced the discovery of a vast oil field 200 miles south of Rio de Janeiro last November, turning the country’s deep blue waters into the world’s most exciting oil frontier. Energy experts said the field could turn out to be just a small part of the largest oil discovery in 30 years.
But seven months later, the problem is still how to retrieve it. Petrobras has only three rigs capable of drilling in waters that exceed 6,500 feet, like the sites of the new fields.
But drilling constraints are not the only problem facing international oil companies, which are seeking to expand at a furious pace after a decade of underinvestment in the 1990s. They have also had to contend with a doubling of development costs across the industry in the last five years, more acute competition for energy resources, shortages in steel, engineering and manufacturing capacity, and pressures posed by an aging work force.
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Most new orders for drill-ships have gone to Asian shipyards. Companies in Singapore and China have benefited, but South Korea’s big three shipbuilders — Samsung Heavy Industries, Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering and Hyundai Heavy Industries — have gotten the bulk of orders for the most complex and expensive types of vessels.
“The market for offshore exploration is now the hottest sector in the global shipbuilding industry,” said Lee Jae-kyu, shipbuilding analyst at Mirae Asset Securities in Seoul.
At Samsung’s sprawling shipyard on the southern Korean island of Geoje, next to the gigantic hulls of half-finished supertankers, cranes and dry docks work overtime to construct odd-looking drill-ships like the West Polaris.
At 62,400 tons, the West Polaris, due for delivery this month, is larger than a World War II aircraft carrier. The pipes and steel scaffolding of its drill loom over the other ships lining the construction yard, like cars in an oversize parking lot.
The shipyard and its 25,000 workers bustle with activity, emitting a cacophony of clanging construction sounds, the roar of motors and short musical ditties that warn of moving cranes. These sounds echo in the emerald hills behind the yard, which stretches across one side of a deep blue bay.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/19/bu...hp&oref=slogin
Nah, the last thing conservatives and Republicans want are empowered workers who have skill and knowledge that are scarce and that can then push up the wages of the working class people. Better to just blame liberals for everything that's going wrong - that is easier than actually understanding the problems and actually fixing them.
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