http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2008/06/brazil-discovers-new-offshore-oil.htmlThere have been huge discoveries - some in the last month of off shore fields in Brazil.
Brazil has ordered 75 rigs (they take years to build and cost $ 500,000,000) each.
If they changed the law tomorrow the United States would not be able to get its first rig until 2012, if then.
It would take 8-10 years to have any impact at all.
http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20080619/NEWS/806190472But even as oil trades at more than $135 a barrel -- up from $68 a year ago -- the world's existing drill-ships are booked solid for the next five years. Some oil companies have been forced to postpone exploration while waiting for a drilling rig, executives and analysts said.
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 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.
This boom could lead to renewed 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.