Houghton Offshore Helps Set Another Record

Houghton Offshore has enabled the Transocean Sedco Forex to set a new world record for the deepest well drilled to date. The drillship Discoverer Spirit used a subsea blowout preventor (BOP), operating on a 2 percent mixture of Houghton Stack Magic 200 BOP fluid, as it drilled at 9,727 ft. below sea level in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico, surpassing the previous record of 9,687 ft. set earlier this year.

"The previous world record had been set on that same drillship using Houghton's BOP fluid in June 2001," explains LeeRoy J. Patin, Global Offshore manager at Houghton Offshore, a division of Houghton International specializing in the manufacture and formulation of water-based fluids for oil and gas production and exploration equipment. "Two factors keep our fluids breaking world records - superior lubrication properties and resistance to microbiological contamination." The new record was set drilling for Unocal in the Alaminos Canyon, 240 miles south by southwest of Galveston, in the Gulf of Mexico.