Roughneck Regatta

For more than a year, a sort of rough neck regatta has been churning the wa ters of the Gulf of Mexico off Loui siana. It is composed of workboats, tugs, barges and even helicopters, and is crewed by hard-hat engineers, welders and derrick workers. Along the Gulf, a group of companies have strung out 1,000 miles of pipeline in a race for some of the richest U.S. natural-gas deposits.

Their goal is a 1,165-square-mile area off the offshore continental shelf, where natural gas is being tapped under water as deep as 600 feet. A collection of 100 offshore drilling rigs, some of them as tall as a 40-story building, are working on leases for which they have paid the federal government alone some $1.2 billion. Pushing slowly out to meet them are complex pipelaying barges that cost as much as $8,000,000 to build and $38,000 a day to operate. The area is "exploding with action," says William C. Keefe, president of Houston's Panhandle Eastern Pipe Line Co. He should know. To harvest deep deposits lying 125 ft. below the sea surface and another three miles under the sea bottom, a Panhandle subsidiary last month finished a 150-mile underwater section of 30-inch pipe that will eventually reach shore and extend a full length of 200 miles out to sea. Costing $67 million, the Panhandle job is the Gulf's biggest project to date.

No Sign of Letup. Natural gas has been piped from the gulf since 1937, and estimates are that the area harbors some 79 trillion cubic feet of gas or about one-fourth of the total U.S. reserves. The pipelaying splurge began sometime last year when natural-gas companies, who form the nation's sixth largest industry, found demand outpacing supply. Then came a fillip from the Federal Power Commission in Washington. Ruling that the gas companies should bring the Louisiana deposits ashore individually, the FPC scotched the plans of a large group of 30 oil companies headed by Shell to build a single, cooperative system.

There is no sign of a letup in the resulting proliferation of pipe, even though some lines already parallel others. Gas companies plan to lay out another 850 miles next year, despite some gathering economic clouds. It takes about three years before a pipeline even begins paying its way, and it will be a long time before the gas companies can retrieve their share of the total $8 billion sunk off Louisiana so far. Even now, other underwater strikes are turning up, notably off Texas.

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