Astronauts just had to get to the moon. They didn’t have to figure out how to extract oil from it.

With the new $3 billion Perdido oil and natural gas platform, in a remote deep-water area of the Gulf of Mexico, Shell and its partners have effectively done both.

After more than a decade of work, they began last month pumping oil at the massive floating facility, which sits in nearly 8,000 feet of water and draws from wells that far below the sea floor, setting several records along the way.

A recent visit to Perdido, roughly 200 miles south of Houston, brings the scope of the achievement into focus.

It also offers a g

limpse of what could be ahead for the oil and gas industry as it presses farther into one of the last remaining U.S. regions where big quantities of crude oil are still being discovered.

“What we’re seeing here is the start of a new frontier in the Gulf of Mexico,” Bill Townsley, Shell’s Perdido venture leader, said as he stood aboard the hulking steel structure, staffed with 150 people, that he has dedicated the last three years of his life to building.

Indeed, Perdido could offer a template for rivals to follow in coming years as they develop fields of their own in an emerging deep-water area known as the Lower Tertiary trend. In recent years, more than a dozen big oil discoveries have been in made Lower Tertiary formations — deposited from 65 million to 35 million to 23 million years ago — in a 300-mile band on the outer edge of the U.S. Gulf between Texas and Louisiana.

Shell’s Perdido — which in Spanish means “lost” — is the first to achieve commercial production there, but Lower Tertiary fields are also being developed by BP, Chevron Corp. and others and are expected to help reverse years of oil and gas output declines in the well-plowed offshore region.

Perdido alone is capable of producing 100,000 barrels of oil and 200 million cubic feet of natural gas per day — enough to meet the energy needs for over 2 million households for a year.

Though not at that level of production yet, getting to this point hasn’t been easy. Shell, with partners Chevron Corp. and BP, has done the equivalent of moving mountains to bring the project online.

To make the project feasible, Shell, the lead operator, and partners devised an elaborate plan for tying in three distinct fields — called Great White, Silver Tip and Tobago — and handling their production through a single platform. Doing it, however, would require drilling at least 35 wells, some as far as seven miles from the platform and all extremely costly.

“When we came at them with 35 wells, people’s heads exploded,” Townsley said.  >more

As many as 20 of the 100 deepwater oil rigs on order worldwide may be delayed or canceled as loan availability erodes, possibly slowing developments including the biggest petroleum discovery in the Americas in three decades.

About half of the 20 rigs in question are rented for when they’re completed in two to three years — no longer enough to ensure financing for units that can cost $800 million to build, said Brian Uhlmer, an analyst at Pritchard Capital Partners in Houston. The drillers building those rigs are mostly fledgling contractors and may lack enough cash to satisfy lenders amid a global credit crunch, he said.

Norway’s Sevan Marine ASA has lost 70 percent of its value this month amid concern it won’t get financing for two drilling units. Houston-based Atwood Oceanics Inc. said Oct. 16 that it won’t exercise an option to build a deepwater rig at Jurong Shipyard Pte. Ltd. in Singapore. New rigs were being ordered to ease a shortage of deepwater gear needed to exploit offshore prospects like Brazil’s Tupi, announced in November by Petroleo Brasileiro SA, or Petrobras.

“Petrobras would probably be the dominant oil and gas company that gets hit by this,” Uhlmer said.

Jose Sergio Gabrielli, chief executive officer at state- controlled Petrobras, said the Rio de Janeiro-based company may need to help find financing for some of its suppliers. “We are concerned about the supply chain of products for Petrobras,” Gabrielli told reporters at a conference in Houston last week. >more