The lead off batter in that play was McMoRan trying to develop the Davy Jones Field. Here's an update from 2013 frtom Forbes:
"We got an interesting update this week from McMoRan Exploration, America's ballsiest oil and gas explorer, on the status of the ultradeep wells it has drilled in the shallow waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Led by legendary geologist Jim Bob Moffett, McMoRan said in its new quarterly report that it has sunk a total of $1.2 billion to drill six behemoth wells, including Davy Jones, Blackbeard and Lafitte.
Moffett, as we've written before, is going after deeper reservoirs of natural gas than anyone has before -- more than 30,000 feet below sea level. McMoRan's exploration wells have indeed found bountiful quantities of hydrocarbons. But the trouble now is figuring out how to complete and produce these wells.
Davy Jones is perhaps the most watched well in the entire U.S. oil and gas industry right now. McMoRan has drilled two wells into the Davy Jones structure, discovering high-quality sandstone reservoirs of more than 300 feet thick and filled with natural gas. The reservoirs have been proven to stretch more than 2 miles across between the two Davy Jones wells."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/christophe ... 0fab52a92cAnd from Dec 2015:
"Freeport-McMoRan Inc. co-founder James “Jim Bob” Moffett’s last big gamble as head of the world’s largest copper miner was a $1.2 billion wrong-way bet six miles beneath the Louisiana coastline.
Bloomberg reports Moffett, a legendary wildcatter and geologist whose credits include the gigantic Grasberg copper deposit in Indonesia, is stepping down as chairman and director at Freeport as the minerals, oil and gas producer turns to cutbacks and cash preservation amid a deepening commodities meltdown.
The 77-year-old Moffett in 2007 staked much of the company’s future on an obscure cluster of gas-soaked rocks, hidden beneath coastal Louisiana oil fields, that had been discarded by bigger operators including Exxon Mobil Corp. After seven years of drilling, Freeport in January suspended work on fields with names like Davy Jones and Blackbeard."
https://www.businessreport.com/article/ ... t-freeportAnd the latest news I could find. From Jan 2016:
"PEOPLE call us pioneers. Well...some people say pioneers end up with arrows in their back.” So James “Jim Bob” Moffett, one of the great wildcatters of the past half-century, presaged his fate in 2012. On December 28th Freeport-McMoRan, the firm he founded and built into a global mining and oil giant, said he was stepping aside as executive chairman.
He seems to be the latest casualty of the “Icahn effect”, the toppling of larger-than-life entrepreneurs of the commodities boom after Carl Icahn, a veteran activist investor, buys stakes in their firms and seeks to shift their focus to cost-cutting. Though Mr Moffett, a geologist, found one of the world’s largest copper and gold mines, Grasberg, in the mountains of Indonesia, in 1988, his costly pursuit of the appropriately named Davy Jones gasfield in the Gulf of Mexico, as well as controversial takeovers, upset many shareholders. So did a 70% drop in Freeport’s share price during 2015"
https://www.economist.com/news/business ... n-you-cant