Offshore drilling is back in the news with the energy crisis squarely upon America’s shoulders.  Should we or shouldn’t we? Is this the answer to our short-term energy shortage and can it get us through a 20-year transition to cleaner, renewable energy alternatives?  

Ask Bob Bauer (BSPTE ’42) and he’ll say, “Yes, yes and yes.” This comes from a Viterbi School petroleum engineering graduate who roughnecked in the oil fields near campus when offshore drilling was still new.

Bob Bauer at home in Whittier Hills.

Bauer had what most of his fellow graduates didn’t have back in the 1940s – experience – and Union Oil Company knew it.  They snatched him up right out of college, at a time when scientists knew more about the Moon than they did about 70 percent of Earth’s crust — the 70 percent that is underwater — and put him to work.  Bauer had already spent years as a driller and knew how to prospect in uncharted territory.   

He designed a diving bell — three feet in diameter, five feet high and 1,500 pounds heavy — an air-tight chamber with just enough instrumentation to support one operator on a brief prospecting trip along the bottom of the sea.  Divers usually looked for salt domes along the ocean floor, a geophysical phenomena that occurs in association with oil deposits. The hope was that these explorations would also help them better understand California’s complex offshore geology.

The bell wasn’t a particularly new device, but Bauer’s model had novel features, most importantly that its operator could release himself from the heavy base and bob to the surface in an emergency. Moving from place to place along the bottom, an operator holding a gravimeter between his legs was able to take readings from a permanently level surface rather than from the deck of a boat, which rises and falls with every wave. Each time he detected a strong gravitational pull along the bottom, he recorded the coordinates and a core sample of gray-green clay could be extracted to determine its oil content.   

Bauer worked on his diving bell for several years. In May of 1946, he was ready to try it out.  Amid the media blitz at Los Angeles Harbor, he won a coin flip with his colleagues from Union Oil Co. and hopped into the diving bell to take the maiden plunge. Fitting snugly into the capsule, he dropped to a depth of 100 feet, tested the equipment and telephoned his results to the surface.  When it was all over, his boss, Cy Rubel, vice president of Union Oil Company, eagerly climbed into the chamber and dropped to the muddy floor.  “Didn’t see a single mermaid,” he told reporters when he re-emerged.  

Bauer was only 28 years old when his diving bell opened up offshore drilling along the Pacific Ocean. Diving bells gave geologists the ability to conduct gravimetric work from floating vessels anywhere in the ocean.  A ship with a diving bell became a floating rig, and these platforms could be deployed quickly and inexpensively, yielding returns much faster than permanent onshore oil rigs.

Bauer's diving bell.

"We thought there were real opportunities in the field of floating drilling rigs,” he told the Oil and Gas Journal (June 6, 1960), “and by reason of our past experience, we felt we were well qualified in the field.  So we chose to gamble our future on independence.”

He and a handful of drillers who belonged to the CUSS Group (Continental, Union, Shell and Superior) struck out on their own in 1958. The CUSS companies agreed to let Bauer and his associates establish themselves as an independent contractor and sold them the CUSS Group’s floating equipment. They formed Global Marine Exploration Co. in Los Angeles with Bauer at the helm.  

Sitting in his spacious Whittier Hills home not too long ago, Bauer, who is now 90, went through several photo albums of his remarkable career without blinking an eye at the headlines he made in offshore drilling. He flipped through page after page of presidential invitations and letters of gratitude from every administration going back to the 1950s, skipped over news clips of his trips to Iran and Japan, even shrugged off a cover story in Life magazine written by John Steinbeck.     

"The reason I got so many headlines was because I had to go see everyone to get things done,” he said. “I met heads of government all the time.”

Bauer was born in Declo, Idaho, on Jan. 10, 1918, the son of a salesman who moved the family around during his early years.  He got his grammar school education in Rocky Mountain schools, until a favorite uncle in California lured him to the West Coast with a job offer.  Bauer worked his way through USC by roughnecking in the oil fields surrounding Los Angeles, taking six years to finish his BS in petroleum engineering.  After graduation, he joined Union Oil Co. of California and was soon doing research work in drilling and production.

Bauer climbs into the diviing bell for its maiden voyage to the bottom of Los Angeles Harbor.

He met his wife, Dorothy, through a friend who was attending Woodbury College and married her shortly thereafter.  A rugged outdoorsman, Bauer wanted to settle in Montana, where he could ranch and raise horses, but Dorothy didn’t want to leave her native Southern California, so they raised a family of four daughters near the Whittier oil fields that brought wealth to Southern California.

In his early days with Union Oil Co., the CUSS Group built the well-known CUSS I, a Navy barge redesigned to take sample cores from deep in the earth’s surface under 12,000 feet of water.  CUSS I became the prelude to Project Mohole, which was the first attempt by geologists to pierce through the Earth’s mantle.  Project Mohole cost less than one missile launch from Cape Canaveral and confirmed geologists’ hunch that the ocean floor was carpeted in layers of sedimentary rock, basalt and fossil deposits laid down millions of years before.  

Global Marine built floating rigs up and down the coast, from Santa Barbara County to Mexico’s Gulf Coast, and had a profound influence on the future of offshore drilling. Five generations of CUSS ships were set to sea in ensuing years. These floating rigs introduced new and unique opportunities in ocean-floor mining, tunneling (such as between England and France, which was being considered at the time), underwater television and national defense.  The platforms also made offshore oil drilling possible for the price of onshore oil.

Global Marine’s success transformed Southern California, pumping wealth into its economy and fueling Bauer’s reputation worldwide. He was named to the National Academy of Engineering and received accolades from industry leaders and government officials around the globe. A new underwater species was named for him. Admirers included Zohrab Kaprielian, former USC vice provost for academic administration and research and dean of the engineering school, who gave him the Distinguished Alumni Award in 1972.  

Bauer meets with industry officials in the 1950s.

In later years, he and his wife moved to the 1.5-acre estate he calls home today.  The landscape is laden with huge, healthy rose bushes, fruit trees and a koi pond in the front yard. A breeze from the Pacific Ocean blows through this hilly community, which once supported many more oil rigs than are operating today. This is Bauer’s niche, close to the Los Angeles Harbor where he once made news.

Ask him if there’s oil in that harbor and he won’t blink an eye.  

“There’s lots of oil offshore today and we should go out there and get it,” he said.  “That oil is what will get us through the next 20 years while we’re trying to move into other technologies.”