Probing one of its recent discoveries in deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, Royal Dutch Shell found 100 million barrels of oil equivalent buried at its Kaikias field, nearby three of its massive production facilities and a network of subsea pipes, the company said Wednesday. The one-year-old Kaikias discovery, about 60 miles south of the Louisiana coast in the Mars-Ursa basin, is nowhere near the size of the big-ticket deep-water oil fields that Shell uncovered in that region two decades ago. But its location near existing oil-production infrastructure make it an attractive bounty for an industry that has had to dramatically rein in exploration spending and project costs as oil prices languish under $45 a barrel. The field would be much cheaper to develop than more remote projects, far removed from the Gulf’s expansive network of pipelines that help ship crude to land. A 100-million-barrel find “is not […]