News outlets have been covering ExxonMobil’s request for a court to review the U.S. Interior Department’s rejection of plans to develop our Julia oil discovery in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico.

I don’t plan to argue the case here. We’ll have our day in court, and suffice it to say that we believe we followed the rules and that the government should approve our plans to produce the oil – which we and co-venturer, Statoil, have so far spent more than $300 million to find and develop.

What I do want to talk about today are the headlines about a significant oil discovery and the questions from media and others about why we didn’t trumpet it from the rooftops when we made the find several years ago.

The answer is both complex and simple.

First, the simple. We drilled into a reservoir, named Julia, that our geologists and explorers believe contains a significant oil discovery.

Now the complex. The Julia discovery is located in what we call “ultra deepwater,” which is the frontier of oil and natural gas development. It’s not a simple matter of pumping the oil up and moving it to shore to be refined into finished products like gasoline for your car.

The oil is heavy; the rocks in which it is trapped won’t release it easily; and the water is very deep, which makes development technically and commercially challenging.

We needed to find a way to develop that oil in a safe, environmentally responsible way that makes a sufficient return for our shareholders in order to warrant investments of billions of their dollars. And remember, as I’ve said many times in the past, if you have mutual funds or participate in a public sector pension plan in the United States, there’s a good chance you’re one of our shareholders.

Thanks to years of research and technological development, the oil and gas industry has the tools and experience to find and access these remotely located resources. But we know we must approach this frontier with extreme caution and deliberate strategy. We have to be sure we make the right plans, use the right tools and implement the right safety measures.

It’s an approach that recent experience would suggest that government policy should promote and not discourage.

So, we don’t rush into these announcements until we know what we have, how much of it we can economically produce and whether we can do it safely. Once we’ve done that, we make an announcement, such as the 700-million-barrel Hadrian discovery in the Gulf of Mexico we talked about earlier this summer. Hadrian consisted of two oil discoveries and a gas find, and it actually took us a couple of years (plus interruption from the moratorium) to fully explore and evaluate.

For all these reasons, we are planning a conservative, phased approach to developing the Julia field. Our plan is to invest billions to produce just a fraction of the oil to gain insight into how best to safely and economically produce the remainder of the reservoir – if all goes well.

We spent more than $300 million to find the oil and presented a plan to government, which will create jobs and government revenues and increase U.S. energy security. We can’t do that in a courtroom.