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Why we should leave old oil rigs in the sea, and why we don’t
- kabes 6y agoBit of topic, but that video in the article of these 2 boats lifting the entire oil rig is the coolest thing I've seen this month.
- cesis 6y agoIt's actually a single ship not 2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneering_Spirit_(ship) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneering_Spirit_(ship)
- glup 6y agoI want to grow up and be this ship.
- tda 6y agoAnd because of this ship it is easy to see how expensive topside removal must be. The vessel costed some 2.5B or so. Recovering that in a few dozen decommissionings means a Hugh price. And don't forget the operational cost of a crew of a few hundred, easily adds up to a few 100k/day. Then the topside, probably full of toxic flame retardants and asbestos needs to be dealt with.
- n3k5 6y agoThis page has a picture that shows the vessel's layout more clearly: https://deltamarin.com/references/pioneering-spirit-pieter-schelte-pipelay-vessel/ https://deltamarin.com/references/pioneering-spirit-pieter-s...
- megablast 6y agoIt’s so great, that you don’t even link to it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWsl-6P09eM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWsl-6P09eM
- robocat 6y agoThe Shell promo video is longer and has more details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5xXmEHPFp8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5xXmEHPFp8
- zackangelo 6y agoI helped build and worked on a similar vessel, the VB10K [0]. We originally built it just for this purpose (decommissioning) after a bunch of hurricanes toppled oil rigs between 2005-2008. [0] https://gcaptain.com/interesting-ship-versbar-heavy-lift-vessel/ https://gcaptain.com/interesting-ship-versbar-heavy-lift-ves...
- noja 6y ago"Decommissioning the UK’s offshore oil and gas infrastructure will cost the taxpayer £24 billion" errr... what? Why is the entity that installed the platform there not responsible for that cost? This article reads very much like a paid piece.
- ghouse 6y agoPrivatize the gains (assets), socialize the losses (or the liability)
- serjester 6y agoBP was owned by the British government up until 1987. Maybe it’s their rigs from back in the day? Private companies are usually required to have insurance to cover decommissioning their assets in the event of bankruptcy. I’d be very surprised if Britain wasn’t directly involved in the operation of these.
- redis_mlc 6y agoThe notable exception is nuclear plants. In the US, they just get their operating certificate extended until they fail, then the owner hires a bk lawyer. Fukushima will cost over $1 trillion to cleanup, plus the Japanese mobilized their military to source enough labor.
- throwaway2048 6y agoIf its anything like how it works in most other oil and gas sectors, they transfer the well infrastructure to shell companies for next to nothing when they are at or near the end of their useful production life, that then promptly go bankrupt. Now the big companies don't have to pay for clean up, magic.
- noja 6y agoThat only works once. If the other side expects shenanigans, then the company can prepay the cleanup cost somehow, either as an ongoing tax, as upfront fee, or as an insurance pool that you pay into. There are probably hundreds of ways of structuring it.
- taylorfinley 6y agoThis piece felt pretty one-sided, and given that it advocates for reducing costs to the petrochemical industry I was curious about the author and his potential motivations for writing this piece. I found it informative that on his linkedin profile he describes himself as a "Chemical Engineering Consultant."
- mc32 6y agoIt sounds like it, but it’s not the industry that pays directly, but the government. That said the question is are the habitats created, on balance, better than any of the drawbacks of leaving the systems in place? What happens when the structures partially collapse or completely collapse? Do they create dangers either to well heads, vessels, ecosystems ?
- tda 6y agoMaybe one day we figure out how to reuse the foundation/jacket for a huge windmill, that would be a win. And enough space to add an offshore High Voltage Station
- simonebrunozzi 6y agoI'm surprised that all these oil rigs are not used by libertarians to start new micronations.
- yostrovs 6y agoWhy only libertarians? You can have communists living on these rigs in utopia as well.
- Mountain_Skies 6y agoThere's no reason why communists couldn't make an attempt but historically micronations have been much more of a libertarian thing than a communist one. Communists seem to be much more into either changing the economic system of an entire country or founding communes within a existing country than being into making ocean platforms into a new communist nation.
- mattmanser 6y agoNot really true, there's loads of communes that were started in the 60s/70s, many still around today.
- Mountain_Skies 6y agoNot sure what in my comment implied that communes don't continue to exist.
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- Ancapistani 6y agoThey’re not far enough out to be in international waters.
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- smackay 6y agoIt's a long flight across the North Sea for migrating birds and the platforms have provided a rest stop and no doubt saved many birds from a watery grave - the gas flares have probably killed many more but that's another matter. My brother was meteorologist out on the rigs for a while and he said that one morning after a storm he went outside and the heli-deck was completely packed with Golden Plovers (Pluvialis apricaria). There was not a square centimetre left exposed. Another time, in a force 12 gale, he watched a Lapwing (Vanellus vanellus) just outside the control room window flying for 20 minutes without making any headway against the wind. Not sure if it made it onto the platform.
- Pick-A-Hill2019 6y agoOk - I get the 'artificial reef is good' aspect but leaving the topside structures in place? No way is that environmentally safe to do (imo). I’ve been on a few rigs over the years and the Topside structures are heavily contaminated with various petrochemicals. By the time you have decontaminated it sufficiently for it not to be toxic to marine life and doing it at sea with all of the added costs and complexities vs. a full cap and off-shore decommission? Uhmm no, the sums don't add up. Factor in the the added (admittedly pennies per tonne) value of the the scrap metal and the benefits of just leaving it there are head scratching. Being fair – perhaps a properly capped well with the jacket left as an artificial reef might make sense, although the chances of it being snagged or snapped in the decades to come by a passing vessel probably outweighs the slight benefits of leaving it there for marine life to inhabit it. I’m assuming that the proposal in TFA includes the costs of ensuring that all of that rusting infrastructure is properly decontaminated before it slowly corrodes and drops down to the sea bed but the article doesn't seem to mention that. The costs of ensuring that the topside structure (the 'oil rig' bit that sticks out of the water) is properly decontaminated at sea to a level that would be safe(-ish) for marine life? Yeah, I think HN correctly spotted the smell of bs in the authors' proposal.
- OldHand2018 6y agoThe article includes a link to the US program for turning rigs into reefs [1]. You should read that link. To start, the rig must be a good candidate for acceptance into the program (which includes contamination - or lack thereof) and the operator must generally “donate” half of the money they would save to the US state that will be accepting the rig to pay for the costs involved in maintaining the rig as a reef. [1] https://www.bsee.gov/what-we-do/environmental-focuses/rigs-to-reefs https://www.bsee.gov/what-we-do/environmental-focuses/rigs-t...
- Triv888 6y ago> I’ve been on a few rigs over the years and the Topside structures are heavily contaminated with various petrochemicals. I bet that is nothing compared to what leaked from the well..
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- korethr 6y agoIf I understand this correctly the obligation to remove these structures from internetational law that the UK has agreed to. ISTM that the point of this law is to protect the ecosystems of the waters -- it seems to be operating on the assumption that leaving these structures in the ocean causes them to remain a disruption to the ecosystem. A sort of, you made your mess, now clean up after yourself, rationale. But if leaving these structures in the ocean causes them to to become marine habits and is actually a net positive on the marine ecosystem, then the goals of this policy are at odds with its actual effects. So now I wonder how hard it is to go back to OSPAR with evidence that leaving the structures in place is a good thing and getting the policy changed to allow that. Hopefully the OSPAR convention is less dysfunctional than the US Congress?
- demarq 6y agorig will rust and finally give in to the forces of the ocean, taking the habitat with it.
- robbrown451 6y agoIt's odd that they say it only creates 35 jobs. Then why is it so expensive? Seems like if it is so expensive, that will create, if not jobs, lots of person-hours of work, which is effectively jobs. Ok, so the jobs may be out of the country, such as manufacturers of equipment, but still. It takes labor to make it happen, and that is jobs. I'm not one to advocate for doing things just to create jobs, but that statement seemed disingenuous.
- walrus01 6y agoI don't think we should set the political precedent that the oil industry should be allowed to abandon infrastructure in place and let it decay naturally. Ever. For any purpose. Look at the history of the open pit mining industry, and underground mining industry abandoning things in place and the environmental havoc it has caused. Resource extraction industries have proven time and time again that they cannot be trusted as responsible environmental stewards without aggressive oversight. recent example on abandoned things in oil/gas industry: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=alberta+abandoned+gas+wells https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=alberta+a...
- aaron695 6y agoNo one kills off ecosystems better than the environmentalists and their Taliban style system of puritanism. We have enough deserts in the solar system. We should be developing the ocean deserts more.
- AtlasBarfed 6y agoWhen I guess that there will be a "reverse economies of scale" that will really bury the petroleum industry, this is a shining example. 24 billion to shutter these things?