Where Oil Rigs Go to Die (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Where Oil Rigs Go to Die (2017)

theguardian.com

114 pointsfredley30 comments

The graveyard shot is incredible.

Surprised there's not more photos of ship-breaking itself, which lends itself to some dramatic shots. Examples: https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2014/11/the-ship-breakers/...

It really is. My first engineering job out of school was designing offshore drilling rigs (mostly service systems like ballast) and running shipyard projects. The economics of the industry have really gone through boom and bust cycles as the article says. I lucked out on timing. I got out just as a bust cycle was getting serious to go back to school as I had always planned to anyway.

They truly are magnificent structures. The popular image of the oil industry is one of roughnecks around ugly old drilling equipment next to a hole in the ground.

The size and scale of the engineering challenge, especially of deep water drilling, are incredible. I wish more people could be exposed to the marvels of engineering in the O&G industry.

I was interested to learn a while back that one of the rigs I worked on the design of, the Ocean Odyssey, was repurposed as an equatorial launch platform after it was damaged in a blowout. It was mothballed after Sea Launch ran into financial difficulties.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odyssey_(launch_platform)

I haven't kept up with the industry but, especially in retrospect, it was a great first job.

Several satellites, including the first X-ray telescope, Uhuru, was launched from a former oil platform off the coast of Kenya:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broglio_Space_Center

What graveyard shot? All I see is ads.

https://media.guim.co.uk/51370940379b5a46c6f1f917b3f025e4da3...

Those are some really good photos, thank you.

Slightly off topic: Here is an amazing video of the heavy lift ship Pioneering Spirit lifting an off-shore rig off its base.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jEXmOQ22fQ

The Pioneering Spirit is the largest ship, in terms of gross tonnage, by a wide margin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_ships_by_gross...

edit: forgot video link....

Im assuming you are referring to this video?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jEXmOQ22fQ

Yes, thank-you.

Great find. On a related note, one of the best pieces of journalism I've found in the past several years is about a similar incident: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/magazine/the-wreck-of-the...

What a strangely touching article. I'm not particularly interested in oil rigs, but that was a compelling read.

> I'm not particularly interested in oil rigs,

Are many people?

For any UK comedy fans, there's an episode of Only Fools and Horses that was made to promote careers in the oil industry. No laughter track and I guess they didn't want to pay for the theme tune but it's still a fun watch

http://tellyspotting.kera.org/2013/11/08/the-lost-only-fools...

Is it worth sinking them in areas where they can boost aquatic life ecosystems or attract scuba diving tourism. I have read many times on how old shipwrecks turn into a house where lot of aquatic life flourish.

It's happened with production platforms. I assume in the case of the exploration rigs, there's a positive ROI to towing them to a ship breaker and selling them for scrap.

Too much value in the steel and other materials, I'd guess. Sounds like hard and dangerous work for people cutting them up, but it is work, probably in areas without a lot of other prospects.

The rig was worth about $3 million as scrap in Turkey, according to the article ($190/ton at 17,000 tons). Approximately $0, maybe less, if the owners were forced to send it to an EU scrapyard, as regulators keep threatening to enforce.

At that price level, sinking it to create an artificial reef for environmental or tourism benefits is a competitive option. Though there may be other reasons it's not best suited for that.

Surely they're absolutely filthy and you don't want all the paints, oils, lubricants going into the water?

Some can and are decontaminated and sunk for creating reefs. I dont think old oil tankers are used for obvious reasons.

The reason why I thought about this was because whenever you look at any world war timeline shipwrecks, it is totally overtaken by aquatic life. I am sure those ships had enough toxic things on them maybe radio active stuff too but somehow nature reclaimed it.

That does happen, but I think it's only done with fixed platform structures[0], rather than the mobile platforms like in the article. Apparently 532 rigs have been turned into reefs in the Gulf of Mexico[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_platform [1] https://www.bsee.gov/what-we-do/environmental-focuses/rigs-t...

Why not repurpose the rigs for residential use?

Huh? A drilling rig has a rather small living space for maybe 50 people or so in mostly bunk housing. Compared to, say, a cruise ship, they're tiny.

I wonder if it'd be possible to augment or replace the existing living spaces (and other spaces) on a rig. Maybe turn a rig into a hotel-on-the-water kind of thing.

The thing is: You're now effectively living on an island, albeit one that requires ongoing maintenance and other expenditures to remain seaworthy. And hope you don't have a big storm that you're very exposed to. Most people don't want to live someplace where they have to take a boat trip to go to work or the grocery store.

Some are fine with that but, guess what, you can often live on islands with a fairly low COL. There's tons of land in the US generally. It's just some specific locations of land that are expensive.

From an engineering perspective, you also can't build it up that much. When I worked on rig designs, every time we added equipment, we had to verify that the center of gravity remained within acceptable limits. You can't just build a multi-level structure atop the entire rig or it would become dangerously unstable.

They've tried floating hotels before, generally they aren't successful.

The problem with floating hotels is that they're all the disadvantages of cruise ships, mixed with the disadvantages of a hotel.

Like a cruise ship, you're still on a relatively small floating building, which limits the activities you can do, and you also have to deal with sea sickness and storms. Like a hotel you're stuck in one place, the main drawcard of cruise ships is that you're cruising between locations.

Now instead of a floating hotel, you could turn it into a little sovereign floating town for libertarians. People have proposed this and made efforts to manifest such a libertarian utopia, but have never actually succeeded.

aside from the significant engineering required, my guess is that most people who could afford to construct or live on such a structure don't actually find libertarianism that appealing.

Because an old wore out iron structure is extremely expensive to maintain and repair. For example, the FryingPan tower: http://www.fptower.com/

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