Is This Platform the Future for Offshore Oil and Gas?
As Deepwater Horizon and Piper Alpha have shown, trying to get offshore oil and gas wells working properly can be a hazardous business.
I was converted to the idea and the economics of reuseable platforms many years ago, when I did the calculations for Balaena Structures in Cambridge.
A few days ago I was watching BBC Breakfast, when they had an item about F3-FA, which is a reuseable gas platform. It may have cost £200million, but it is intended to drain up to four or five smaller gas fields during ts working life.
The article says this about the costs of the design.
“Most platforms are permanently installed on the seabed, they are used for a number of years, after which they are decommissioned and brought back onshore,” he says.
“This platform is self-installing, which means it comes out on a barge, you put the legs down to the sea bed, you exploit the oil and gas out of the field and when the field is finished you do it in reverse and take it to the next field.
Just seven or eight people are needed to run the 9,000-tonnes facility“And you do that three or four times, thus reducing the cost.”
Note that statement about the platform needing a small crew. It must surely have safety and accommodation implications as well as cost.
Incidentally, it is very different to the Balaena I worked on. One day, I’ll put the details of that on this blog.
I Don’t Like Gas
There are reports coming in of a gas explosion in Salford. It would appear that people are trapped.
I don’t like gas and when I designed this house, the propane tanks are a long way from the house, the AGA is electric and the boiler is in an outhouse.
My fears stem partly from working in the chemical industry for ICI in the 1960s, when a gas explosion destroyed the reaction vessel and killed two people on Polythene 6 plant. A lot of engineers I worked with didn’t like compressed gas, as only a couple of kilograms have a tremendous explosive force.
My new house in London will probably be heated by gas, but I will make sure that all the safety equipment is installed. I will of course not allow anybody to smoke.
But even with all the checks, I’d much prefer that the only energy we took into our houses and factories was electricity. After all it is probably a lot safer and much easier to distribute!
The Anonymous Widower 