The world
has a problem with its oil rigs. There are too many of them, and for the first
time since the earliest manufacture of seaborne drilling platforms 50 or 60
years ago, decisions are being made about how and where to get rid of them in
number. That there should be a sudden surplus is vexing for those invested in
undersea drilling: as recently as 2010 the rigs were thought too few. Back
then, had an oil company such as Shell or BP or Marathon wanted to dig down and
discover what was lying beneath a particular patch of sea, it wasn’t unusual
for them to wait as long as a year until an exploration company such as
Transocean or Diamond or Ensco had a rig available to lease to them. It was a
time of under supply. Dozens of new rigs were commissioned, and worldwide orders
tripled between 2010 and 2011. But oil rigs take two or three years to build,
and by the time these were ready for use, the price of oil had declined
sharply, and with it the industry’s hunger to prospect – thus the oversupply.
Rigs without contracts to drill were either “cold-stacked” (anchored without
crew) to wait for a market recovery, or sold for demolition. More than 40 oil
rigs were waved off on end-of-life voyages in 2015, according to data gathered
by a Brussels-based maritime NGO called Shipbreaking Platform; up from a single
dispensed-with rig, so far as the NGO knew, in 2014.
When a drilling platform is scheduled for destruction, it must go on a thousand-mile final journey to the breaker’s yard. As one rig proved when it crashed on to the rocks of a remote Scottish island, this is always a risky business
It was night, stormy, and the oil rig Transocean Winner was somewhere in the North Atlantic on 7 August 2016 when her tow-line broke. No crew members were on board. The rig was being dragged by a tugboat called Forward, the tethered vessels charting a course out of Norway that was meant to take them on a month-long journey to Malta. Within the offices of Transocean Ltd, the oil-exploration company that owned the rig, such a journey might have been described with corporate seemliness as an “end-of-life voyage”; but in the saltier language heard offshore, the rig was “going for fucking razorblades” – for scrap, to be dismantled in a shipbreaking yard east of Malta. In that Atlantic storm, several thousand miles from her intended destination, Winner floated free.
The
33-year-old rig had never moved with so little constraint. Winner was huge –
17,000 tonnes, like an elevated Trafalgar Square, complete with a middle
derrick as tall as Nelson’s Column, her four legs the shape of castle keeps;
all this was borne up in the water on a pair of barge-sized pontoons – and its
positioning had always been precisely controlled. While moored, she was held in
place by eight heavy anchors. At other times, she was sailed with a pilot at
the helm as if she were any other ship. When contracted to drill in the North
Sea, as she had been since the 1980s, boring into the bedrock for hidden
reservoirs of oil, Winner’s anchors and underwater propellers worked together
with her on-board computers to “dynamically position” her – that is, keep her
very still. The men and women who formed Winner’s crew – drillers and engineers
and geologists and divers and cleaners and cooks, most of them Norwegian – imagined
this rig to have a character that would resist such checks. They nicknamed her Svanen,
or Swan, because to them she was both elegant and unyielding. Scheduled as she
was for destruction, Winner could not have chosen a better moment to bolt.
In the spring of 2016, for instance, at about the time Transocean was considering whether or not to decommission Winner, its drilling rival Ensco sent away two rigs that were relatively new: built in 2004, and meant to bear 30 or 40 years of graft, but hurriedly euthanised after 12. Winner, by comparison, had lived long and busily. She was launched in 1983, and in the decades since had bobbed through market downturns and upturns, through winter hurricanes and underwater blowouts, and at least two on-board deaths. For the most part, Winner’s 33 years at sea had been characterised by day after day of patient, repetitive work – the stuff that gives offshore life its rhythm and, for many, its special comfort.
.” In
July 2016, Winner’s scrapping was confirmed. A Norwegian crane operator posted a
message on the rig’s Facebook page: “Malta og spiker next.” Loosely
translated, he meant: “Malta next, then a furnace – somewhere.”
It
is common for rigs on end-of-life voyages to be towed with their tracking
systems switched off. On 3 August, Winner sent out a final blip from a fjord in
southern Norway, near Stavanger, and then stopped sending a signal. The tugboat
Forward then took her out into the North Sea. On 6 August, Winner entered the
Atlantic, and the next day she was lost in the storm off the Hebrides. On 8
August, shortly before sunrise on the Isle of Lewis, the oil rig washed in with
the tide
Her 17,000 tonnes came in on Dalmore Bay, one of the island’s prettiest beaches.
As it was, the rig collided with the headland that defined Dalmore Bay’s southern edge.
What had begun as the quiet removal of Winner from Norway – a journey scarcely noticed by anyone outside the oil business – was now a richly public event.
Transocean company had in its fleet more rigs than any other drilling
company – more than 70 in 2016 – and the earlier pruning of about a dozen of
these vessels had been conducted with discretion.
What does this to marine life and to the quality of the water? And what are the plans for the future with this large amount of steel that have a limited life span?
Is somebody thinking of that or they just go out of business and do not care about the environment and the large amount of steel left.
Nobody
in this part of the country could forget what had happened in the Shetlands in
the early 1990s when a tanker, Braer, foundered in a storm off the
islands’ southern edge and disgorged many thousands of tonnes of crude oil into
the water. There were fears of a similar spill from Winner, but the truth was
that, although she was often referred to as an oil rig, Winner’s real business
was mud. During her decades at sea, Winner was generally a tunneller,
commissioned to bore through layers of undersea rock and sludge, after which a
purpose-built tanker would float in and slurp up any finds.
It is time to think to a global strategy that have the Earth and the Oceans in mind when implementing the economical concepts. And these environmental friendly practices should be thought in schools. International corporations and government should implement business practices that protect the water and the land and the wild life and people.
Link
http://www.johnmacleanphotography.com/n_transocean-winner-oil-rig-dalmore-broadbay-isle-lewis/
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/23/oil-rig-that-ran-aground-on-scottish-beach-refloated/ https://getpocket.com/explore/item/where-oil-rigs-go-to-die?utm_source=pocket-newtab
