You can send shock waves down to the ocean floor all day, but ultimately you're going to have to drill a little if you want to know if you have a potential gusher on your hands. Floating Rigs Semi-submersibles can be used in water depths from 60 to 6,000 metres (200 to 20,000ft). For the oil rigs that operate in really deep water, they more or less float and are anchored in position really really well. If the shock wave reaches a change in rock layers, it bounces back up toward hydrophones dragged behind the survey ship. The downside, however, is that when they're at sea, they work 12-hour days, seven days a week. Having been pre-constructed in a very short time, they were then floated to their location and placed on the shallow bottom of the Thames and the Mersey estuary. Hale, Briony. As many of these rigs are located far from cities and shores, the employees (who range from engineers and geologists to divers and doctors) live for weeks at a time on these huge structures. Engineers lower a drill string -- a series of pipes designed to drill down to the oil deposit -- through the riser. Once the drill hits petroleum, a final bit of casing called a production casing goes down to the bottom of the shaft. (Sept. 2, 2008)http://skyscraperpage.com/diagrams/?1241105, Special Offer on Antivirus Software From HowStuffWorks and TotalAV Security. The design achieves this by relying on a narrower tower of steel and concrete. A submersible or barge MODU usually consists of a barge that rests on the sea floor at depths of around 30 to 35 feet (9.1 to 10.7 meters). In 1928, a Texan oilman unveiled the first mobile oil platform for drilling in wetlands. The first production spar[when?] As you might imagine, the platform has to remain as stationary as possible during all this drilling, no matter how severe the weather becomes. Perdido's hull is 550 feet long and 118 . Offshore production platforms may be marvels of modern engineering, but none of that valuable petroleum makes its way out of the wells and into refineries without a great deal of human labor. Geophysical companies conduct scientific surveys in offshore areas by bouncing soundwaves off the seafloor. Offshore rigs are used to drill in both shallow and deep . "Pumped Up: Chevron Drills Down 30,000 Feet to Tap Oil-Rich Gulf of Mexico." HowStuffWorks.com. An onshore job is also more attractive for the aging workforce in the petroleum industry, at least in the western world. On the next page, we'll take a look at the different types of offshore production platforms. It experiences more horizontal motion and a certain degree of vertical motion, but it allows oil companies to drill at depths of up to 7,000 feet (2,134 meters), well over a mile (1.6 kilometers) beneath the waves. In water, the energy source is typically an array of different sized air-chambers, filled with compressed air. These self-propelled vessels are anchored to the ocean bot- Miles away from the shore in the open ocean stands an oil platform towering above the water like a skyscraper. The first semi-submersible resulted from an unexpected observation in 1961. Not all of these options are particularly viable, however, if the terrain you're canvassing is thousands of feet below pitching ocean waves. In fact, larger oil rigs often employ more than a hundred workers to keep the platform running. Once a show has occurred, drilling stops and geologists perform additional tests to make sure oil quality and quantity are sufficient to justify further action. Please copy/paste the following text to properly cite this HowStuffWorks.com article: Robert Lamb The report was commissioned in 1988, and was delivered in November 1990. To help cope with these issues, petroleum companies frequently put a great deal of effort into providing comfortable living conditions for offshore workers. It is most often used for exploratory drilling of new oil or gas wells in deep water but can also be used for scientific drilling. Tires as reefs were appealing for two reasons. Solid petroleum deposits often take the form of oil shale or tar sands. What Is An Oil Rig? Jack-ups, the most common rigs, typically cost between $180 million and $190 million to build [source: Offshore Magazine]. Spars are moored to the seabed like TLPs, but whereas a TLP has vertical tension tethers, a spar has more conventional mooring lines. The drilling mud lubricates the drill bit, seals the wall of the well and controls pressure inside the well. Some variants of these applications, called FSO (floating storage and offloading system) or FSU (floating storage unit), are used exclusively for storage purposes, and host very little process equipment. Elements in the oil/gas production process include wellhead, production manifold, production separator, glycol process to dry gas, gas compressors, water injection pumps, oil/gas export metering and main oil line pumps. But it was Kerr-McGee Oil Industries (now part of Occidental Petroleum), as operator for partners Phillips Petroleum (ConocoPhillips) and Stanolind Oil & Gas (BP), that completed its historic Ship Shoal Block 32 well in October 1947, months before Superior actually drilled a discovery from their Vermilion platform farther offshore. Depending on the circumstances, the platform may be fixed to the ocean floor, consist of an artificial island, or float. Instead of sinking until its lower hull rests on the seafloor (which, in deeper waters, would drown everyone), it simply lets enough water in to lower it to appropriate operating heights. The resulting investigation conducted by Lord Cullen and publicized in the first Cullen Report was highly critical of a number of areas, including, but not limited to, management within the company, the design of the structure, and the Permit to Work System. It is operated by Royal Dutch Shell and was built at a cost of $3billion. To ensure accurate drilling, engineers connect the drill site to the platform with a subsea drilling template. [13] The deepest operational platform is the Petrobras America Cascade FPSO in the Walker Ridge 249 field in 2,600 meters of water. Once cemented into place, this conductor pipe barrier lines the hole and prevents leaks and caving. In 1947, a consortium of oil companies built the first platform that you couldn't see from land in the Gulf of Mexico. Subsea System (SS) ranges from single subsea wells producing to a nearby platform, FPS, or TLP to multiple wells producing through a manifold and pipeline system to a distant production facility. While the design may vary depending on the exact ocean floor conditions, the drilling template basically resembles a large metal box with holes in it to mark the site of each production well. Once the well has been drilled by a surface platform, the automated systems transfer the oil and natural gas to production facilities by either risers or undersea pipelines. To surmount these obstacles, petroleum companies have invested billions into the development of offshore drilling and offshore oil platforms. This happens because: Shallow seas often had the correct . On the plus side, salary and benefits are usually pretty good, and employees typically enjoy long rest periods when they're not at sea. This process operates at around 1000C and removes carbon in a solid form from the methane, producing hydrogen. Robots Improve Efficiency and Worker Safety on Transocean Oil Rigs Transocean, a leading offshore drilling contractor, has rig operations located in harsh environment and ultra-deep water locations across the globe. In the weeks or months it takes to reach the oil deposit, the bit may dull and require replacement. World Petroleum Council. Semisubmersibles float on the surface of the ocean on top of huge, submerged pontoons. When searching for fossil fuels at sea, oil geologists are able to use special sniffer equipment to detect traces of natural gas in seawater. "Oil Rig, 9 Miles Offshore, Is Home and Work Above the Sea." Some can convert from drilling rigs to production rigs, reducing the need for a second rig to take its place once oil is found. As the pontoons were not sufficiently buoyant to support the weight of the rig and its consumables, it was towed between locations at a draught midway between the top of the pontoons and the underside of the deck. The oil is extracted from the seafloor then tied-back to an existing production platform. These measures not only help to safeguard the lives of their employees, but also protect their truly massive financial investment in constructing and sustaining an offshore production platform. In the next section, we'll follow the well down to the petroleum itself. GlobalSecurity.org. The drilling process itself occurs in phases. Pipelines are classified in three categories: Geophysical companies, drillers and producers are just three types of companies that are part of the offshore oil and gas production ecosystem. Tension Leg Platform (TLP) consists of a floating structure held in place by vertical, tensioned tendons connected to the sea floor by pile-secured templates. Divers have been used to assess the fish populations surrounding the platforms.[34]. Even the North Sea, which endures nearly constant inclement weather, is currently home to many offshore drilling sites [source: The Guardian]. Steel GBS are predominantly used when there is no or limited availability of crane barges to install a conventional fixed offshore platform, for example in the Caspian Sea. In 1937, Pure Oil Company (now Chevron Corporation) and its partner Superior Oil Company (now part of ExxonMobil Corporation) used a fixed platform to develop a field in 14 feet (4.3m) of water, one mile (1.6km) offshore of Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana. The oldest offshore well recorded in Infield's offshore database is the Bibi Eibat well which came on stream in 1923 in Azerbaijan. Finally, an 8-inch (20-centimeter) bit bores the rest of the way to the petroleum deposit. The trend today is to conduct more of the production operations subsea, by separating water from oil and re-injecting it rather than pumping it up to a platform, or by flowing to onshore, with no installations visible above the sea. 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