The Technology of Offshore Oil Drills and Oil Spills

Rachel Maddow, host of MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show,” made a good point recently about the technology of oil drills and oil spills, in questioning whether or not oil spill technology has kept pace with oil drill technology. The Horizon Deepwater Ocean rig, now resting about a mile beneath the waters in the Gulf of Mexico, did represent the state of the art in oil drilling technology in 2001 and still does to a large extent. And because of that fact, you have to wonder if the Horizon oil spill will represent the new standard for offshore oil spills.

In 2001, when the Horizon was built, it was even problematic for Hyundai, the rig builder, to move it. In fact, Fagioli PSC, the contractor responsible for moving the 12,800 ton rig, was credited with breaking a world weight moving record, moving what was known at the time as the RBS-8D semi-submersible deck.

Today, though, the Horizon Deepwater is becoming outdated. Displacing that technology, is Transocean’s new Discovery Enterprise. Unlike the Horizon rig, the Discovery Enterprise is a ship with an oil rig on top. Weighing in at 75 million pounds or about 37,500 tons, the Enterprise not only outweighs the Horizon, but also will out-drill it; capable of 35,000 feet compared to the Horizon’s drill depth of 30,000 feet.

Besides drilling capacity and weight, the Discovery is also mammoth in almost every other way. Onboard is 40 megawatts of power generation capacity, enough to power over 40,000 homes. And all that power goes through about 1,600 miles of cable and wiring. That power must  move and control the ship as well as manipulate the heavy oil drilling machinery, massive valves and pipes needed for today’s oil rigs.

The Enterprise, like the Horizon, is also equipped with a dynamic positioning system. However, the Enterprise’s dynamic positioning system uses just six 7,000 horsepower thrusters controlled by a triple redundant dynamic positioning system. That system, according to Transocean’s literature, is enough to keep the ship afloat in hurricanes.

However, despite all that stability built into the Enterprise, stability is not the major selling point of Transocean’s oil rig ship. The main selling point is that it is expected to reduce offshore drilling costs by about 40 percent.

On the other side of the coin is oil spill technology. For the Horizon oil spill, aerial thermal imaging technology, from the likes of companies such as Ocean Imaging, is being used to analyze where the oil slick is thickest and just how to use resources to contain the slick. That technology is complemented with the ADIOS system, developed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). ADIOS, which is basically an oil spill simulator, allows for first responders to predict how the oil spill and oil will respond to weather conditions such as wave height, wind and water temperature. Other oil spill technology being used comes from Elastec/American Marine. Elastec is providing fire booms, which are used to contain the oil and burn it.

One might think that using underwater robot technology to close off the valves to Horizon’s broken oil pipes would be part of the oil spill solution. But so far, these robots have not succeeded. And that’s because that task, even for the robots, may be daunting. Not only must robots deal with giant sized valves that are underneath 5,000 feet of water, but also they may very well have to deal with oily black water.

Regardless of how the oil spill pans out, the most likely scenario is that a new oil rig, a relief rig, will be set up near the old site of the Horizon. A new rig will alleviate the oil pressure and reduce the flow rate from the Horizon’s broken pipes. However even at that, it will take months for the new oil rig to be deployed.