THE Oil & NGas Infrastructure Thread (merged)

Rickenbacker · Heavy Crude Joined: Jan 04, 2005 Posts: 140 Location: UK

If oil rigs are going to become useless, how easy would it be to use the base of the rig and create a wind turbine or perhaps wave powered generator?

RonMN · Posted: Thu Apr 14, 2005 9:24 am Post subject:

That would probably be a good idea! Until the next hurrican season smashes them all to pieces Crying or Very sad

pip · Posted: Thu Apr 14, 2005 9:51 am Post subject:

Wouldn't an offshore rig be a little too far from the grid?
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mortifiedpenguin · Heavy Crude Joined: Oct 15, 2004 Posts: 119

We could park all the huge, useless, gas guzzling tankers in a line and use them as platforms to string up power lines from the rigs to the mainland. Very Happy

Rickenbacker · Heavy Crude Joined: Jan 04, 2005 Posts: 140 Location: UK

haha thats not such a bad idea, if they genuinely are to become useless as vehicles, theyll probably be used by someone for something (self sustaining ecosystem on a ship/fishing will probably become more popular if cattle are uneconomical)

born2respawn · Posted: Fri Apr 15, 2005 4:38 pm Post subject:

The only problem with the idea would be hooking the system up to the grid, but seeing as people get really NIMBY over wind farms, it's not a bad idea. There are plenty of offshore windfarms in use around the world, so provided they're not positioned in an area prone to weather that could destroy them.

Aren't there plenty of offshore oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico at the moment anyway?

dmtu · Posted: Fri Apr 15, 2005 6:43 pm Post subject:

You jest, right?
A) there really isn't that many of them.
B) they are not permanent fixtures. They just drill the hole then move on to the next project and a relatively small pump is left where the rig was.
C) they are not even close to the size of actual commercial windmills.
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Devil · Posted: Sat Apr 16, 2005 12:48 am Post subject:

And
D) they are not engineered to carry a massively heavy lump of ironmongery which, by definition, will have massive lateral forces applied to it., at the top. They would buckle into the sea in the first few days.
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born2respawn · Posted: Sat Apr 16, 2005 4:31 pm Post subject:

Omnitir · Posted: Sun Apr 17, 2005 12:38 am Post subject:

Off the topic of using oil rigs for windmills (which doesn’t sound very likely), but about future fisheries-

apenas · Coal Joined: Feb 28, 2005 Posts: 4

There are some pilot projects: link1 and link2

mididoctors · Posted: Mon Apr 18, 2005 2:21 pm Post subject:

Offshore engineering tech is being applied to wind farms to be built off the furness peninsular England.
A company that helped developed the mobile platform technology is working on the project. the head is a friend of the family.

alexis · Tar Sands Joined: Apr 29, 2005 Posts: 26

Saudi oil infrastructure rigged for self destruction
I don't know if this crap is true, either way this would be a smart threat indeed to any potential assailant...
FROM : http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ "According to a new book exclusively obtained by the Huffington Post, Saudi Arabia has crafted a plan to protect itself from a possible invasion or internal attack. It includes the use of a series of explosives, including radioactive “dirty bombs,” that would cripple Saudi Arabian oil production and distribution systems for decades.
Bestselling author Gerald Posner lays out this “doomsday scenario” in his forthcoming “Secrets of the Kingdom: The Inside Story of the Saudi-US Connection” (Random House).
posner_cover.jpg According to the book, which will be released to the public on May 17, based on National Security Agency electronic intercepts, the Saudi Arabian government has in place a nationwide, self-destruction explosive system composed of conventional explosives and dirty bombs strategically placed at the Kingdom’s key oil ports, pipelines, pumping stations, storage tanks, offshore platforms, and backup facilities. If activated, the bombs would destroy the infrastructure of the world’s largest oil supplier, and leave the country a contaminated nuclear wasteland ensuring that the Kingdom’s oil would be unusable to anyone. The NSA file is dubbed internally Petro SE, for petroleum scorched earth.

To make certain that the damaged facilities cannot be rebuilt, the Saudis have deployed crude Radioactive Dispersal Devices (RDDs) throughout the Kingdom. Built covertly over several years, these dirty bombs are in place at -- among other locations -- all eight of the Kingdom’s refineries, sections of the world’s largest oil field at Ghawar, and at three of the ten indispensable processing towers at the largest-ever processing complex at Abqaiq.
According to the NSA intercepts, Petro SE was devised by the Saudis because of their overriding fear that if an internal revolt or external attack threatened the survival of the House of Saud, the U.S. and other Western powers might abandon them as the Shah of Iran was abandoned in 1979. Only by having in place a system that threatened to create crippling oil price increases, political instability and economic recessions did the royal family believe it could coerce Western military powers to keep them in power.

Some American and Israeli officials privately believe that Saudi officials have been aware for more than a decade that their conversations were monitored, and that as a result they greatly exaggerated Petro SE in order to blackmail the West into protecting them at all costs. For the Saudis, the threat to the U.S. and other powers works so long as those countries cannot be certain of the extent of the “self-destruction grid.”
Posner chronicles an over twenty-five year multinational intelligence gathering operation that exposes Petro SE -- the House of Saud’s “nuclear” insurance policy to escape the fate of Saddam Hussein and the Shah of Iran.
“Although the NSA is not certain of the radioactive elements finally used by the Saudis, they believe Petro SE successfully developed dozens of radiation dispersal devices,” Posner writes.

“These RDDs that the Saudis have integrated into their oil infrastructure are far less lethal than traditional nuclear weapons. The risk is not mass fatal casualties as with a nuclear explosive, but rather increased cancer rates over many years. In the short run, the psychological fear that an area is contaminated by radiation might be so great as to make it commercially unproductive.”
Posner is an award-winning author of nine books, including "Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11" and "Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK", and has written for such publications as The New York Times, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, and U.S. News & World Report."

Jdelagado

roman · Coal Joined: Apr 24, 2005 Posts: 15

It's sounds pretty outlandish, but then again it's Saudi Arabia-- one of the richest yet most backwards countries on earth.