Interesting to read this because as a kid I watched these rigs rise into the sky as they were built then floated out. They're building wind turbines in that shipyard now.
Methil, which built Brent A and at least three other large platforms. As others have noted there were several other yards involved at that time, such was the size of the North Sea fields development effort. Some historical info here : http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/written_answers/1976/mar/...
On the Southern California coast, they've dismantled some old oil rigs too. But they were allowed to leave a certain amount of the infrastructure intact, about 70 feet or so below the surface, because there was so much marine life clinging to them. They became artificial reefs.
In fact, there's enough interesting sea life there to support recreational diving trips to the sites.
I've read that some environmental groups want to do something similar in the North Sea, seems like a good idea. Ocean fisheries need all the help they can get.
I don't think so. These rigs look massive and permanent, but in reality they are constantly deteriorating. Thus, they should not be compared to an island. Salt water is very bad for steel. And the ocean waves and winds constantly put stress on said steel.
If they get left without being dismantled for a while, they will get into a very dangerous state where they are about to fall apart and it is too dangerous to even approach them. Then dismantling them will be much more expensive.
>If they get left without being dismantled for a while, they will get into a very dangerous state where they are about to fall apart and it is too dangerous to even approach them. Then dismantling them will be much more expensive.
Once the Well itself is plugged, what are the realistic consequences of just letting the things rust into oblivion?
That depends on how environmentally friendly you want to be in reclaiming that steel [0]:
> A secondhand vessel is currently worth about $190 per tonne to a shipbreaking yard in Turkey, a price established by the local market in reclaimed steel. Sail on to China and a different market, and the same metal is worth $210 per tonne. At breakers’ yards in Alang in India, Chittagong in Bangladesh and Gadani in Pakistan, they will pay around $280 per tonne. Meanwhile, at the EU-approved shipbreaking sites, which are bound to conform to continental waste laws, and where vessels are dismantled in closed-off quays or dry docks, rates are less competitive: European yards offer zero dollars per tonne, and, in fact, tend to ask a fee to take a shipowners’ junk.
That is correct. The structural integrity of the platforms is only one aspect.
How would you check/ensure that it is still fit for purpose?
Another aspect I read on this topic and remember from the Brent Spar [1] case is that the cavities and tanks of these platforms are sometimes filled with unknown and/or highly toxic undefined stuff. Unless you 'clean' this up it might not be liveable.
"The oil companies do not want a repeat of the mid-1990s. Back then, Shell’s plan to sink a piece of Brent equipment, called Brent Spar, in the ocean depths caused a bruising fight with environmental groups led by Greenpeace and prompted stricter regulation."
The irony was that after all that, Greenpeace had to finally admit that the original plan of sinking the Brent Spar was actually the most environmentally friendly option.
Turns out that bacteria at the bottom of the ocean love the sludge that's so toxic on land.
Can you provide a citation for your claims here. The link you provided doesn't seem to back up your claim at all. Actually, it seems to contradict your claim.
Also, assuming what you say is true, was this known at the time? Because that would seem to make a big difference -- opposing dumping "sludge that's so toxic on land" into an environment where you don't know the effects seems to be more than "PR and feelings", but rather caution and prudence.
Had a hard time finding a reference, but here is something (not exactly what I wrote, which I think was from either The Economist or Die Zeit, it's been a while):
"Writing in the journal Nature in June, Professor Euan Nisbet and Dr Mary Fowler of London University argued that the quantities of heavy metals in Brent Spar are minuscule compared with those found naturally in parts of our deep oceans. In so-called "black smokers", whole communities of highly specialised bacteria eke out their lives where the earth's crust vents huge amounts of superheated water and metals into the ocean depths. One estimate puts this discharge of metals worldwide at 700,000 to five million tonnes a year.
Dump the Brent Spar near such a vent, argues Professor Nisbet, and its impact could not even be measured. Its contents might even give the bacteria a free meal."
Also, the amount of oil was much less than Greenpeace had stated, estimated at somewhere around 100 tons, rather than 5500 tons. And oil is something that bacteria do eat.
All the articles I could find essentially state that Shell's plan was scientifically valid and posed less environmental risk than disposal on land, but didn't "feel" right.
Some of the oil rigs get transported to southeast asia before they are dismantled.
Check out the south Atlantic for a possible location, west of the Namibian coast. There are some shallow spots there like the Zubov Seamount, less than 50m deep and more than 200 miles from the coast.
The horn of Africa (notorius for pirates) is on the other side of the continent. Or does this sound truthy because, you know...Africa? For your information, Namibia and South Africa (neighbouring country and close trading partner) have professional navies. Any hypothetical pirate's career in that geography would be similar to real-life illegal fishers' in the area: short and unfruitful.
That's an understatement: it's over 2000 nautical miles north.
> but their officials in Namibia say themselves that they're concerned about it.
The link you gave was a speech given by the president while commissioning a naval base. I wouldn't place import on his mentioning piracy while listing the functions of a navy in a generic speech: also of concern are "global peace and security" by your terms.
You'd have to be producing something valuable, but then again, that's one of the economic models behind seasteading is production of high value goods which are forbidden to produce on land. ie: drugs, dangerous materials, etc.
Is the idea that you're in international water so you can do what you want? What stops a navy coming and confiscating your equipment then? They stop drug smugglers and pirates in international waters all the time. And you'll be static!
The idea is that you can simultaneously be protected by the laws of nation-states that you like (protection from pirates), and are free to break the laws of nation-states that you don't like (taxes, drug laws, etc.)
It's an example of Libertarian paradise syndrome; where you want all the comforts of modern civilization with none of the obligations.
I think the Anarcho-Capitalist paradise you're talking about would involve personal contracts with "security" companies to keep the pirates away - although it has never been explained to me what keeps the security company from becoming the pirates.
The Libertarian version involves paying for a military, I think.
Yeah, that's the flaw in the drug production plan. They think they can get around it by declaring themselves an independent nation, but nobody's going to recognize them as such. If they're not an independent nation they're just a vessel on the ocean subject to maritime law.
Governments will tolerate seasteading if it's the functional equivalent of parking a big houseboat somewhere. They won't tolerate modern day Tortugas, though.
>Is the idea that you're in international water so you can do what you want?
Pretty much as I understand it, but I don't think they're under the illusion that they don't have to maintain some sort of relationship with land-based nations.
>What stops a navy coming and confiscating your equipment then?
Nothing? Some form of diplomacy?
>They stop drug smugglers and pirates in international waters all the time. And you'll be static!
They never stop them all. I don't think I will be static. I'll be on the beach.
Yes - that's 12km of the coast of Suffolk - down south, almost in the channel. Much warmer and calmer, relatively. Also, no one lives on it anymore, afik.
A seasteader would have to pay more than the rig's value as scrap (less the cost of scrapping it). That might turn out to be quite a bit of money.
Or, it might turn out to be zero. The article left it unclear whether they (the owners of the platforms) are making or losing money by doing this.
But there are two other concerns that would have to be addressed: Plugging the oil well, and navigational hazards. Neither seems to me to be insurmountable. Plugging the hole and leaving the platform there is easier than plugging the hole and removing the platform. And the navigational hazard has been there for decades. Leaving it changes nothing; an existing risk merely continues.
These are production platforms, not drilling platforms. A production platform like the one mentioned in the article gathers oil and gas from dozens of wells connected by a system of piping laid on the sea floor. As such, they'd have no way to plug a well. Operators use mobile rigs to do a "P&A" (Plug and Abandon). There's no way that the permitting authority would allow the well operator to abandon any wellhead without plugging it, no matter who they'd sold the production platform to.
>A seasteader would have to pay more than the rig's value as scrap (less the cost of scrapping it). That might turn out to be quite a bit of money.
I suspect that number is actually negative without the rig owner's input. Thus the bit about Shell "watching over" the process to make sure the breakers are dealing properly with chemicals and asbestos.
On of the reasons the US Navy has taken to sinking decommissioned warships is the various hazardous materials make the cost of breaking them up more than the value of the materials. Rigs can't be that different.
Sure, you'd have to pay for the scrap value. But it's never [1] going to be cheaper than that anyway. I'm not sure what environmental hazards the (former) oil rigs themselves are.
--
[1] until we get self-assembling nanobots one day
If the platform weighs 100,000 ton and scrap iron is between $50 and $100/ton, then the rig's scrap value can't be more than $10,000,000, but it can be a lot less. Maybe it costs you a couple million dollars just to have it towed back, then maybe a couple million in labor and tools to cut it up, and a million in hazardous waste (asbestos) disposal, and so on. TBH, I don't know how much all of this really costs, but I can see where dismantling a rig could potentially cost quite a bit more than its scrap value, and thus the thing can have a negative value. In that case it might be quite attractive if the owner of the thing can transfer that responsibility to someone else. They might even pay you to take it.
related, there are several old Navy towers off the coast of Georgia/South Carolina (USA) that were at one point going to be scrapped as well but with so much marine life around them last I heard they were transfered to the state gov't and just being left as is. They're quite a sight to see appearing on the horizon as you're moving towards one.
I was trying to find a pattern for the border between competence regions, and it's quite obvious that point (x,y) belongs to the nation closest to it, much as in a Voronoi diagram based on a continuum of points.
Seems a little more complicated than that. Germany's claim looks to have been reduced on both sides by the fields being operated by Netherlands and Denmark. I'm curious what kind of agreement was made between them such that Germany gave up the claims to the oil fields. In fact, it looks like Germany is not drilling for any oil at all. Maybe they just don't want to be in that line of business?
While it looks like Germany gave up some claims on first glance that is a bit misleading. That area is strangely shaped (coined Duck's Bill) to make Germany's area larger after a 1969 ICJ judgement[0]. They probably purposefully added areas without much oil leading to this shape.
Germany produces about 3% of its oil demand in own fields (with two of them being in the North Sea, Mittelplate[1] is largest).
Germany has plans to use nearly all of their sea for offshore wind farms[1] (the areas free of wind farms are either for shipping or natural habitats). Probably more valuable in the future than oil rigs .
> “We may well be at that critical point in history where people will say that this is the point where the oil industry reached its peak and began to decline.”
No article about the industry is complete without a reference to "peak oil".
Do people realize there's a much harder problem to solve than alternative sources of energy? Namely: How do we make all the other compounds essential to modern life which currently originate in an oil well?
We won't be able to quit oil for a long fucking time.
Another way to look at it is that we have cheaply accessible, ready-made source of hydrocarbon compounds buried in the earth. And we dig it up and burn it off.
It's basically the same shortsightedness that led us into hunting whales to (near-)extinction for lamp oils. At least less animal cruelty is involved, I hope.
Also, planned Obsolescence should be illegal - or at least thought of, socially, as immoral. The thing is, that the need for replacing vast majority of things that you use regularly do to the disposable nature of profit-only-driven markets is typically built around supporting components in a product which are made out of plastic - but the useful aspect of the item can often be a re-usable material.
Take Razors as a prime example... Overall plastic is bad, regardless of the ephemeral convenience it currently provides - i has stifled innovation, its short-sighted and its detrimental effects will last for generations...
Nitrogen fertilizers are already made from hydrogen from natural gas and air. So that can be replaced with electrolysis (of course that requires greater energy inputs, but not to such an extent that civilization will hinge upon it).
Peak Oil is not about quitting oil entirely; it's the point at which oil extraction stops rising and begins to decline. Yes, there will probably always be a place for oil as a source for chemicals, but without its use as a fuel that becomes a much smaller market.
Do you actually think the transition to non-fossil fuels will be painless? Or do you think it won't be necessary? I'd like to see your math on how you plan to feed all the planet's people and give all the newly wealthy Chinese the cars they will want. Economic pain is a distinct possibility.
Giving people all the cars they want and feeding the planet are two different subjects. Yes, I expect over time we'll all be a bit less wealthy than we would have been if our supply of oil was endless.
But I do not believe the price of oil is suddenly going to shoot up to some astronomical value overnight and cause mass die-offs, which is something you hear every time the price of oil goes up a bit.
Chemical feedstock is a much smaller fraction compared to heating and transportation. And they might not even release carbon into the atmosphere. Plastics for example don't release their carbon for a long time.
Petrochemicals and plastics are only a small fraction of oil demand. The vast majority is used as fuel.
So no, we won't totally eliminate the need for oil for a long time. We also won't totally run out of oil for a very, very long time. But we can eliminate the need for 50-75% of current oil demand in this century, possibly the first half of this century.
Are there any industrial feedstocks that aren't easily generated with the same processes (e.g. pyrolitic cracking) on natural products (e.g. heavy plant resins/oils) instead of crude oil/coal?
Lego plans to transition entirely to plant-based plastics by 2030 - they've spent $150 million on a new sustainable materials research center, and will employ 100 people to work on the problem. Add onto that a similar R&D effort among their suppliers, it hardly qualifies as "easily".
Peak oil is about the fact that after you remove half or so of the oil from a particular oil well, removing what is left gets very expensive. We aren't running out of oil, but we are unlikely to ever again see oil that is as cheap as it once was. We are running out of cheap oil, and that is game changing.
Most reserves have already hit or passed that point. Most oil today is more expensive than it was, say, in the 70s because you have to inject water to force it to the surface and things like that. Just digging a hole and watching it gush skyward from internal pressure is a thing of the past, basically.
It's the barrier point that we can't haul it out of the ground as fast as demand requires. It's sort of like how people were concerned we were going to hit peak food: we very well could, but we need a lot more people to hit that point.
There is also a finite amount of oil in the ground. It's stupendously useful and rich in chemistry. We still don't know where all the reserves are, and there is a lot of oil still in the ground. But that oil comes at a cost: inconvenient, excessively deep, politically untenable. But we'll be able to get oil for a long time (just at ever increasing costs).
It's running out of oil reserves that are easy to get at. There will always be more oil, but some portion of it will always cost more to extract than it is worth.
Technology changes that point, though. Much of the oil we're pulling out today in the US was considered too expensive to be worth the extraction costs just a few decades ago.
Put another way, you can, for a crude estimate, divide national GDP by petroleum consumption to arrive at the net economic gain per barrel of oil consumed.
In the U.S., that's about $1,000. For India and China, it was about $400 - $500 as of a couple-three years ago. For much of Europe, about $1,500, peaking with Switzerland at about $3,000/bbl.
Put another way, figure what you spend to get a barrel of oil, and subtract that from what you gain by it. Or divide to get a multiplier. At $10/bbl cost and $1000/bbl value, the US gains $100 for each dollar spent on petroleum. At $100/bbl cost, that falls to $10 per dollar.
For countries with lower value per barrel, those gains are even smaller.
A couple of other perspectives:
* In India and China, there are low-value activities enabled by energy usage which would be driven out by higher energy costs.
* There is the question of total net energy. It's one thing to say "but we've got $10/bbl oil". But if there are only, say, 10 billion barrels/year of $10/bbl oil, vs. the 35 billion barrels consumed annually, well, that's 25 billion barrels/year you've either forgone or need to substitute by other means. And our substitutes for petroleum, most especially in transport, are exceedingly limited.
* There's substitutability, generally. Passenger vehicle traffic may be electrifiable. Transit and cargo freight as well. Marine freight not so much, and commercial air travel almost certainly not at all. Options for alternative liquid fuels are at best highly problematic. Some exacerbate current problems, most create new ones.
But answering your point: what's changed isn't the amount of fuel, or the benefit gained per use. Rather, market price has climbed (and fallen, and climbed, but that's another story, unless you owe or hold loans based on market price assumptions...) to the point that previously noneconomic reserves are now economically viable.
The limit of energetically viable deposits is, however, a hard cap, and barring some massive developments in technology, are unlikely. There's that little emissions problem as well.
Hydrofracking is a technology which was first developed in the 1940s and 1950s. It wasn't used until the past decade simply because it wasn't necessary or viable. And while there've been some select specific technological improvements in application, the fundamental concept is as it was first conceived.
It's about the halfway mark where half of all the fossil oil that will (presumably) ever be produced has been produced.
The problem is that as the oil price goes up oil that was not economically viable in the past suddenly becomes viable and so peak oil will shift a little bit into the future.
Eventually it will run out though, it is a finite resource after all.
I don't think 'peak' implies half, just that it won't be any higher again. One side of a mountain peak can have a shorter approach than another can't it?
Plastics are pretty bad for the world, and not so much impossible to replace, as much as they are plentiful cruft that's merely incidentally practical.
Synthesizing organic compounds sounds pretty reasonable given our modern advanced awareness of chemistry, the liklihood that we'll be able to use renewable energy to offset the overhead of synthesis. Just so long as we don't write checks on these kinds of ideas before we can actually cash them.
