Offshore Engineering and Technology

One crucial part of maritime enterprise and our world economy isn’t directly related to shipbuilding or international shipping. Instead, it focuses on procuring the substance that continues to power our world: oil. Although the controversy about offshore drilling continues too rise after the recent disastrous Deepwater Horizon spill, the tech behind it continues to march on, divining new ways to extract black gold from beneath the ocean floor.

A Relatively New Technology

Offshore drilling has arisen in the last 40 years, as the world’s market for oil has continued to increase. The first step in the process of offshore engineering consists of installing an offshore rig, which acts as the home base for experimental drilling. This floating platform allows petroleum and geological researchers to station above the ocean floor, to begin the search for underwater pockets of oil and gas. The rig itself is an impressive technological innovation, which sits up to hundreds of meters in the water, providing stability for those residing on the platform.

Exploratory Drilling

Next, the engineers on the rig use seismic tests to determine if there are potential reserves of the two resources down below. If they decide it is worthwhile, a drill bit is sent down to tap the ocean floor, and a computer program is used to decide the best place to drill under the earth. The drill then goes down and sends information back to those on the surface about the existence of oil or gas. 

Production

If the exploratory drilling turns up promising reserves of natural resources, the drill rig is replaced with a production platform. A barge and heavy cranes are brought to assemble the platform. Unlike the floating drilling rig, these platforms are affixed to the ocean floor by steel posts. A drill bit is lowered to the ocean floor, and made to penetrate beneath the surface. As the drill bores a hole in the earth, a special drilling fluid is pumped down to remove the drilled earth and to stabilize the hole.

Issues With Offshore Drilling

Offshore drilling is dangerous, because any small accident can lead to huge environmental repercussions. Oil spills can never be completely cleaned up, and the error is likely to damage delicate marine life that will take hundreds of years to restore itself. Besides the threat of an accident, it takes a large amount of diesel fuel to power the barges to and from the rig, and to power the rig itself. Besides the environmental cost of this fuel, diesel can also be spilled into the ocean, again damaging ocean life.

Drilling also disrupts the ocean floor. The drilling fluid used in the process can contain poisonous heavy metals, which mix with the normal ocean debris to destroy life in the area. Fisheries and the underwater food chain can be seriously damaged by the entirety of the process.

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