Life On An Offshore oil Platform.

From time to time my job takes me to interesting places. Some of the most intensely interesting places in the world are offshore oil and gas facilities. These places of limited spaces where humans look the planet squarely in the eye and say Fuck You. They are a fight against the world on many levels.

As a rule oil and gas deposits prefer to lie in inhospitable places: freezing cold, boiling hot, humid, isolated, stormy, insect ridden or politicly unstable locations. If you are really lucky you can get all of them in one location.

The stuff you are dealing with is flammable at best and explosive at worst. It can be at tremendous pressure and often very hot (pressure and temperature increase with depth). It can be toxic in one of several ways: hydrogen sulphide, benzene, aromatics and/or heavy metals.

Put all this together over a body of water, add a lot of cash and you have the offshore oil installation. Isolated chunks of metal that soaks up a huge amount of capital to hopefully produce a huge amount of money. Basically drill a hole, turn on the tap and watch the money start pouring out. Add a bit of geopolitics and that about sums it up.

A place where workers combine with technology to face the challenges of extracting hydrocarbons from thousands of meters below the sea bed. A place where error is unacceptable. A place where the rewards for all parties involved are great.

The structures that are built dwarf the tallest things on land. Artificial islands that can be fixed to the sea bed or float on the waves.

Huge machines and complex systems that must operate day in day out without fail in hostile conditions. That is where I come into the picture. My knack is integrating the prevailing conditions and requirements to provide the lowest cost solution to the ‘get the money out of the hole’ problem. Very specifically the electrical power, instrumentation and control systems are my domain. Systems that protect the human resource while exploiting the trapped cash supply.

Redundancy of equipment is only part of the solution. Each subsystem must be inherently reliable. It is no good having two machines that don’t work. Conservative approaches don’t work well and life on the bleeding edge is painful. The trick is understanding a new technology or method and working through all its issues before you have to work them out a few thousand miles from the nearest support.

Locally the environment is protected and impacts minimised, globally, climate change is real and dangerous. Economically our lack of planning for the end of oil will be catastrophic. Politically “what ever it takes” would be a reasonable operating premise for a oil company.

No wonder I am conflicted about work……