Posted on 06/05/2013 2:24:27 PM PDT by thackney
Royal Dutch Shell is making the final preparations to sail its state-of-the-art Olympus platform into the Gulf of Mexico, and showed it off to a group of journalists Wednesday. (Check back throughout the afternoon for more photos from inside Olympus.)
The Olympus, designed to operate in water depths of 3,000 to 8,000 feet, will be Shell’s sixth tension leg platform in the Gulf.
The platform is docked at the Ingleside shipyard near Corpus Christi and will leave in about a month to work at the Mars B project, comprising the platform and a six-well subsea development 130 miles south of New Orleans. The hull made an 18,000 miles, two-month trek from South Korea, landing in Ingleside earlier this year.
Shell owns 71.5 percent of Mars B project, and BP owns the rest.
The Olympus is Shell’s largest platform to date, and is expected to produce 100,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day at its peak.
The Olympus will be the second tension leg platform in the Mars field, which so far has produced 700 million barrels. The new platform is expected to extend the life of the Mars field to at least 2050.
Derek Newberry, Shell’s Mars B business opportunity manager, said the integration of the new technology for the platform, combined with existing infrastructure in the Mars field, will allow Shell to maximize the field’s potential.
Olympus’ drilling rig is about twice the size of the one on Shell’s other platform in the Mars field, and is designed to access reservoirs at 22,000 feet — beyond the first facility’s reach.
The Olympus crew will be able to control ballast water from its deck, reducing safety risks by eliminating the need for workers to descend into the platform’s legs to monitor and adjust its position.
“We have leveraged a lot of the other technologies into Olympus,” said John Hollowell, Shell’s executive vice president for deep water.
He said that while some aspects of the tension leg platform design are copied from prior platforms, each new platform requires some technology specifications to address the special characteristics of the reservoir for which it is designed. “Each one of these projects requires innovative technology that at the time we began did not exist — and that pattern will continue.”
Tension leg platforms are named for the steel tendons that reach straight down from the pontoon supporting the floating platform to the ocean bed. They provide greater stability and more deck space than some other platform designs.
Make sure to check the blowout preventer!
Shell was one of the founders of the Marine Well Containment Company. They committed a lot of dollars following the BP spill to see that this is done right in the future.
https://marinewellcontainment.com
Lord, that IS huge!!
I’m having difficulty finding current pictures that are easy to pick up the URLs.
This is the second platform for the Mars field. It has been quite a proven producer. The original Mars platform received significant damage during hurricane Katrina but was back up and running less than a year later.
I here there is a welding job open on board.
Really. The big BP blowout lost a lot of valuable oil.
It also increased the fisheries by 10%. Seems they like that seepage.
Pray for America to Wake UP
I’m just amazed they were able to bring it across
the pacific.
I’ev fished around some of the Gulf rigs and
they are massive, but this is BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBig.
We used to build stuff like this...
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