Are Oil Rigs Taller Than Skyscrapers?
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 7 ก.ย. 2024
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✩ABOUT THIS VIDEO✩
In this video, we ask whether oil rigs are taller than skyscrapers and show how the design of rigs varies depending on the depth of water.
✩ABOUT CASUAL NAVIGATION✩
I am a former maritime navigational officer and harbour pilot, with a passion for animation. My hobby is presenting educational stories and interesting nuggets from the maritime industry and sharing them on social media to keep them freely accessible to everyone.
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The question of the day: how do you account for waves that can lift the platform itself up to somewhere in the teritory of 100 feet, if the structure itself is anchored and not free floating?
Well you could compare the deathtoll to alexander kjelland there died 123 men
Hey there. I am from the Philippines, Can you tell us the story Of Doña Paz? It's a Philippines ferry.
Living in a landlocked state, I always assume anything in the ocean is bigger than a skyscraper.
Krill must be terrifying.
Heh
It's you, Mongolian?
Actually, they kinda can be. Just watched a video about some deep sea squid where the submersible was engulfed by krill. Enough so that that they couldn't see the bottom visually or via instruments. Ever seen a mayfly swarm? It was like that.
@@tmurphy0919 Those are part of why I don't leave the house after March. Both mayflies and junebugs are terrible about looking at their tiny calendars.
"I'm one in a krillion"
Pumping oil 8000ft up is quite crazy when you think about it. That's pumping thick liquid up about three times the height of Burj Khalifa.
(Fun?) Fact:
When the Burj Khalifa was built, the sewage system couldn't handle the flow.
They regularly had to use poop trucks. For around a decade.
So either case, some brown liquid was being pumped!
And several thousand more feet below the surface. But actually these are generally not pumping it up. The oil reservoir is under tremendous pressure, and the oil will flow as soon as it's pierced.
@@benoithudson7235exactly.... All the water above the oil will cause a huge pressure, right?
@@just.jose.youtubeno, the water is irrelevant. It’s the tremendous pressure within the rock formations that contain the oil. Same as oil rigs on land.
@@cruisinguy6024 thanks for the reply. I understand the rocks formations may also be compressing the oil "reservoir" but, won't the enormous amounts of tons of water contribute to increase the pressure?
Kinda crazy how people came up with the idea of all the rig designs.
"There is money in that drilling spot."
empire state building 1454 ft = 443m
bullwinkle platform 1736 ft = 529m
conventional fixed platforms are only economical to about 1500 ft = 450m
troll A 1549 ft = 472m
petronius oil platform 2100 ft = 640m
vertically moored tension leg platforms max out around 5000 ft = 1500m
perdido oil platform operates in over 8000 ft = 2438m
good lord it's almost 2.5km deep wtf
Thanks
@@alveolate those are all relatively shallow depths for the most part. Titanic sank in water of average depth for the ocean - 12,500 feet or 3,800 m - which is nowhere near the depth of most oceanic trenches, etc. (Titanic sits on an abyssal plain off the continental shelf), so the depths we're talking about with oil rigs arent particularly deep overall in the grand scheme of it, given oil rigs will always be on a continental shelf, not over an abysal plain or an oceanic trench.
@@Harlem55 But this is a working industrial complex, not a sunken ship, which is, in this state, just a bunch of nonfunctional metal crushed together. Falling down is easy.
Thanks for converting, though I think I'd have given "around 5000 feet" as "around 1500m", rather than introduce accuracy that isn't there in the original.
I was always under the impression that ALL rigs floated on the surface, and that there were just pipes underneath. Wasn't fully aware that a lot of them actually have the huge structure beneath, and they are basically the sea version of a land drill rig.
All sea rigs floating sounds unreasonable when you consider just how rough and choppy the ocean can be. If anything I imagine floating rigs would be used for short term drilling and areas with multiple isolated pockets of oil or something.
@@VassiliniaOh, no there are several types of offshore oil rigs, both floating and fixed, jackup, semi submerged and ship-hulled. The "Oil platform" article on Wikipedia is pretty informative
Still cant wrap my head around the fact that many oilrigs arent standing on the ground
They just float like a chair shaped ship
It was barely mentioned in the video, but some are even ship shaped ships (FPSO), using DP to hold position above the well. The riser then connects to a gigantic bouy of sorts, so the ship can disconnect when weather is too bad, or it needs to dry-dock, etc.
Yes, there is no other way to do it. The crane "ships" that install them, install the moorings etc, are similar type of structures: semi-submersible rigs, with large cranes mounted on them. I recently was on the biggest one, the Sleipnir of Heerema, with a lifting capacity of 2 x 10,000 metric tonnes.
@@2testtest2 that still poses a problem: even if the rig itself is free floating the riser itself is of finite length and from my understanding of it the riser isnt flexible and cant move in the water column. So, then it becomes that because a wave could then lift the platform up to 100 feet (e.g. the largest wave recorded in the North Atlantic - and never mind what you get on the regular in the Indian ocean) that the waves would essentially pull the rig platform off the riser by sheer force of the waves lifting the structure, if we are to avoid large waves constantly slamming the rig platform in a storm.
@@Harlem55 I work in the oil-service industry, and have worked a bit with this style of production ship. They use flexible risers, designed with a generous bend in them. It's essentially a steel reinforced hose. I will not claim to know how all of them work, but one we had a request to work on it was described how the bouy could be pulled down by the teathers to about 50m depth during heavy seas to protect it.
@@Harlem55 Those waves are the reason the platforms sit on such long legs - most of the water displacing structure is always below the waves, total bouyoncy changes only by the volume of the stilts thats wetted by the waves.
Gigantic underwater structures make me strangely uncomfortable.
Me too, it's called thallasophobia
@merekcook573 It's actually Submechanophobia! Thalassophobia is the fear of the ocean in general
@Thetankracer Yeah fair, you right
I was using the word thalassophobia here the same way people use the word gay. A Lesbian person isn't literally Gay.
But the word gay refers both to the specific sexuality, and a larger category of people.
@@Thetankracer Out of curiosity, is there another word for the fear of icebergs and just general sea ice?
Oddly, the original meaning of "skyscraper" was a tall sail on a sailing ship
They should’ve called the buildings “skyscratchers”, that’s way more catchy
@@FlymanMSWell in German they are called Cloudscratchers (Wolkenkratzer).
@@nemofunf9862 awesome, German is on point as usual
@@FlymanMS Ha. Glad you like it :)
@@FlymanMSI disagree, skyscraper sounds much nicer
Could you mention units in metric alongside imperial. This would make it easier to visualise for some.
For most*
Agree!
Yep, I had to keep pausing the video to convert the units. A simple visual indication in metres/kilometres would suffice. There is no need to mention both units in the voiceover as I understand that might affect the pacing of the video.
Great video otherwise!
Just divide the feet by three to get approximate meters.
@@Devantejah why?
I am still amazed when I look at the videos of when they towed the Troll platform from the construction site in the fjords out into the sea.
It was impressive, for sure. The amazing thing was that they only had a couple of meters of ground clearance in certain parts of the fjord it had to be towed through.
The oil rig museum in Galveston is really cool and worth a visit.
Finally! You're back! You have been missed!
The fact that there are rigid structures that extend up to where I usually fly above ground level, and non-rigid ones that go as high as I fly above sea level is just insane. That's thick, heavy crude oil being pumped 3 times the height of the tallest above-ground structure _regularly._ The ocean scares me more than space ever could hope to.
Yep - In space you have a decent view at the nothig around you and a manageble pressure differential. Down in the ocean you see nothing. But its there, and quite a lots of kinds of it. And a leak would likely kill you before you have a chance to react.
Oh give space a chance, it’s far worse… luckily our brains can’t even comprehend the scales of cosmic super-structures
Excellent summary!!! Having worked on design, construction & installation of Bullwinkle, Perdido, MARS, and Prince TLP rigs, I have difficulty giving a general summary of the technologies to neophytes. I'll refer folks to this video in the future. Kudos!!!
If you're counting what's under the water, you have to count what's under sidewalk level.
Basements, foundations, and piles.
Agree. I came to say the same thing
So it‘s essentially a huge metal straw, sucking up dead dinosaur soup from beneath the ocean floor, whilst standing on a plot of land, which is quickly becoming unstable? Marvelous, all we need now are huge rogue waves.
it's basically a giant man-made mosquito
Weird suggestion. If you’re doing oil rig stuff. Think you could cover major rig accidents? Or, for fun (April fools) how the rig team in the movie Armageddon worked on the asteroid???
New drinking game: take a shot every time he says "Marine riser"
heck yeah he's back
I am getting vertigo just watching this! Thank you for the *deep* explaination of structures I knew very little about.
Great video! It would be great if there were metric conversions though (at least as text in the video).
I’ll unsubscribe if he does 🇱🇷🇱🇷🇱🇷
@justysilverman seriously? how immature.
@@jamesengland7461 it's a joke.
Nice Liberian flag. @@justysilverman
Me too.❤.
Now the question is how do you anchor the lines at those depths?
They use suction pilings. These are large pipes, open on the bottom but closed on the top (except for necessary fittings). They are lowered to the sea floor by construction vessels and monitored by ROVs. Once it contacts the sea floor, it sinks slightly into the mud. A suction line is then attached to the fittings, pulling the water out which causes the pile to sink into the sea floor. Mooring lines are then attached, securing the platform. Anywhere from 6 to 20 anchor piles are used.
@@macmedic892 that's amazing! what a clever solution!
@@macmedic892 Yup, but also still "oldskool" catenary mooring, using large anchors. Anchor handling vessels still are used a lot to install and retrieve those anchors. It all depends on water depth.
I love Bespoke Post. Glad one of my favorite channels supports it as well!
Yikes.
@@williamcampbell9859 speak for yourself bro. I’ve received enough gear to go off the grid for ten years in three months!
@@williamcampbell9859 yikes indeed... what an awful "shopping" idea...
Very Informative, great video!
A bit off topic technically as it's hard to navigate an oil rig but lovely and informative as usual! Cheers to all the very smart and very brave people who make it happen.
Always glad to see you’ve posted new content! It seems like they’re fewer and farther between, of late.
Thanks! I needed a little time to recharge, but it should be back to the normal frequency again now.
And all these techniques are now being used for wind platforms.
Not all of them as offshore windfarms are not deployed in very deep waters. Yes, you will see jackets for the substations, but floating is only done experimentally basically. It is far too expensive to use any other system than jackets commercially at the moment.
I would argue everything below the water is the foundations of the rig, since we don't count below the ground on sky scrapers
You are right, I can´t imagine the height of those things when you only give them in feet and not in meters...
With the power of the internet, you too can stop being a lazy windowlicker and search up the conversion yourself.
Or just learn both systems and be done with it. It's not that hard.
@@noscopesallowed8128it should all be in metric. That's what serious people actually use. Make the people using archaic measurements do the conversions
@@poochyenarulez Hey you know how there are millions of people across the world, all very serious in their crafts, that use Imperial measurements every single day? You are not better than them. Your personality is disgusting.
@@noscopesallowed8128having to pause the video every 30 seconds is annoying as shit, when the video creator could just put it in the visuals of the video.
@@The_Jzoli Learn it then. Not that hard. You guys make fun of Americans wanting people to cater to them, you don't get to demand we cater to you.
2:39 "Piles running deep down into the sea bed"
How deep?
at least five
@@mikieswartthank you
200-400 feet below the mud line.
More than 5 but less than 5000.
This depends on the characteristics of the sea bed and the different layers underneath the sea bed. Just like with conventional pile driving on land. In the Netherlands piles can be driven up to 30 m in the sea bed to create a steady and secure foundation for the topside.
Always excited to see one of your videos! Thank you so much!
0:14 yeah but how far down do its foundations go ?
Seeing how much goes into deep water oil drilling the idea of an underwater oil rig like what you see in the movie 'The Abyss' starts to make sense.
The Troll A platform. When it was built, a documentary film was created and aired. The coverage of its towing into place in 1995 was staggering. At the time, it was the largest and tallest structure ever moved.
Again, a video that teaches me things I never knew I wanted to know!🙌
needs more metric
You clicked on a video measuring things in Empire State Buildings. If you were expecting metric, that's on you.
You can convert American Empire State Buildings to metric Eiffel Towers yourself. It's 1.4076 Eiffel Towers per Empire State Building.
EDIT: Just saw that predictive text felt we should convert to metro instead of metric.
Just divide by 3 and youre essentially in meters
@@Ahstocks*multiply
I assume you are talking about feet.
Edit: I was wrong, thinking about the other way around.
@@drgrey7026 oh yeah my bad
Wtf is a kilometer? 😂
Speaking of the under-platform, you should also include the height of underground floors and the huges lengths of piles foundation of a skyscraper. They can go over 280 FTs underground.
4:35 In my Star Wars fan fiction, I would put something like that in. Like, a star destroyer gets disabled from an ion cannon, or something, causing emergency doors to shut. To restart the star destroyer they'd need to get access to the boot disks, but they can't get to the boot disks because a big door is locked, because the power went out. The imperials would have to resort to cutting a hole through the door with a blow torch. A naïve person might think it looks too incompetent, but it is so crazy that it really did happen, so putting it in would make it more realistic.
To be fair, this catastrophe _was_ the result of incompetence:
- during (re)design
- making and implementing procedures
- putting the same group in charge of production and safety, sacrificing the safety
@@christopherg2347 Placement of the emergency shut off controls is why I keep a fire extinguisher next to my bed. I keep it there to solve that kind of problem.
I agree that Piper Alpha was (at least mostly) caused by incompetence, I didn't say it wasn't. I meant that sometimes extraordinary things really do happen in real life. So extraordinary that if an author included something like it in a work of fiction it would be recognized as poor, lazy writing, i.e. "Deus ex machina." If we live in a simulation then the people doing it are hacks and should be fired. However, knowing that "truth is stranger than fiction," including unlikely things in a story can make it more realistic, not less. Putting the emergency shut off controls in a place that would make them unreachable if you needed to use them is stupid enough that I can believe it really happened.
Would it really have been too much work to provide the measurments in metric too?
WHAT THE F@!K IS A KILOMETER 🦅🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸
Steve Davis said he played in snooker exhibition on an oil rig once and its was his most strangest place to play. Cant get my head round that.
please show atleast metric measurements besides the imperial in the video
WHAT THE F@!K IS A KILOMETER 🦅🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸
Why? Can't you think in both?
Look it up, most channels don’t show imperial
@@womble321 no, i cant
Yes, hearing British units feels like I'm watching a TV show based in medieval times 😂
Great video! A couple of questions:
1) how is the well head positioned/installed/fixed in place? Do they just drop a big metal plate from the surface and hope it lands in an okay place? Presumably it is too big for a diver to install (and too deep?)
2) the vertical pipe riser thing the oil goes up: is that flexible? If not, what stops it breaking when the tethered platforms move around in big weather?
3) how is this channel so consistently awesome? I love it!
ROV
Great video, although each type of anchoring, tensioning, spar or jacket design deserves it's own video. Just like riser design, well head design, the process of drilling a well, etc. Here in the Netherlands, we operate in very shallow water, mostly between 20-30 m. We use jackets all the time. As these are relatively cheap (mind you just drilling a well could cost anywhere between 50-100 million EUR, without platform and infrastructure), we typically use a system of a central complex (large platform) surrounded by multiple satellite platforms. The latter ones are very small platforms, each serving between 1 to around 5 or 6 wells. What is missing in the video (it's outside if the scope of the video) are the subsea wells and all equipment on the seafloor. This allows for production without a platform or rig. It is mindblowing what the offshore industry is capable off these days.
The Mariana Trench is deeper than Mount Everest is Tall.
I wish i could build a couple of oil rigs and make them a motherbase of my own PMC
I design offshore platforms, and the terminology is commonly mistaken. The entire structure is the platform. The rig is the temporary piece of equipment that drills the hole that the well is placed.
I can’t help but notice the omission of drillships in this discussion but I understand that, since they’re not really connected to the sea floor other than by riser pipe, their exclusion is necessary. An in depth explanation of dynamic positioning would be really great in a discussion about drillships.
I can recommend the Oil Museum in Stavanger.
It would be very nice to also see the imperial numbers be translated into metric in future videos. I can't grasp the size in feet. Thank you.
Great videos !!! Thank you. Would love more on the oil&gas sector
I know they play in another "league", but talking in production in greater depths we have the FPSO design, that incorporates the platform structures in a vessel hull. This permits operations in deep waters in a much safer way, theres no register of huge accidents with this design, brazil and guyana lead the number of this units which depths are 8500 on average for brazilian pre salt in Santos basin. Go Brazil !
The Kennecott Copper smelter smokestack on the edge of The Great Salt Lake is 1,215 ft tall but it does not look like it since it is surrounded by much taller mountains.
2:08 I would class the underwater part as foundation for the structure. So why not also use the 55ft foundation used for the Empire State building
Okay, but who and how goes to those depth to attach those tethers or drill a hole to access the reservoir?
Super informative and interesting as usual!
Please to include metric pleeeeeease!! 🥺😛
WHAT THE F@!K IS A KILOMETER 🦅🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸
@@Kingtiger21 hahaha! 😂 I know right?
It's equivalent to 3,5 freedoms, for you Yankees. 😁
Officially, the USA does follow the SI though... :p
@@just.jose.youtube 👍good to know some people have a sense of humor. Have a good day cheers 🍻
@@Kingtiger21 thanks! On the Internet, it's not easy to stay away from the "this-person-is-willingly-offending-me-and-attacking-everything-I-believe" mindset, but I try to keep a positive attitude on this environment... 😅
Good day! Cheers!
I'm from the UK, I wish I could understand this video. My grandfather's long-dead so can't explain the measurements to me.
You must have a lot of speeding tickets.
You can't understand the video because of measurements? Just think REALLY deep.
It’s a shame they don’t have Google in Britain.
@brickhead. Thanks for telling me those signs on roads mean 30 feet per hour. I never knew that.
Actually, all skyscrapers have pylon foundations that can be longer than 100 meters, depending on the type of soil. Therefore, there is an invisible part of every skyscraper beneath the ground.
Two months is worth the wait for these videos 🙂
Do you know what is a Section Base? But as a room, I've seen some rooms call like that but I don't understand why it is called like that. Nice vid btw💪🏻
the Empire State Building also has floors that go underground if you wanna get into that logic, aside from the general fact that skyscrapers have more volume and mass overall and would generate more displacement
I'd never dare put my feet on a floating piece of concrete from an industry known to fully disregard any form of life and to care only for profits, to the expense of anything on earth
Crazy cool tech! Seafarers and engineers are amazing. I’ve seen some videos of the insane weather the rigs endure.
great video, easy to follow, thank you :)
One really bad storm and you're going to have a broken pipe, even if the rig itself still looks fine thereafter.
What’s with the imperial units of measure?, the only countries that have not gone metric are the United States, Myanmar and Liberia. The rest use Metric, at least include both.
The US metricized in about the 70s, Customary is only still common in civilian applications
Brits use both, and sometimes even worse - stones for weight (14 pounds is 1 stone, which is approximately 6.4kg).
Oh no, you might die because it isn't metric! We all have to save you!
i feel like a steel cable makes so much more sense than a truss in almost any scenario outside of fairly shallow distances. stronger, more flexible, probably much easier to install. (underwater welding is exceptionally expensive, and dangerous.) is the price of making a boyant platform really so high as to offset that?
Jackets are made onshore and offer far more stability than wire ropes/floating platform can offer for the same cost. For very deep water, wire rope has it's limits in terms of length you can use, it is heavy and from a certain length onwards, it can't carry it's own weight anymore and will break. Modern systems use Dyneema tension ropes for mooring of platforms in ultra deep water.
for those non-rigid oil rigs... exactly how wobbly can it get?
Always love your videos but it kinda feels more like a video of how tall can a Oil Rig get.
METRIC!!!
WHAT THE F@!K IS A KILOMETER 🦅🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸
If you have a floating rig do you have to counter the spin of the drill twisting the whole rig around the riser instead of the the rig spinning the drill
They should just let some water out of the ocean. Then the oil rigs wouldn't need to be so tall.
It’s amazing how tall oil rigs are. Kinda like the iceberg effect.
Could the oil-rig's underwater structure be seen as analogous to the skyscraper's foundation? And how deep do the skyscraper's foundations go?
Intresting video, but it would be great if you could provide metric measuremends aswell on screen
WHAT THE F@!K IS A KILOMETER 🦅🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸
Troll A FTW
Thank you for using imperial measurements! Freaking metric system. Takes all the romance out of measurement. I want my units based on the size of a king’s unit. That’s what a sh!t load is, one king’s loaf.
God Bless each and everyone one of them. 🙏
Why did he use the imperial system for this video, but the metric system for other videos?
How do they do work at -8000ft?
5:38 That’s hilarious :D
Why count the oil rigs below-sea structure but not the skyscraper below-land structure?(IE foundations)
Do a video on how they anchor it
do you count the driven pile foundations of a skyscraper? if the legs of an oil rig count then they should too.
what about shell prelude? just its floating part is bigger than the empire state. 1600ft long, 243ft wide, 344ft tall. 600,000 tonnes displacement when fully loaded.
The Prelude is a liquid natural gas platform, not an oil platform.
That said, it's also technically the longest floating vessel ever built, longer than the Seawise Giant.
Doesn't count if they're below sea level lol, but very cool.
Need to talk about FPSOs and FLNGs
For a long time i thought they floated, and were just anchored...
How do they build a wellhead 8000 feet below the surface?
Metric measurements pleasee!!
Only saying the debths in feet was a little disappointing.
Just be glad he didn’t use some maritime term like fathoms
@@zachv My dad's a former fisherman and occasionally use ells and fathoms. Makes kind of sense when talking about ropes though.
the skyscraper, obviously... provided you measure against sea level :P
Lol.. trip over 1k feet just to set surface.. God those things are huge.
Then you get to FPSOs where the deepest is operating at 9500ft
I like these videos, but please use metric units. Nobody uses feet and inches any more.
Yes we do
WHAT THE F@!K IS A KILOMETER 🦅🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸
Assuming you apply the same logic as to the one volcano near the Mariana Trench being taller than Mt. Everest because the very bottom of the volcano is at the bottom of the trench and the volcano above the water is less than a mile in height, yep, oil rigs are in fact taller than skyscrapers
Anything for oil, huh. No obstacle is to big.
Sorry, I couldn't concentrate on the content because I was busy trying to work out what all those heights were.The foot was replaced by metric units in in my school textbooks almost 50 years ago. Judging by your sponsor I guess you are aiming at the US market but could you possibly put metric units on the screen for those of us elsewhere?
a little meters subtitle would been cool
WHAT THE F@!K IS A KILOMETER 🦅🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸
Does anybody know what software this is?