Living With Oil and Gas Platforms along the Gulf Coast. If you have ever been to Dauphin Island south of Alabama, you will see quite a few of these rigs out in the gulf. We went out on a ferry ride to cross the gulf and we went by one of these so I took a few photos.

So I had to look up some information on these, to learn more about them. Following are some quotes from an interview with Mr. Conklin who is an engineer and knows about these wells. I will put the link to the complete interview that was given in 2008 here.

Mr. CONKLIN: Well, what we operate with one portion of our company is what’s called a shore base. All those platforms that anybody sees offshore, everything they get that the people need out there, from spare motors, replacement valves to their groceries and their drinking water, comes to them by a vessel, a boat, and that boat has to go to some central location to pick everything up. Those are called shore bases,

Mr. CONKLIN: You’ve got two main kinds of what we call fixed platforms. You’ve got manned and unmanned. Your unmanneds typically could just be as small as a stem, just one pipe sticking out of the ground with nothing on it, and it can be serviced by a vessel that comes up to it as a ladder so a guy can get to the top and that would be about as small as they can get.

But your typical platform will have anywhere from three to six caisson legs driven into the ground, and it will be a large, steel superstructure supported on top, and it will look, to a lot of people, a lot like a drilling rig.

Mr. CONKLIN: The largest platform in our area is owned and operated by Exxon Mobil and they can have upwards of 45 people out at there at a time with a typical number probably in the thirties. The smallest has two.

CONAN: So what advice would you have for people in California or Florida or in North Carolina if they were given the power to make their decision by the Congress and decide whether to start offshore drilling?

Mr. MCGRATH: If they’re asking me, I would tell them, you do not want those contraptions off your shoreline. For matters of safety, for matters of health, aesthetics, of course, they are ugly. I mean, there are people on the island who’ve grown up with them and some of my neighbors say they’ve gotten used to them and they find kind of a comfort in them, but I’m thinking – and of course, I’ve only lived on the island for three years, 

It is quite the controversy on whether to have these or not. On tomorrow post I will be showing you some Container ships that passed by these rigs and by us when we were on the ferry boat. Along with a video of both. I thought the Container ship I saw on the Gulf was huge, but after doing some research it isn’t even close to the largest container ship built.

Living With Oil and Gas Platforms

by Sandra J