In previous posts, you saw photos of lots of oil/gas infrastructure, and two of this rig, Enterprise 351, here and here.
I said then I’d come back to this rig because it was the biggest I saw. It was built in Quebec in 1982.
Note the crewman walking on the rig below and to the left? Here is a video of 351 departing Singapore on a semi-submersible, showing a drone’s eye angle. Here is a video of its arrival in the Gulf of Mexico two and a half years ago, and it’s afloat like a barge, not standing like a platform. And here‘s one more, showing tugboats moving a rig away from a stack.
If I read this right, these three legs are each 477′, which at 14′ per story, is about equivalent to a 34-story building!
Accommodations onboard are for 81 crew.
This helideck is designed for a Sikorsky S-61 aircraft. It only looks like a steaming caldron here.
I’m not sure what happens in all these spaces.
These draft marking only make sense when this rig is a 243′ x 200′ barge, not a platform.
I suppose lifeboat drills are required with some frequency.
All photos, WVD, who hopes to get to a southern rig museums one of these months when they are open. I tried to visit the one in Morgan City but it was closed that day. Here’s one in Galveston. Here’s a floating rig I saw in Brazil almost a decade ago.
3 comments
Comments feed for this article
September 3, 2022 at 8:22 pm
louiskl
You cant help but wonder what kind of disaster preparedness/training they do. Deepwater horizon does come to mind.
September 3, 2022 at 10:10 pm
George
Boat “drills,” where everybody is required to show up and verify a muster, are weekly. Boats only need to be exercised in the water every 3 months, less-often for the free-fall lifeboats. The realism of the drills is at the initiative of the Captain or Offshore Installation manager.
That big shed you saw houses only the drawworks, the huge, high-speed, high capacity winch that handles the drillpipe and casing for the well. Sometimes the driller’s station is alongside the drawworks, other times it’s remote to isolate the driller from the noise and flying debris off the wire. In my early days, drillers were typically deaf in their left ear because of spending 12 hours a day running the drawworks right alongside them.
September 29, 2022 at 10:51 am
tugster
I just stumbled onto this article about a group of Mexican women working on platforms: https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-secret-sisterhood-of-offshore-oil-workers?utm_source=pocket-newtab