Perdido, the world's deepest
production and drilling platform.
What we do is like the space program in the other direction.
To push engineering frontiers
to the absolute limit...
These machines can easily work
at 10,000-foot depths or greater.
Engineers look to the pioneering innovators
of the past...
What once was the wall has now become the floor.
So the intumescent paint now is charring
due to a chemical reaction.
That made the impossible possible.
Captions by vitac... www.Vitac.Com
captions paid for by discovery communications
Since the 1940s, the Gulf of Mexico has provided
a vital source of energy for America.
Almost 2 million barrels of liquid fuel
are produced there every day, and almost half of the country's
entire petroleum-refining capacity is on the Gulf coast.
The challenge of accessing deep-water reserves
gets harder and harder.
We're exhausting the supply or access to the easy barrels.
With every new discovery and development,
it gets more challenging and it gets deeper.
That's what causes us to push the frontiers of technology.
To access these deep-water fuel reserves,
200 miles from shore is the revolutionary Perdido,
the deepest production and drilling facility in the world.
It's a $3 billion engineering colossus.
The structure itself stands as tall as the Eiffel Tower
from the bottom of the spire all the way to the top
of the drilling rig.
Weighing over 60,000 tons,
the world's deepest production and drilling platform
is anchored to the sea floor by nine 2-mile-long
steel and polyester mooring lines.
Oil and gas from 35 newly discovered Wells,
some as far as seven miles away from the platform,
are pumped to the surface.
At 550 feet long and 118 feet in diameter,
this floating spar provides the base
for the three decks where the oil and gas are processed.
There's space for two helicopters, a restaurant,
a gym, and multiple cabins to house the crew of 150-plus,
who live and work on this record-breaking platform
for 14 days at a time.
Perdido is an engineering achievement
once thought impossible.
You're going into a frontier area
in what we call the ultra-deep water.
We are going in reservoirs that had not truly been tested before
in new plays for the oil and gas industry
in the Gulf of Mexico.
You are going into one of the most severe
environmental conditions as you can imagine,
in 7,800 feet of water.
Making Perdido possible required
a giant technological leap.
Oil and gas fields wouldn't exist without the death
of tiny plants and creatures.
While dinosaurs roamed the earth,
gazillions of dead plankton and algae built up
on the sea floor...
Oh, crikey.
Before a crust of rock formed over the top.
Millions of years of pressure and the earth's heat
essentially cooked this into an energy-rich soup.
But getting to it underwater
has never been easy.
Because it had to operate at an unprecedented depth
of 7,800 feet, engineers determined Perdido
couldn't have legs like a standard oil rig.
The reason we couldn't use a conventional
tension leg platform was because the water depth was so great
that those tension legs would be too heavy
for any structure to be able to support.
To go this deep, Perdido's designers drew on
a breakthrough military technology
called the floating instrument platform.
In San Diego, California, mechanical engineer Dan Dickrell
is exploring one of history's most unique vessels.
In the early 1960s, the U.S. Navy was looking for
a new type of research platform from which to take precise
underwater acoustic measurements.
Now, the submarines they'd been using previously
were deemed unstable due to their shape.
They would yaw in the water, making it impossible
for the scientists on board to take the precise measurements
they needed.
Oceanographer and underwater explorer
Fred Spiess developed a more balanced solution
that changed deep-sea exploration forever.
After months of testing various designs,
Spiess and his team came up with this, the R.P. Flip,
a floating instrument platform.
But flip earns its name in another,
more extraordinary way.
This one-of-a-kind, 350-foot-long spar buoy
can go from horizontal to vertical in just 30 minutes.
But how does this work with crew on board?
During the flip itself, everyone comes,
stands out on the outside decks.
As the process occurs, the decks and the bulkheads
exchange places throughout
the horizontal-to-vertical transformation.
Most rooms on board have two doors...
One horizontal orientation, and another door
for the vertical orientation of the platform.
Now, in the configuration it is right now,
we're in the horizontal position.
But imagine what happens when the flip occurs.
What once was the wall has now become the floor,
and what once was the floor has now become the wall.
Everything on flip
is designed in two configurations...
Look at this.
It's a sink. It's a bathroom sink.
But, oh, it pivots.
How bizarre is that?
From rotating condiment racks in the galley
to tables on the walls.
To maintain its stable position in the horizontal,
there are huge concrete blocks
underneath what is now the floor.
But when it's time to change and flip from horizontal
to vertical, tons of seawater are pumped into
those ballast chambers slowly
that changes from horizontal to perfectly vertical.
It's so cool.
When flipped vertically,
amazing stability is provided by the 800 tons of water
inside a ballast tank in the long spar
sitting below the surface.
Flip is so steady it can deal with swells up to 275 feet high
and is still in use today.
Oh, this platform is too crazy.
Engineers in Finland built on the principles
of Spiess' flip design to construct the world's
biggest floating spar.
The spar itself is constructed quite ingeniously.
It's done in slices.
You cut it into slices.
And it's from the top of it to the can section,
and then the truss section you do.
And then it's welded together slice by slice.
Each of the seven-ring sections
has 12 self-contained compartments,
so if disaster strikes and a compartment is punctured,
then only that compartment would flood with water.
On the end of the can section, an open truss of pipe works
and the ballast area are added
to complete this massive structure.
Perdido's spar is about 550 feet.
In diameter, it's 118 feet.
Then the spar was delivered by ship
to the Perdido site in the Gulf of Mexico.
To reach depths of 7,800 feet, plugs are pulled to let seawater
into the ballast, and then, like Fred Spiess' flip ship,
Perdido's spar slowly begins the process
of switching from horizontal to vertical.
So they also pump water into the tanks
inside the can section, and that lowers it to give it
that stability to allow the pitch and the roll to stabilize.
Once upended, the spar must then be secured
to brace against storms, or so-called tropical disturbances.
We have a long duration... Relatively long duration
before we can get to storm-safe.
The first disturbance is predicted to be here within
about seven to eight days.
Nine supersized mooring lines had to be tethered
to the floating spar to the sea floor,
totaling around 20 miles of chain and rope.
So what we do in order to secure the structure
floating on the surface is we connect the suction anchors
on the sea floor with 2-mile-long,
huge polyester mooring lines, about 25 inches thick,
and massive steel chains on either side of the mooring line.
For maximum protection from storms,
the lines fan out for more than 1 1/2 miles around the spar.
Now, it's still sitting pretty high in the water,
so they put a weight in the bottom, essentially iron ore.
They pump into a tank at the bottom of that truss section,
so you have a lot of weight at the bottom tank.
With the additional weight and the mooring lines,
Perdido's spar is finally storm-safe.
But this was just the first step in creating the world's
deepest production and drilling facility.
It was critical to get the top sides
to be a certain weight because we wanted to do
the top sides' installation with a single lift.
To do this, the team had to produce
more engineering breakthroughs...
You just can't get people down there,
yet a considerable amount of work has to still be done
at these water depths.
To deliver this record-breaking feat
of impossible engineering.
Perdido.
About 200 miles off the Texas coastline in the Gulf of Mexico,
the world's deepest production and drilling platform
is at the cutting edge of ultra-deep water operations.
Moored in waters nearly 1 1/2 miles deep,
the rig extracts oil from 35 Wells
across three newly discovered oil fields,
producing 100,000 barrels of oil each day.
But creating a rig like this called for daring engineering.
Once workers anchored the world's biggest spar,
the next step was to connect the all-important top side.
What we call the top side is all of the equipment
that sits on the structure in the water
that allows us to produce the oil and gas.
It was critical to get the top sides to be
a certain weight because we wanted to do
the top sides' installation with a single lift
in the interest of doing it efficiently and safely.
Traditionally, these multi-story megaplants
are assembled at sea.
But a location as remote as Perdido's
called for a different solution.
The top sides were constructed at Ingleside, Texas,
and they were done one layer at a time, like a birthday cake,
and there are three layers on the deck of Perdido.
All that was done in the construction yard,
and then you had a heavy-lifting device
that took that entire three-deck layer
and put it on a barge and shipped it offshore.
With the final weight around 11,000 tons,
the top side began its journey deep into the Gulf of Mexico,
where the giant crane vessel, the Thialf, was waiting
to begin the biggest single lift ever attempted there.
This was the moment of truth, when engineers attempted
to connect the spar to the top side.
Remember, these things, they were built separately,
one in Finland and one in Texas, and all by measurements,
and all of a sudden, this was the first time
they said, "things better mate together."
And there's a lot of very anxious moments
as that crane is lifting that top side on to that hull.
As the lift began,
the top sides were pivoted into position.
And they fit perfectly.
To see those pins go in, it's a wonderful feeling.
At last, the spar settled into its new draft.
With this mammoth construction milestone complete,
the Perdido team had to focus on installing production equipment
on the sea floor.
But at 7,800 feet below the surface,
with a terrain resembling a mountain range,
this is a seemingly impossible working environment.
It's extreme amount of pressure.
In addition to that, it's really, really cold
down there, so you're talking temperatures in the order of
38 degrees Fahrenheit, so, very, very cold, and there's no light.
So it's very hostile conditions in terms of the pressures
we have down there.
With sophisticated deep-sea hardware needed
on the sea floor, physically interacting with it
is practically impossible.
You just can't get people down there, yet a consider amount
of work has to still be done at these water depths.
In an environment where even fish
struggle to survive, how do you carry out
some of the most advanced engineering work
at these high-pressure depths?
This problem required another ingenious innovation
from the past...
Check this out. Look at this.
That arm right in there exactly mimics my actions.
Cool.
To make the impossible possible.
The Perdido platform.
In the Gulf of Mexico, this engineering giant
is the deepest production and drilling platform on the planet.
But to drill at the staggering depth of 7,800 feet
in the water, engineers had to look to an ingenious innovation
from the past, the telemanipulator.
In the 1950s, America was at the forefront of developing
nuclear power for peacetime use.
Crucial to this movement was Chicago's vast
Argonne national laboratory.
And professor Eric Lima is here to reveal
the breakthrough telemanipulator technology that lets scientists
safely handle radioactive material.
And so, what they would use are these incredible arms,
and this is really cool.
Look at this.
On the other side of that glass, it does exactly what I do.
And not only does it move back and forth, in and out,
but check this out.
Look at this.
That arm right in there exactly mimics my actions.
Cool.
Called mechanical master slave manipulators,
or MSMS, these devices allowed technicians to transfer
basic movements to a second arm
from behind the safety of a glass wall.
But their dexterity and strength was still limited.
That is, until 1954, when engineer Raymond Goertz
added a motor to each arm, connected by an electric cable,
spawning the powerful telemanipulator.
It's actually a force multiplier.
So, I could pick up something very heavy just like
I was gripping it with my hand and move it over.
Well, look. There's another arm right there.
I could use both of them.
It's, like, right out of some cyborg thing.
Whoa.
It's making noises.
That's the servo motors up there.
The motors not only multiplied force.
They also allowed the operator to feel the movements.
Improved precision was matched by greater flexibility,
and the electrical cable connection allowed engineers
to separate the master and slave arms.
Goertz was able to decouple the arms, and what that means
is they can be as far apart and in any location that we want,
so we could actually have the slave arm coming up
from the floor or coming at some weird angle to get us
right where we want it to go.
Over the following decades,
Goertz's remote technology was further finessed,
producing a series of telemanipulators
that combined safety...
Okay.
With robotic precision.
So, thanks to Goertz and his work
at Argonne national laboratory,
developing these telemanipulators,
we are able to go, as humans,
in places that we've never been able to go before.
Resembling a scene from a Sci-Fi novel,
engineers at Perdido are using telemanipulator technology
to work at sea depths that were once thought impossible.
This fleet of remote-operated vehicles, or R.O.V.S,
sweep the sea floor beneath the platform.
This is exactly the type of R.O.V.
That we would use on Perdido.
This is a 1,000-pound thrust machine.
One of the main reasons we use them is simply because
below about 600-foot water depth,
it gets really, really dicey,
really, really risky to have humans at those depths.
Enter the R.O.V.
These machines can easily work at 10,000-foot water depth
or greater, and we can always get them back,
and they never get hurt.
These sub-aqua robots are equipped for serious work.
These are our hands that actually connect and attach
all the different equipment we need.
And here is our eyes.
This camera, this high-definition camera
is how we see what we have going on down there.
A leap forward from Goertz's telemanipulators,
these R.O.V.S can be operated by a joystick
using a fly-by wire system back on board the rig.
That allows a R.O.V. To fly out on excursions and move about
the well pattern to go from one well to the next,
so they can survey the entire subsea system.
Installation, drilling, and maintenance
can all be achieved remotely.
But there was one daunting task the R.O.V. Engineers
had to overcome... Getting the oil to shore.
So, you're 150 miles offshore of the coast of Texas.
And you had to get that oil and gas back to the beach.
Most of the oil pipelines that you have
in the Gulf of Mexico start in less than 5,000 feet
of water depth, so we had to connect
from Perdido's location to oil pipelines
and gas pipelines that are
further up in the shallower water.
Connecting to a live export line
at these depths had never been attempted.
The pipe had to be cut and connector installed
with extraordinary precision, and at nearly 5,000 feet,
it was completely out of human reach.
Over a two-year period, the Perdido team designed
and rehearsed for this procedure with the R.O.V.
And when they made the attempt, it worked.
To be able to do all that with remote-operated vehicles
and the water depth that they did that at Perdido
was world-class.
Never been done before.
This state-of-the-art solution is opening up
the depths of the sea.
But to tap into the world's deepest oil reserves,
Perdido's engineers had to look to the past...
The moment I flip this switch,
something very exciting is going to happen.
To produce more impossible engineering.
The Perdido platform is the deepest
offshore production and drilling facility ever built.
It has pushed the boundaries of offshore engineering.
This deep-sea hub has 22 Wells directly underneath
its structure, and its reach is far greater.
An additional 13 Wells across three oil fields
transport crude through a nearly 200-mile web of pipeline.
But creating ultra-deep offshore Wells is no easy task.
So, when you're offshore, drilling's a little bit
different than if you're on land.
In Perdido's Wells, the total well depth
was somewhere around 17,000 feet.
But almost half of that, 7,800 feet of it,
was just the water column.
Each new well must be drilled with precision,
keeping the water out and the oil in,
or both the project and the environment
could be irreversibly damaged.
To prevent the oil from leaking, engineers look to
a revolutionary innovation, the conductor pipe.
Andrew Smyth is exploring Titusville, Pennsylvania,
to discover how the conductor pipe paved the way
for an economic boom of black gold.
The moment I flip this switch,
something very exciting is going to happen.
Here it comes. You can see it.
Pennsylvania crude.
It was here in the small town of Titusville
that the hunt for oil took off at a scale never before seen,
and all because of one man's simple innovation.
In 1859, railway worker Edwin Drake
gambled his life savings on a small stake
of the newly formed Pennsylvania rock and oil company.
Drake, as a stakeholder and now employee, was sent here,
to this very site, where he began his search for oil.
But early attempts were met with mixed results.
So, at the time, the practice in drilling
was to use something called percussion drilling,
where the drill is just hammered down through the soil
until you reach your oil.
But Titusville's water-sodden ground
thwarted his plans at extracting the oil effectively.
As you withdrew the drill, the problem would be
that the water would rush into that space and contaminate
the oil he was trying to pump out.
To overcome this problem, Drake and his assistant, Billy Smith,
came upon the idea of connecting lengths of cast-iron pipe
to encase the freshly dug hole,
preventing the ingress of the water.
Called a conductor pipe, they continued to drill
through this now-watertight space through the ground,
the bedrock, and down to the oil reservoir.
After drilling 69 feet, they waited.
Overnight, it happened.
Clean oil had risen up through the pipe
to a point which it could now be collected.
Drake's plan had worked.
By the following year, oil Wells using
Drake's innovative technique sprang up all over the region,
producing several hundred thousand barrels.
The nation's oil bonanza had begun,
and huge fortunes would be made.
To drill to unrivaled depths, Perdido engineers
have taken the principle of Drake's conductor pipe
200 miles offshore.
And like that first well in Titusville,
one thing is crucial.
The processes for drilling are designed around
keeping the oil in the pipe.
So, you start with big diameter pipes, and as you go deeper,
you get smaller and smaller concentric sizes of pipe.
To begin, a hole is drilled for the conductor pipe.
Then another drill bores a few hundred feet
before a casing pipe is installed.
This is followed by a smaller drill and casing.
The process is repeated until the oil reservoir is reached.
But with the sea floor resembling the landscape
of the Grand Canyon, being able to hit the target area
with the drill is no easy task.
Most of the locations that we have to drill
are quite far away from the rig, and we have to use
directional drilling techniques in order to get there.
The scale that we're talking about, to be able to
land a well in the exact place that we need it,
if you were in a typical room, the thickness of a human hair
from the ceiling all the way down to the floor,
hitting a square inch, is the kind of accuracy
that we're talking about.
To tap reservoirs spread across nearly
30 square miles of sea floor, GPS-drilling motors
guided the drill string within a foot of its target.
In all, 35 separate Wells were created,
feeding five risers leading up to the rig.
But for the engineering team, perhaps the biggest challenge
of all is lifting the crude oil up these risers to the surface.
The reservoirs are low-pressure,
lower than you normally would find in the Gulf of Mexico.
That required us to add energy to the system in order
to produce fluids up to the surface.
To do that, we had to pump.
We had to use electrical, submersible pumps.
Well, these pumps don't like gas.
Normally the gas, oil, and water
are separated on the surface.
But to bring Perdido's oil up to the platform,
engineers had to remove the gas at the source itself,
over 1 1/2 miles below on the sea floor.
At the base of each riser, a unit separates the components.
The gas naturally ascends and is then pumped to the surface.
The engineering leap for Perdido was really in two areas.
One was the depth in water in which we were working.
The other and more significant
was the first ever subsea process.
After decades of innovation, in march 2010,
oil from the world's deepest offshore Wells finally emerged.
We are all piped in via camera
to the guys who are actually offshore doing it.
And then you start watching the pressure in the pressure gauges,
and you see the pressure start falling,
meaning that it's starting to flow.
It's been a long road, boys.
You know, you've just done something that,
in Perdido's case, nobody had ever done before.
We were pumping and separating on the subsea floor from day 1.
And it all worked, and that was incredible.
Perdido's engineers are succeeding in procuring oil
from deep within the earth's crust.
But to ensure this operation remains safe,
engineers had to look to the past...
Let's see what happens when I light them.
To create more impossible engineering.
The Perdido oil platform.
It's the first of its kind to operate
in ultra-deep water depths at nearly 8,000 feet.
When it started operations, 172 workers spent two weeks
at a time extracting enough oil to fill more than
six Olympic-size swimming pools each and every day.
As you fly up to Perdido,
it's 200 miles away from the coast.
There's pretty much nothing around it,
and it's almost a 2-hour flight on the chopper,
and as you get into the range of where Perdido is,
you see this monument to what's possible
out in the middle of nowhere, and it's really satisfying
to land on that and see what we've accomplished.
But Perdido's isolation creates
logistical challenges.
It's a 24-hour boat journey.
So, while much of the resupplying happens by ship,
the biweekly turnover of staff from 200 miles away
is carried out by helicopter.
We're flying these really large helicopters,
like this s-92 you have, which can hold up to 19 passengers.
Although we'll fly with about 15 or 16.
In the event that helicopter goes down,
that's a lot of people that we need to take care of.
But when you're potentially processing more than
100,000 barrels of oil a day,
one hazard above all others comes to the forefront.
Fire protection on an offshore installation
is of Paramount importance.
We design for safety.
It's the number-one thing we have to get right.
The worst thing that can happen on a rig
or a production facility in the event of a fire
is it gets out of control.
It gets to be very large and very catastrophic,
and in that event, we're going to abandon the facility.
We're going to put people in lifeboats that they've been
trained to use, and we'll put those lifeboats in the water
and get people away from the fire and abandon the platform.
Fire isn't just a hazard to the workforce.
A hydrocarbon Blaze can reach such high temperatures,
it has the potential to deform or even destroy solid steel.
As we become more complex and remote with these types
of developments, the safety systems that we need in order
to support them become ever more critical.
So how can you protect Perdido's vast surface areas
against the threat of extreme heat?
Engineers look to a chemical used for safety
in 19th-century show business, boron.
If, hundreds of years ago, fire-safety expert Luke Bisby
visited a theater like this, he might have been
taking his life in his hands.
At the time, oil lamps were used for lighting,
so curtains and fabrics were frequently set ablaze.
But in the early 1800s, following a string
of tragic fires, French chemist Joseph Gay Lussac
worked to fireproof France's theaters.
He began experimenting with boron, a compound now used
in detergents and cosmetics.
And to demonstrate how effective it is,
I'm going to do an experiment.
Here, I have a stage, and it has two curtains.
One of them has been soaked in boron solution,
and the other one is just normal fabric.
So let's see what happens when I light them.
And you can see that the curtain on the right-hand side
is burning quite vigorously, whereas the one on the left,
you can clearly see the effect of the boron,
which is helping the curtains to prevent flaming.
I mean, I'm impressed, and I'm a fire-safety person.
The boron helps form a protective layer of char,
which acts as a buffer between the fire and the fabric.
But this element alone isn't enough to protect
the steel platform from being subsumed by fire.
To protect this gargantuan platform,
engineers needed to take another page from engineering history...
So, the intumescent paint now
is charring due to a chemical reaction.
It's swelling and turning into a thick char.
To make the impossible possible.
Perdido is the deepest production and drilling platform
on the planet.
But to keep this colossal platform and its crew safe
from the outbreak of fire, engineers had to look to
another fire-safety development that works on steel...
Intumescent paint.
The charring effect pioneered by Gay Lussac's use of boron
is also evident in the modern fire-resistant
intumescent paint.
At Edinburgh university's fire lab,
Luke Bisby will put it to the test.
And what we're gonna do is we're gonna subject
these two steel plates, which are identical to each other,
to the heat from the flame.
The plate on the left is coated just with
a household emulsion paint, and the plate on the right
is coated with a fire-protection intumescent paint.
All right, so, here we go.
So, the intumescent paint now is charring due to
a chemical reaction and swelling and turning into a thick char.
As with Gay Lussac's boron coating,
this charring looks dramatic, but temperature monitoring
reveals just how effective it is.
The untreated steel plate heats up to 650 degrees.
But the one with intumescent plate burns under 212 degrees.
As the intumescent paint's chemical reaction accelerates,
expanding bubbles insulate this plate's surface.
So, a massive amount of thermal protection for the steel.
While it's visually kind of ugly,
it's exactly what we wanted to see happen.
In the Gulf of Mexico, the Perdido oil platform
has its key components coated in an intumescent paint.
So, intumescent paint that we've used
on Perdido, it's an epoxy coating on the steel,
and if it comes into contact with heat,
it'll form a charred layer, and that'll provide
a heat barrier between the fire and the steel itself.
So the intumescent paint system buys you time to either
fight the fire and get it under control or protect people
to the point where if you need to get off the platform
and evacuate, you've got that time.
Above all, the platform and its workforce
are geared up to stopping fire breaking out in the first place.
What we do to train our people to combat a fire,
it starts with prevention.
It's always about prevention, just like you learned in school.
Prevent the fire to start with.
We have a ton of monitoring equipment out there
to always be on watch, 24 hours a day,
watching for fires or potential sources of fires,
like a gas leak.
Perdido is covered by hundreds of sensors and alarms.
It is rigged with twin 5,000-gallon-per-minute
firewater pumps, and an automatic foam system
that covers the entire platform, including the heliport.
All of this is designed to protect the environment,
the workers, and this remarkable engineering pioneer.
It's been more than a century since humanity first dared
to attempt offshore drilling.
Now, in 7,800 feet of water in the Gulf of Mexico,
a new generation of bold engineers
has put the Perdido platform into the record books.
For me personally, that was the single biggest project
I had ever worked on, and I've worked on
some good projects, but I have tremendous pride
in what we did with Perdido.
I think everyone who worked on that project team feels
they had done something in the oil industry
that had never been done before
and really set the stage to move into ultra-deep water.
By looking at engineering history
and making the innovations high-tech,
the team behind the Perdido platform
is rewriting the map and exploring brand-new frontiers.
What we do is like the space program
in the other direction, to be able to push
the boundaries of what's possible
and achieve more than you thought you could.
It just gives a huge sense of satisfaction,
and it provides inspiration to the next generation
who have to push the boundaries even further than we did.
Engineers have succeeded
in making the impossible possible.