Perdido spar moves into place 200 miles off the Texas coast
[3.34 minutes]
[Description]
On 18 August 2008 the Shell-operated Perdido Regional Development Spar arrived in the ultra-deep
waters of the Gulf of Mexico and is being secured to the seafloor in about 8,000 feet of water. Perdido
will be the deepest oil development in the world, the deepest drilling and production platform in the
world and have the deepest subsea well in the world.
Perdido will be a fully functional oil and gas platform with a drilling rig and direct vertical access wells,
full oil and gas processing and remote subsea wells. The facility is designed to produce 100,000 barrels
of oil per day and 200 million standard cubic feet of gas. The production from these fields will be
transported via new and existing pipelines to US refineries.
[Words on screen]
Perdido spar moves into place
Ultra-deep water
Gulf of Mexico
200 miles off the Texas coast
August 18, 2008
Voiced News Story
[Voice over]
The Perdido spar was towed 160 nautical miles in just under two days to its final work site. An area
called Alaminos Canyon block 857 in the Gulf of Mexico.
The big spar, 550 feet long and 118 feet in diameter, arrived floating on its side. The task was to up-end
it, rotating it from a horizontal to a vertical floating position. It took dozens of people from Herema’s
deep-water construction vessel, Baldor, working non-stop for nearly 24 hours. Once in place, tugboats
pulled rip-out plugs from the spars bottom tanks. Sea water rushed in and after two hours had flooded
the tanks enough to submerge, tipping the giant structure about fifteen degrees. Water was pumped
into the tanks through hoses from the Baldor over the next 24 hours filling the tanks until the entire spar
floated upright in the water. Next, wielding polyester and chain mooring lines strong enough to hold
firm against hurricanes as powerful as Katrina, workers secured the floating giant to previously installed
anchor piles in the sea floor nearly 8,000 feet below. It will take a month to fasten all nine mooring lines.
During that month the Perdido team and meteorologists will continually monitor the Atlantic and Gulf of
Mexico for tropical storms and hurricanes and work steadily to secure the spar before another hurricane
passes through the southern Gulf.
[Bert Ulbricht, P.E., Offshore Coordination Team Lead]
“As far as our weather window, this time of year we are approaching the peak of hurricane season so
there's a tremendous amount of weather forecasting services that we use for the project. We've broken
up the tow out and the installation offshore into a number of phases. We look at each phase for a
particular weather window. The window that we needed today to get offshore was a four-day weather
window which is clear of no tropical disturbances coming within the Perdido area and then we have
other steps offshore that we look at weather windows for each particular activity that we're going to do.
To get storm safe once we depart here to getting our first three mooring lines connected offshore is
roughly 10 days to two weeks”.
[Voice over]
Back at Ingleside on the Texas coast workers are finishing the topsides production module for setting
atop the spar in early 2009. The top sides will turn the anchored spar into a small manufacturing town in
the remote southern reaches of the Gulf.
A self-contained facility with its own power generation, the topsides contain the production equipment,
drilling rig, helicopter landing pad and living quarters for a crew of up to 150. This floating town is
designed to be capable of delivering 130,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day from some of the deepest
depths ever attempted in the Gulf of Mexico. At max production, Perdido is expected to produce
enough oil each day to fill 132,000 cars with gasoline. Shell and Perdido co-owners, BP and Chevron,
expect first production around the turn of the decade.