Drilling rigs clamping down for hurricane season

Houston Chronicle:

Royal Dutch Shell's Mars oil platform is whole again with two months to spare before hurricane season begins in June.

A new 250-foot latticework derrick atop a repaired 1,000-ton drilling rig substructure is back on the Gulf of Mexico's largest producing platform about 130 miles southeast of New Orleans. That reunion was the biggest step in the platform's last major repair after Hurricane Katrina's destructive wrath in August 2005.

But this time, revamped clamps give the substructure a much stronger grip on the platform, said Charlie Williams, chief scientist of well engineering and production technology for Shell.

Katrina's fury sheared through the original 3-inch steel clamps, lifted the rig, slammed it back onto the platform and tossed the derrick into the ocean.

In response, Shell designed new clamps to prevent both vertical toppling and side-to-side sliding, Williams said.

"These are four times stronger than the clamps we had before," he said.

Shell is far from the only Gulf player to strengthen structures and operations in light of 2005's one-two punch of hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Many drillers and producers, last year and this year, shored up mooring lines that came loose, implemented more backup systems for communications and added portable generators, among other steps.

Houston-based Transocean, the world's largest offshore drilling contractor, plans to use increased mooring capacity during hurricane season on its massive Deepwater Nautilus and Transocean Marianas deep-water semisubmersible drilling rigs, company spokesman Guy Cantwell said.

Both were set adrift when mooring systems that fasten the rigs to the seafloor were damaged in 2005 — Nautilus by Katrina, and Marianas by Rita a few weeks later.

Another moored semisubmersible rig, the Henry Goodrich, also has the increased mooring capacity and is scheduled to be in the Gulf in the third or fourth quarter of this year, Cantwell said.

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This is for those of you that may wonder what the oil companies are doing with the increased revenue from pump prices. As more of our production is done in offshore rigs, more will be invested in technology to keep them where they are supposed to be. It should also be noted for the environmental wackos that none of the disruption caused by the hurricane resulted in a huge oil spill.