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The World’s Top Five Energy MegaStructures
Submitted by Nick Cunningham via OilPrice.com,
Royal Dutch Shell plans on shutting down its iconic Brent oil field after it reaches the end of its life. The field has played a critical role in the United Kingdom’s energy history, having accounted for about 10 percent of the country’s total oil and gas production since the 1970’s.
But with the aging field hitting retirement, the massive platform used to drill the field must be dismantled. The structure is the size of the Eiffel tower and sits 450 miles offshore in the rough waters of the North Sea.
How does Shell plan on removing such a structure? It will hire a truly massive ship to do the task. The ship in question is included in the following non-scientific and non-comprehensive list of some of the largest energy structures in the world.
The Pieter Schelte.
The Pieter Schelte is one of the largest ships on the planet.
Owned by the Swiss company Allseas, the Pieter Schelte cost $1.7 billion to build. It is almost as long as the Empire State building and as wide as the Big Ben’s Elizabeth Tower.
Up until now, offshore platforms had to be disassembled piece by piece, at great cost. But the Pieter Schelte will change that. It is so big and so powerful that it will sail to the Brent oil field and literally lift the Delta platform off of its concrete pillars. That will turn a job that used to take months into an operation that should only take a few days. Check out this video of how the dismantling is expected to take place.
The Perdido.
The Perdido oil platform is the world’s deepest oil platform.
With a 35 percent ownership, Shell operates the Perdido in the Gulf of Mexico. It has a total depth of 2,450 meters (8,000 feet).
The 555 foot spar had to be towed on its side to the drilling site in the Gulf, and then upended to be put in place to previously installed equipment 8,000 feet below at the sea floor. It started oil and gas production in the Gulf in 2010.
The Berkut.
While the Perdido has the deepest structure, the Berkut platform arguably has the world’s largest above water structure for an oil platform.
The $12 billion rig weighs around 200,000 tons and is designed to work in the harsh conditions off of Russia’s Pacific coast, where it is in place. It is expected to produce over 100,000 barrels of oil per day near the island of Sakhalin.
The Prelude.
Shell achieved a milestone when it built the Prelude, the world’s first floating liquefied natural gas (FLNG) vessel.
It is also the largest floating structure ever constructed. It is over half a kilometer long (more than four soccer fields) and will weigh more than 600,000 tons. The Prelude will displace as much water as six of the largest aircraft carriers. Put another way, it is longer than the Petronas towers in Kuala Lumpur and almost as long as the Taipei 101. The Prelude will be moored 300 miles off the coast of northeast Australia. It will drill for natural gas, liquefy it and offload it onto tankers. This cuts out the need to pipe gas to shore for liquefaction and re-export, potentially revolutionizing the LNG industry. It will have the capacity to produce about 3.6 million tons of LNG per year.
Three Gorges Dam.
The iconic dam is the world’s largest power plant with over 22,000 megawatts of capacity, or equivalent to about 22 large nuclear or coal-fired power plants.
At a cost of $28 billion, the project began operation in 2008. While the Chinese government holds its up as an engineering feat, the environmental group International Rivers calls it “a model for disaster.” Over 1.2 million people were displaced during construction, several cities were flooded, and the environmental damage has been profound. It is unlikely that there will ever be a power plant that comes remotely close to the size of the Three Gorges.
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At the cost of billions and with breakevens in trouble one wonders how the following projects will fare...
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Actually, Washington is the biggest energy structure in the world. It produces more BTU of dung than anything else too.
is this kinda like the 'skyscraper method' of predicting the next downturn based on people building gigantic shit like this?
ss
Forgotten in the above is Hibernia, the heaviest object ever moved on earth. Troll is another monster.
Actually, Allseas is Dutch but, you know, the fiscal things...
and the ship has been renamed. Pieter Schelte was a little bit too much fanboy of the 3rd Reich. That is not so much a problem when you deal with Ukrainian politicians but it is when you want to name a ship after your grand father.
And it increases Entropy way up too.
Plus the addition of all the "hot air" when Congress people open their pieholes to speak.
I'm making over $7k a month working part time. I kept hearing other people tell me how much money they can make online so I decided to look into it. Well, it was all true and has totally changed my life. This is what I do... www.globe-report.com
cool stuff
very cool. check this out tho http://www.iter.org/
could be the worlds first thermonuclear fusion reactor. not till 2025 or so. but a gallon of water could be enuff to power the world with virtually no toxic emmisions.
"... a fusion reaction is about four million times more energetic than a chemical reaction such as the burning of coal, oil or gas ..."
There is no doubt that there are an abundance of possible creative alternatives. However, Alternative Energies & Society Adapted to Them?
As long as political science continues to have no relationship to physical science, other than twisted up through the maximum possible deceits and frauds, then every advance in technology STILL gets pumped into the established social pyramid systems, based on backing up lies with violence, which ultimately results in those systems becoming even MORE criminally insane than they already are!
It is cool stuff; we used to do this stuff all the time and think nothing of it.
Why we should ditch that UN-Cold War sop to Soviet paranoia, the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, and go back to the Moon for fun, profit, and exploration.
You pay's your money and you takes your chances...
Risk taking is a part of how the real world works but with the way it work now, risk can't be quanitied because everybody is trying to screw everybody else. I've been offered several investments in the last few years that require the market to be bent to fit. If I'm going to jump out of an airplane I want to know that I'm actually wearing a parachute not made by ACME.
risk cant be quantified...
isnt that amazing? why do they even bother having bond auctions anymore when they are just monetized by central banks. i mean, when you get right down to it, why dont they just give us spending credits on a smartphone and be done with it!
You have to keep up appearences so the sheep don't suspicious.....
Am I too late for the auction?
I would like to bid on one of those floating cities.
I'm assuming they will recycle the oil platform?
As much as possible, there's a lot of high dollar alloy's in it.
Various steel alloys.
Thing is, once you put alloys into refined steel, it is not typically economical to get them out (toward the precise alloy intended). The current practice is, primarily, to dilute the said scrap with lower alloyed scrap or ore melt.
Add my penis to the list of megastructures.
Mandatory rebuttal to a mandatory penis reference in an article about megastructures:
When the scale is in nano-inches, a hundredth of an inch is indeed a megastructure!
She said, "I need nine inches, and I like it to hurt!"
I said, "take your clothes off, baby, and I'll give it to you the way you want."
She willingly obliged, and was soon naked under the covers. I turned the lights out, stripped, and put it in and out three times, slapping her face.
Micro soft?
NOT BAD!
How about an iPad MINI? it's REALLY HARD, and also REALLY SMALL...
3 inches .... but hard as carborundum ! LOL
Transformers?
Yes, and spars and cables and switch boxes and fancy hydraulic doohickeys ... lots of savageable equipment in that sucker.
Why don't they just make a casino out of that piece of shit in the north sea ? What a waste it is to take down.
thats funny, nowhere do i see a picture of printer or the CME
This might be a good time for the Fed to make a big statement / Buy signal ..... We "will not Monetize" the oil market.
They tried last week and they failed.
There's also those floating Russian nuke powered sea water desalinators which should be coming on line any time now, which can purify something like 250,000 litres of sea water into drinking water a day , they have 2 , wouldn't be surprised to see them off Crimea this year or next
Those wouldn't be the floating desalinators shown in Oblivion would they?
All that for less than the daily needs of Maybe 200,000 people per day.
And poster in the other ZH article on California doing it for their needs. The Russian plant would satisfy LA for about a minute.
Natural history tells us that Earth has suffered lots of abuses in the past. But, eventually it will manage and cone back to wipe all those abuses away. Fuck humans and they will disappear as all others before them there, according to late George Carlin.
https://youtu.be/7W33HRc1A6c
ULA three d prints a rocket engine the size of a tea cup.
The nanosats should be hitting the airwaves here any day now.
Even Estonia has launched their own Satellite. So I guess we'll all have our satellite.
Quebec have a 16000 MW damn complex since the 70'
Thinking about the cost of such structures leads to this: The oil glut and low prices reflect an affordability problem
Since the energy industries (as well as everything else) are "paid" for with "money" made out of nothing, as debts, which is a fundamentally fraudulent financial accounting system, it is almost impossible to have any kind of rational, objective assessment of what it is worthwhile to do, as an expenditure of energy, in order to get a return on that energy invested.
Since our entire political economy is based on ENFORCED FRAUDS, that is the context in which various mega-projects, such as those illustrated above, are manifesting. More and more blatantly, the "markets" are rigged in profound ways which make a mockery out of the illusions that there could be some kind of economic rationality operating through the decisions regarding how to invest energy to get more energy back in return. What ENFORCED FRAUDS are actually based upon is that money is measurement backed by murder, as the most abstract way that private property is claims backed by coercions.
The real costs of anything are almost impossible to assess, because of the ways that the most important costs are deliberately disregarded. Energy mega-projects only have to be relatively "successful" within the context of fundamentally fraudulent financial accounting systems ... IF any kind of civilization manages to survive in the future, then PERHAPS they will be able to more objectively assess the degree to which our energy systems made sense?
The basic problems are that "money" made out of nothing as debts, which can disappear back to nothing, flagrantly violates the most basic law of nature, the conservation of energy. Therefore, the human accounting systems used to assess energy structures, built by human beings for their purposes, are based on bizarre ways that the basic laws of nature are deliberately being disregarded as much as possible, within the social successes achieved through financial systems of enforced frauds, as symbolic robberies.
The biggest bullies' bullshit world view dominates everything we do, with its series of short-term social successes based on being able to back up lies with violence. That world view has also dominated the philosophy of science, so that the concept of entropy was inverted, by having an arbitrary minus sign inserted into the entropy equations of thermodynamics and information theory, in order that those would become consistent with the biggest bullies' bullshit world view. Human beings today tend to deliberately misunderstand their own energy systems. In that context, it is practically impossible to form any coherent opinions regarding the biggest examples of human energy structures, which have been made and maintained inside the context of fundamentally fraudulent financial accounting systems.
While human beings and human civilizations operate as entropic pumps of energy flows, the ways that those are generally misunderstood could not possibly be more BACKWARDS ... Therefore, I would expect that, IF it was possible to do some sort of objective overall analysis, those structures pictured above were probably criminal insanities, that wasted the most resources in the worst possible ways ... However, one can NOT know that for sure.
and they say the Dutch don't build anything. hahah
Guess who raised the Kursk?
"Guess who raised the Kursk?"
O.K., I'll guess...
Was it 'the Kursk's' sexy girlfriend? She must have been able to suck a golf ball through a garden hose. Kursk only got raised ONCE, though, so I guess she wasn't that good after all.
<sarc> :)
Hey, Bro, you need to get laid ! LOL
How much i want you to give the credits, Smit International and Mammoet aren't that Dutch anymore, they have been bought by investment funds.
The size and cost of those structures should give you a clue as to how desperate they are.
The Berkut mentioned will ONLY 100,000 barrels per day. The world uses over 60 MILLION per day.
The Champagne of the oils is gone...... PERIOD.
All we got left is Cooking Sherrie and MadDog 20-20.
IF we can find that.
Peak Oil
They Ain't' find any more 1 million a day wells Period.
agree, but the Berkut is drilling in the artic, not shallow waters. i think the Berkut is only a test drill because with temperatures of -40 C and thick ice ramping on it's pillars it's now quite smart to try to pump up 250.000 barrels a day.
Seems like Thunder Horse should be on that list somewhere:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunder_Horse_PDQ
... must be just a few inches smaller than the Perdido.
It's also noteworthy because it highlights BP's stellar quality assurance program in the Gulf of Mexico. From the article:
I will anticipate that the fluid flow in the referred to manifold is in the opposite direction to that suggested/described in the Wiki link. Weldments, taken as distinct from welds, can fail due to multiple causes. Here, it is not cerrtain that Dennis was an exclusive factor given the duration the components existed in the subsea environment prior to Dennis.
Hi Tyler,
The Pieter Schelte is renamed due it's name: it's now called the Pioneering Spirit
Pieter Schelte was a Dutchguy who joined the SS and after the war fled to Venuzuela,jewish organisations demanded a name change due SS involvement.
Pieter Schelte is the father of Allseas and Heerema
Pieter Schelte Heerema is his full name and his sons begun Allseas and Heerema, on the second foto with the Perido you see the Thialf, owner Heerema.
Shell is as you know British Dutch company.
You can say the Dutch still rule the seas after 400 years V.O.C. legacy