Perdido – overview

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.