- Title: USA: Oil rigs prepare for tropical storms like Gustav year-round
- Date: 30th August 2008
- Summary: (W1) SANTO DOMINGO, DOMINICAN REPUBLIC (RECENT) (REUTERS) VARIOUS OF CAR DRIVING THROUGH FLOODED STREETS
- Embargoed: 14th September 2008 13:00
- Keywords:
- Location: Usa
- Country: USA
- Topics: Disasters / Accidents / Natural catastrophes,Industry
- Reuters ID: LVAZ1DEJX559SN4IVJJA2V03NHA
- Story Text: As Gustav strengthens into a major hurricane in the Caribbean, weather experts employed by the heavy concentration of U.S. oil and natural gas platforms in the Gulf of Mexico say that planning for such storms is a year-round job.
SCRIPT: As Gustav moves toward the Gulf of Mexico, an area that produces more than a quarter of the United States oil supply, production facilities in the region are on weather watch, closely monitoring what could become the most devastating hurricane since Katrina to hit the region.
"The entire Gulf of Mexico watches the weather," says Ed Elfert, Platform Installation Manager of a rig in the Gulf, "We contact with a weather agency. We check forecasts. Watch for storms. We are always planning."
Elfert runs operations on Chevron's Petronius platform -- it sits about 200 kilometres southeast of New Orleans. Installations like Petronius are more like floating cities with dozens of workers on board. It is one of the more than 400 manned structures the company owns in the Gulf.
Planning for a storm is a year-round event. Preparations for the hurricane season were well underway when Reuters visited the platform earlier this Summer. Will Sirgo is a Senior at the University of Texas studying petroleum engineering. His summer project: making sure Petronius is ready should a hurricane hit.
"I'm looking at their hurricane shutdown as the hurricane approaches," says Sirgo.
"How they evacuate people. How they shutdown equipment. In what order they shut down the equipment like if you shut it down will everything work all right."
Technology allows engineers on board to communicate daily with the Gulf office located near New Orleans. Chevron has started to evacuate some essential and non-essential personnel at its facilities -- phase one of its evacuation plans. Phase two starts the process of shutting-down the systems that pump the oil up from the ocean's floor. And phase three, according to Elfert, is when the rig is closed completely by a final group of workers.
"When it is a certain distance from the platform and we know it is going to be here we start narrowing down to what we call a skeleton crew.
Roughly one helicopter load of men that stay and finish shutting the platform in, secure everything in, and leave in phase three," says Elfert.
Each process of the shutdown is followed in painstaking detail to prevent costly damage to the Petronius platform, which pumps 27-thousand barrels of oil and 31-million cubic feet of natural gas a day.
In 2006, hurricanes Katrina and Rita shut down about thirty percent of the refining capacity along the gulf, and also destroyed over a hundred oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico and many of the pipelines, resulting in significantly higher oil prices. It is to soon to tell whether Gustav will strike New Orleans and the gulf coast as those storms did, and remains to be seen what the storm could do to the already high price of oil. - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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