No Bad Days RVing: Galveston, TX - Ocean Star Offshore Drilling Rig and Museum

We have all seen them offshore in the Gulf of Mexico. Have you ever wondered what they are. Well, we had the opportunity to visit one. What I'm talking about is none other than an offshore drilling rig. Galveston is home to the Ocean Star Offshore Drilling Rig and Museum located at Pier 19 in Galveston Bay. What a perfect opportunity to see and learn right here in our back yard, well almost.

After paying our $6 admission we entered the Ocean Star, a retired drilling rig, by way of a causeway or bridge. Not knowing what to expect we were greeted by a young man who told us how to go about touring the rig on our own with no time limits. Got to love it. We started in the theater where we watched a video on the offshore oil and gas industry.

The first US oil well was completed in 1859 in Pennsylvania.

The Ocean Star Drilling Rig, a jackup drilling rig was built in 1968 by Bethlehem Shipbuilding Company of Beaumont, Texas. Ocean Star drilled over 200 wells in the Gulf of Mexico before becoming decommissioned in 1984. The Offshore Energy Center bought the drilling rig in 1995 and spent the next 2 years converting it to a museum.

Underwater view

The first part of the museum was a refresher course on hydrocarbons. Oil and gas are hydrocarbons. Two basic elements make up a hydrocarbon, hydrogen and carbon. These hydrocarbons occur in layers of rocks that can lie thousands of feet below the surface. In the early days of oil exploration wildcatters would drill in areas on a hunch not knowing if oil was present or not. Geologists started studying the earths formations. Much of the world's oil and gas deposits lie offshore under thousands of feet of water and then thousands of feet of soil and rock. Fortunately, scientists and geologists have developed effective ways of viewing the subsurface. The most common is seismology.

How is oil formed you ask? Well let me tell you. Imagine the sea millions of years ago. In this sea lived large numbers of tiny organisms. When these organisms die they settle on the bottom of the ocean floor. Over the years, huge quantities of this material along with mud and sand accumulate on the sea floor. As millions of years go by layers of this sediment build up becoming thousands of feet thick. The huge weight of this overlying sediment creates great pressure and heat on the deep layers below changing the layers into rock. At the same time heat, pressure, and other forces change the dead organic material into deposits of hydrocarbons...oil and gas. Seeping through cracks in the rock the hydrocarbons move upward until they are stopped and/or trapped by a subsurface barrier. These trapped reservoirs of petroleum are what today's oil industry seeks. Clear as mud, well by this time Susan was already on information overwhelm and we are only 1/3 through it. I loved it. Check out the pair of wanna-be-oil riggers.

Engineers use different type of bits depending on the type of rock being scraped or crushed. Roller-cone bits are used for consolidated rock. Polycrystalline diamond compact bits are used for softer rock.

Offshore, several wells can be drilled from a single fixed
platform. Drilling crews first drill a vertical well. Then using a method called deflection the drilling deflects away from the main well. Advancement in directional drilling technology permits multilateral drilling. This allows drillers to tap into the smallest of reservoirs thereby increasing the maximum recovery potential.

How are damaged underwater lines fixed you ask! Wearing atmospheric diving suits, divers can safely descend to 2300 ft for extended periods. The suits have powerful manipulator claws and an assortment of tools (I could only dream about) to perform hundreds of deep water installation or repairs.

Secondly, ROVs or remotely operated vehicles allow specialist on the surface to perform underwater maintenance and inspection of pipeline as well as construction. All subsea activity that was done in response to the Macondo Blowout on April 20, 2010 was performed by an ROV.

There are several different types of oil rigs off shore. Below are just a few.

Jacket platforms are free-standing structures held to the sea floor by pilings.

Compliant towers are allowed to sway with the ocean currents and are held upright by cables.

Tension leg platforms have positive buoyancy and are tied to the seafloor by tendons.

Gravity-based structures are huge concrete or steel structures that sit on the bottom and contain production storage tanks.

Specially equipped vessels receive and process crude oil from the seafloor gather stations. They clean and separate the crude oil from water, mud, and gas then store it until an offloading shuttle tanker takes it away.

Since 1938, over 56,000 wells have been drilled in the Gulf of Mexico. The total footage drilled by these wells is approximately 596 million feet or 113,000 miles. That's equivalent to 46 times the distance between Los Angles and New York. The deepest well to date(2008) was drilled in 2005 and reached 34,000 feet. In 2008 the cost of drilling for a typical well was $1,000 to $5,000 per foot. Meaning the oil and gas industry has invested $1.8 trillion drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.
Blue dots: 1937 - 1984 Orange dots: 1985 - 1999
Black dots: 2000 - July 2008