Houston Chronicle: KATRINA'S AFTERMATH: Surgery for an unwieldy patient: Shell tries to get a huge platform producing again in the Gulf: “If it does not go well, Shell's recovery from what many have called the Gulf of Mexico's worst hurricane season on record will take longer and become more costly.”: Posted Sunday 20 November 2005
By TOM FOWLER
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle
THE HERMOD, GULF OF MEXICO — Early this week, a delicate piece of surgery is scheduled 55 miles off Louisiana. The patient: Mars, a 36,500-ton oil and natural gas platform as big as a city block.
Using two massive cranes mounted on a ship the size of a football stadium, workers from Royal Dutch Shell and marine construction firm Heerema will gingerly lift off a 1,000-ton section of drilling equipment that collapsed during Hurricane Katrina, placing it on the barge.
Much is at stake. If it goes well, Shell may be able to reuse the rig. But in the process, valuable equipment could be damaged.
If it does not go well, Shell's recovery from what many have called the Gulf of Mexico's worst hurricane season on record will take longer and become more costly.
"It's like removing a bullet from the brain," Frank Glaviano, head of Shell's production in the Americas, said during a visit to the site last week. "You could do just as much damage trying to remove it if it's not done right."
The rig atop the platform looked like the detached head of a giant robot flopped over to one side. Workers clambered over the gnarled blue-gray steel mass, welding eyelets onto the structure for the lift vessel's cranes to grab onto.
The operation will require a pair of carefully calibrated moves. The top of the rig will be connected to the lower skid in five carefully chosen locations that will be cut away for the first move. It will be lowered to the deck of the lift vessel for inspection while the skid is also removed.
The destruction on Mars may be among the most dramatic caused by hurricanes Katrina and Rita in the Gulf waters, but it's far from the only damage.
The storms destroyed 112 production platforms and eight drilling rigs, and damaged more than 70 other vessels, according to the Department of Energy. Nearly 130 natural gas and oil pipelines have been damaged.
Companies have been scrambling to make repairs since the storms passed, but the going is slow. Nearly 47 percent of the Gulf's daily oil production and 36 percent of the natural gas output remained off line Friday, according to the federal Minerals Management Service.
The drop in oil and gasoline prices in recent weeks may have led many to forget about the offshore devastation, but every day in the Gulf, dozens of costly repair projects grind forward on platforms and pipelines.
Each day production is out represents a huge cost in lost sales and increased expenses for the companies.
BP said the storms cut about $700 million from third-quarter profit, with more cuts likely to come. BP continues to lease a tanker to move 400,000 barrels of oil per week from platforms to shore because of damaged undersea pipelines.
Chevron estimates the storms reduced third-quarter earnings by more than $600 million and will have an even bigger impact in the fourth. That company's Typhoon platform capsized during Hurricane Rita, and a company official told the Platts information service that it may be written off.
Shell wouldn't specify how much repairs to Mars will cost, but estimates it will have spent about $300 million, before insurance payments, on repairs, evacuations and employee assistance.
First looks at the damage
One of the first people to see the destruction on Mars was Lori Fremin, a planner in Shell's Houston office who used to work on the structure.
With the company's New Orleans office shut down, Fremin volunteered to go on the first inspection flight over the Gulf less than an hour after Katrina passed.
Fremin had grown attached to the giant structure after spending three years as one of its mechanical engineers, so she was eager to see how it fared.
"When you work offshore, you always remember your coordinates, the X and Y of where your platform is located," Fremin said. "So even though I no longer worked there, when the storm was over those coordinates, all of us that worked there were paging each other. I jumped at the chance to go see it."
As the turboprop plane made its way from Houston over the Gulf, Fremin said her sense of dread began to build.
They first passed Shell's Auger platform, which still had power and appeared undamaged. Next was the ConocoPhillips platform Jolliet, then Chevron's Typhoon spar, which seemed fine. It would be capsized by Hurricane Rita weeks later.
As the team flew farther east, there were growing signs of Katrina's wrath. A drilling rig floated by Shell's Brutus platform, which engineers later said suffered about $300,000 in damage. Soon after they spotted Transocean's Deepwater Nautilus drilling rig, which was drifting free.
As the plane dipped below the clouds to look at Shell's relatively unscathed Ursa platform, the battered silhouette of Mars appeared on the horizon just seven miles away.
"I was in shock when I saw it without its rig," Fremin said, referring to the tall latticework derrick that usually towered some 250 feet over the Mars deck. That 350-ton structure was nowhere to be seen and would later be found on the sea floor 3,200 feet below and 310 feet away from platform.
What remained was the lower portion of the drilling rig and the skid that it moved back and forth on.
"I immediately had new respect for nature, for wind and the force of the waves," Fremin said.
As the plane turned to fly back to Houston, Fremin noticed one of her colleagues, a marine structural engineer, was smiling. While the topside destruction to Mars was an awful sight, he was pleased the platform survived winds estimated at 175 mph that lasted four hours.
Lifeboats on Mars had been lifted from their slings and smashed into the braces that held them. The waves bent steel on the underside of the platform. But Mars was not listing and didn't appear to have other significant structural damage.
Later inspections showed that even though the platform swayed as much as 300 feet off its center point, the tension legs that tied it to the ocean floor held firm.
"I had this emotional tie to the place because I had worked there, but he knew it was a structural success," Fremin said. "It wasn't until I landed on the platform a few days later that I had the same reaction."
Another surprise
Nature provided yet another surprise. The drilling rig collapsed rather neatly around a key piece of equipment used to "dry out" natural gas to make it fit for pumping to shore through pipelines. The so-called glycol contact tower on Mars is a massive, one-of-a-kind piece of equipment capable of treating 200 million cubic feet of natural gas per day.
"It was amazing, but the entire rig and hoses and cables fell just around this tower," she said. "It was meant to be that it would not get hit, because finding another like it would be near to impossible."
If the structure of the drilling rig is not significantly twisted, the company hopes it can be repaired on the barge and returned to Mars.
If not, the rig from the Brutus platform 70 miles away would likely be moved to Mars, which would add time and cost to the recovery while putting Brutus behind on its drilling.
"We don't know the full scope of work that will be involved once we lift it," Floyd Landry, Mars' operations manager, said as he watched workers from the helicopter pad of the Hermod. "I'm not surprised at what good shape the whole platform is in, but I am still in awe of what happened to the rig."
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