I don't think so. These rigs look massive and permanent, but in reality they are constantly deteriorating. Thus, they should not be compared to an island. Salt water is very bad for steel. And the ocean waves and winds constantly put stress on said steel.
If they get left without being dismantled for a while, they will get into a very dangerous state where they are about to fall apart and it is too dangerous to even approach them. Then dismantling them will be much more expensive.
>If they get left without being dismantled for a while, they will get into a very dangerous state where they are about to fall apart and it is too dangerous to even approach them. Then dismantling them will be much more expensive.
Once the Well itself is plugged, what are the realistic consequences of just letting the things rust into oblivion?
That depends on how environmentally friendly you want to be in reclaiming that steel [0]:
> A secondhand vessel is currently worth about $190 per tonne to a shipbreaking yard in Turkey, a price established by the local market in reclaimed steel. Sail on to China and a different market, and the same metal is worth $210 per tonne. At breakers’ yards in Alang in India, Chittagong in Bangladesh and Gadani in Pakistan, they will pay around $280 per tonne. Meanwhile, at the EU-approved shipbreaking sites, which are bound to conform to continental waste laws, and where vessels are dismantled in closed-off quays or dry docks, rates are less competitive: European yards offer zero dollars per tonne, and, in fact, tend to ask a fee to take a shipowners’ junk.
That is correct. The structural integrity of the platforms is only one aspect.
How would you check/ensure that it is still fit for purpose?
Another aspect I read on this topic and remember from the Brent Spar [1] case is that the cavities and tanks of these platforms are sometimes filled with unknown and/or highly toxic undefined stuff. Unless you 'clean' this up it might not be liveable.
"The oil companies do not want a repeat of the mid-1990s. Back then, Shell’s plan to sink a piece of Brent equipment, called Brent Spar, in the ocean depths caused a bruising fight with environmental groups led by Greenpeace and prompted stricter regulation."
The irony was that after all that, Greenpeace had to finally admit that the original plan of sinking the Brent Spar was actually the most environmentally friendly option.
Turns out that bacteria at the bottom of the ocean love the sludge that's so toxic on land.
Can you provide a citation for your claims here. The link you provided doesn't seem to back up your claim at all. Actually, it seems to contradict your claim.
Also, assuming what you say is true, was this known at the time? Because that would seem to make a big difference -- opposing dumping "sludge that's so toxic on land" into an environment where you don't know the effects seems to be more than "PR and feelings", but rather caution and prudence.
Had a hard time finding a reference, but here is something (not exactly what I wrote, which I think was from either The Economist or Die Zeit, it's been a while):
"Writing in the journal Nature in June, Professor Euan Nisbet and Dr Mary Fowler of London University argued that the quantities of heavy metals in Brent Spar are minuscule compared with those found naturally in parts of our deep oceans. In so-called "black smokers", whole communities of highly specialised bacteria eke out their lives where the earth's crust vents huge amounts of superheated water and metals into the ocean depths. One estimate puts this discharge of metals worldwide at 700,000 to five million tonnes a year.
Dump the Brent Spar near such a vent, argues Professor Nisbet, and its impact could not even be measured. Its contents might even give the bacteria a free meal."
Also, the amount of oil was much less than Greenpeace had stated, estimated at somewhere around 100 tons, rather than 5500 tons. And oil is something that bacteria do eat.
All the articles I could find essentially state that Shell's plan was scientifically valid and posed less environmental risk than disposal on land, but didn't "feel" right.
Some of the oil rigs get transported to southeast asia before they are dismantled.
Check out the south Atlantic for a possible location, west of the Namibian coast. There are some shallow spots there like the Zubov Seamount, less than 50m deep and more than 200 miles from the coast.
The horn of Africa (notorius for pirates) is on the other side of the continent. Or does this sound truthy because, you know...Africa? For your information, Namibia and South Africa (neighbouring country and close trading partner) have professional navies. Any hypothetical pirate's career in that geography would be similar to real-life illegal fishers' in the area: short and unfruitful.
That's an understatement: it's over 2000 nautical miles north.
> but their officials in Namibia say themselves that they're concerned about it.
The link you gave was a speech given by the president while commissioning a naval base. I wouldn't place import on his mentioning piracy while listing the functions of a navy in a generic speech: also of concern are "global peace and security" by your terms.
You'd have to be producing something valuable, but then again, that's one of the economic models behind seasteading is production of high value goods which are forbidden to produce on land. ie: drugs, dangerous materials, etc.
Is the idea that you're in international water so you can do what you want? What stops a navy coming and confiscating your equipment then? They stop drug smugglers and pirates in international waters all the time. And you'll be static!
The idea is that you can simultaneously be protected by the laws of nation-states that you like (protection from pirates), and are free to break the laws of nation-states that you don't like (taxes, drug laws, etc.)
It's an example of Libertarian paradise syndrome; where you want all the comforts of modern civilization with none of the obligations.
I think the Anarcho-Capitalist paradise you're talking about would involve personal contracts with "security" companies to keep the pirates away - although it has never been explained to me what keeps the security company from becoming the pirates.
The Libertarian version involves paying for a military, I think.
Yeah, that's the flaw in the drug production plan. They think they can get around it by declaring themselves an independent nation, but nobody's going to recognize them as such. If they're not an independent nation they're just a vessel on the ocean subject to maritime law.
Governments will tolerate seasteading if it's the functional equivalent of parking a big houseboat somewhere. They won't tolerate modern day Tortugas, though.
>Is the idea that you're in international water so you can do what you want?
Pretty much as I understand it, but I don't think they're under the illusion that they don't have to maintain some sort of relationship with land-based nations.
>What stops a navy coming and confiscating your equipment then?
Nothing? Some form of diplomacy?
>They stop drug smugglers and pirates in international waters all the time. And you'll be static!
They never stop them all. I don't think I will be static. I'll be on the beach.
Yes - that's 12km of the coast of Suffolk - down south, almost in the channel. Much warmer and calmer, relatively. Also, no one lives on it anymore, afik.
A seasteader would have to pay more than the rig's value as scrap (less the cost of scrapping it). That might turn out to be quite a bit of money.
Or, it might turn out to be zero. The article left it unclear whether they (the owners of the platforms) are making or losing money by doing this.
But there are two other concerns that would have to be addressed: Plugging the oil well, and navigational hazards. Neither seems to me to be insurmountable. Plugging the hole and leaving the platform there is easier than plugging the hole and removing the platform. And the navigational hazard has been there for decades. Leaving it changes nothing; an existing risk merely continues.
These are production platforms, not drilling platforms. A production platform like the one mentioned in the article gathers oil and gas from dozens of wells connected by a system of piping laid on the sea floor. As such, they'd have no way to plug a well. Operators use mobile rigs to do a "P&A" (Plug and Abandon). There's no way that the permitting authority would allow the well operator to abandon any wellhead without plugging it, no matter who they'd sold the production platform to.
>A seasteader would have to pay more than the rig's value as scrap (less the cost of scrapping it). That might turn out to be quite a bit of money.
I suspect that number is actually negative without the rig owner's input. Thus the bit about Shell "watching over" the process to make sure the breakers are dealing properly with chemicals and asbestos.
On of the reasons the US Navy has taken to sinking decommissioned warships is the various hazardous materials make the cost of breaking them up more than the value of the materials. Rigs can't be that different.
Sure, you'd have to pay for the scrap value. But it's never [1] going to be cheaper than that anyway. I'm not sure what environmental hazards the (former) oil rigs themselves are.
--
[1] until we get self-assembling nanobots one day
If the platform weighs 100,000 ton and scrap iron is between $50 and $100/ton, then the rig's scrap value can't be more than $10,000,000, but it can be a lot less. Maybe it costs you a couple million dollars just to have it towed back, then maybe a couple million in labor and tools to cut it up, and a million in hazardous waste (asbestos) disposal, and so on. TBH, I don't know how much all of this really costs, but I can see where dismantling a rig could potentially cost quite a bit more than its scrap value, and thus the thing can have a negative value. In that case it might be quite attractive if the owner of the thing can transfer that responsibility to someone else. They might even pay you to take it.
