Life on Thunder Horse

Welcome to the middle of the Gulf of Mexico!  I am out on rotation for my internship with BP on Thunder Horse, the largest deep water producing platform in the world (no joke!).

Thunder Horse has a capacity to pump out 250,000 barrels of oil per day (for reference, that's HUGE...other BP platforms produce anywhere from 50,000-150,000 barrels per day) and 200 million cubic feet per day of natural gas. It is 6000 ft down to the sea floor and we drill 20,000 into the ground past that.  No matter how you feel about the oil and gas industry, that is quite an engineering feat.

TH is located 150 miles southeast of New Orleans:

Getting to the platform

After a 6 hour drive from Houston, TX to Houma, LA (my first time in LA!), I stayed in a hotel for the night, then got up the next morning at 3:30am to make it to the heliport for a 5am flight.  My supervisor, who is an offshore engineer and does two week rotations as his job, was on the same flight.  After a couple-hour delay because of weather, we were finally off.  We had to wear life jackets and double ear protection!  The whole journey was an hour, flying over the bottom marshy area of LA, over other platforms and drilling rigs, and finally reached the platform.

The platform

Nothing can describe how big the platform is.  We sleep and work in the living quarters on one side of the platform - this has the beds, cafeteria, offices, etc.  In the middle, there is a huge section for equipment, many rooms with pumps, valves, etc., and then the huge drilling derrick and equipment.  Many offshore platforms don't have drilling capabilities (meaning equipment to drill holes on the bottom of the ocean and get the oil out), but TH does.  Of course.  The back half of the platform is called the production side.  This is where the crude oil out of the ground comes and gets separated into oil, natural gas, water, and sand.  There are so many floors pumps, pipes, valves, separators, compressors, you name it.  If you can think of it, we have it.  And, everything is HUGE.  The pumps that I am working on for one of my projects have motors that are almost as tall as me and are longer than my arm span.  Some of the bigger piping is more than 3 feet in diameter.  Crazy.

More in later posts!