Shell Oil Co.’s “Mars” platform in the Gulf of Mexico had been through hurricanes, but nothing had prepared it for Hurricane Katrina last year. For four hours, the platform was lashed by 175-mph winds and slapped by 80-foot waves. The platform’s tall drilling rig, which looks like a bad copy of the Eiffel Tower, toppled over, and the rig’s 1,000-ton substructure was ripped free, lifted into the air and dropped onto the platform.
Last month, Shell finished repairing the hurricane damage to the platform – just in time for a new hurricane season.
This year, however, the company is taking new precautions, installing extra rig clamps and emergency satellite-communications systems in a bid to minimize destruction from storms and to speed recovery efforts if heavy damage occurs again.
The steps taken by Shell and other companies are aimed at heading off a repeat of last year’s disaster, when platforms were wrecked, oil and gas supplies disrupted, and prices sent soaring. A Congressional Budget Office report estimated that repairs to the energy infrastructure in the Gulf of Mexico would cost $18 billion to $31 billion. And consumers paid billions of dollars more in higher prices for natural gas and petroleum products that were in scarce supply after the storms.
On the Mars platform, Shell is using stronger and twice as many clamps to hold the drilling rig to the platform. Different clamps work against vertical and horizontal forces. In Katrina’s powerful winds, steel bolts 3 inches in diameter were sheared straight through.
“It isn’t high tech,” said Frank Glaviano, Shell’s vice president of production in the Americas. The old clamps had survived many hurricanes, and Glaviano thinks the new ones will work better.
In the hurricane alley in the Gulf, there are plenty of oil and gas pins in danger of being bowled over. There are a total of 4,000 oil and gas platforms and 33,000 miles of pipelines in the Gulf of Mexico, and they produce more than a quarter of U.S. oil and a fifth of U.S. natural-gas supplies.
No amount of preparation will make them completely safe in the event of another massive hurricane, oil executives say. According to the American Petroleum Institute, hurricanes Katrina and Rita together destroyed 115 platforms and damaged 52 others.
This year, drilling-rig owners, at the urging of the Coast Guard and the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service, are also taking precautions by increasing the number of mooring lines.
The hurricane damage wasn’t all at sea. Many of the country’s refineries, including the biggest, Exxon Mobil Corp.’s Baytown refinery, are on shore nearby. The API says that, at one point, the hurricanes shut down 29 percent of U.S. refining capacity. The terminals that did have gasoline couldn’t unload it because of power outages.
El Paso Corp., the largest interstate natural-gas transmission company in the country, had $550 million in damage. About $290 million of that amount cannot be recovered from insurance companies, an El Paso spokesman said. The hurricanes damaged or destroyed 13 pipeline segments, 31 pipeline risers that link sea- floor pipelines to production platforms, four offshore gas aggregation platforms, more than 400 measurement meters and eight on-shore compressor stations.
