Perdido's Progress

Here's a hat tip to Ignacio Gonzales of Shell for sending me information and a video about Perdido, an oil platform which will begin producing 100,000 barrels of oil a day from the ultradeep waters of the Gulf of Mexico. It truly is an engineering marvel. See for youself:

The Shell-operated Perdido Regional Development Spar has arrived in the ultra deepwaters of the Gulf of Mexico and is currently being secured to the seafloor in about 8,000 feet of water. Once completed, the Perdido spar will be nearly as tall as the Eiffel Tower and weigh as much as 10,000 cars. Perdido will be the deepest oil development in the world, the deepest drilling and production platform in the world and have the deepest subsea well in the world.

Positioning the spar into place required carefully-orchestrated maneuvers. Here's a link to a video in YouTube, which you may embed as you wish: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ej1_w4iT_kM

Perdido will be a fully functional oil and gas platform with a drilling rig and direct vertical access wells, full oil and gas processing and remote subsea wells. The facility is designed to produce 100,000 barrels of oil per day and 200 million standard cubic feet of gas. The production from these fields will be transported via new and existing pipelines to US refineries.

The Perdido Spar will bring in production from three fields: Great White, Silvertip and Tobago. These fields are located in 10 Outer Continental Shelf blocks in Alaminos Canyon, approximately 200 miles south of Freeport, TX. This development will provide the first Gulf of Mexico commercial production from a Paleogene reservoir. All three fields have been granted production units from the Minerals Management Service and the accumulations are completely in US waters, some eight miles north of Mexico international borders. First production from Perdido is expected around the turn of the decade.

We have more info about the project area, as well as maps, here:
http://www.shell.us/home/content/usa/aboutshell/strategy/major_projects/perdido/about/maps.html
 
And you can follow the progress of Perdido here:
www.shell.com/us/perdido