The Conquest of the Inner Space ‑ Challenges and Innovations in Offshore Technology

Spectacular missions to the moon, the Mars and to other planets of our solar system has boosted public attention to the outer space for the last five decades. During the same period mankind has also conquered the inner space ‑ with fantastic innovations and fabulous inventions ‑ however, hidden under the sea surface, and hence widely unnoticed. While searching for new promising oil and gas fields the offshore industry operates in water depths that have never been explored before. Production systems already reach down to 2000 m, and will probably conquer greater water depths during the next years. Extreme environmental conditions in addition to these enormous water depths call for special solutions. This paper deals with recent developments of offshore deepwater production technology, e.g. SPARs, TLPs, Compliant Towers and huge mono-buoys. After a short survey of the development in ocean engineering from the first shallow water platforms in the Gulf of Mexico in 1947 to today’s deepwater production systems off the Brasilian coast the paper summarizes the principles of platform dynamics in waves to illustrate the advantages of specific design characteristics.