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This potential is greatly reduced if the explosives are all placed deep below the seafloor. Severing the rig from the bottom using explosives is the easiest approach, but has the potential to harm marine life. Method of rig-to-reef decommissioning by toppling in place. The Louisiana Artificial Reef program from its inception through 1998 received roughly $9.7 million in donations and has not taken taxpayer money. Decommissioning a shallow water rig typically costs $10–15 million so the amounts can be substantial.
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If the savings are large enough, the operator typically chooses reefing and donates 1/2 the savings to maintain the reef.
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In Louisiana, costs as well as the risk involved are the primary factors in determining how to decommission rigs. A party other than the operator usually administers the process. The method of decommissioning depends on water depth and structure type and is a three-step process that includes planning, permitting, and implementation. Removing the rig structure does not eliminate the need to address the mound. Mounds can contain significant levels of toxic metals including, arsenic, cadmium, chromium, copper, nickel, PCBs, lead, zinc, and poly-nuclear hydrocarbons. The mound forms on the pile of cuttings discharged from the original drilling operations, shells that have fallen from the platform's underwater structure, and material that has fallen and/or leaked from the platform, occasionally mixed with well seepage. Īs part of decommissioning, the operator must deal with the shell mound that collects on the bottom surrounding the rig. Decommissioning is complicated by factors such as cost, safety, operational duration, environmental issues, risk, experience, and historical relationship between operator and state. Officially, decommissioning an oil rig is the act of removal according to regulatory requirements and includes flushing, plugging and cementing wells to make them safe. The shape and complexity of the structure may lead to significant species diversity. Cumulative costs of removal had reached an estimated $1 billion by the year 2000. The operator benefits by avoiding the substantial cost of removal. RTR preserves much of that marine life and encourages further growth. RTR recognizes that during a rig's productive years, significant marine life comes to live on and around its structure. MMS supports and encourages RTR as an alternative to total removal. In the United States, the Minerals Management Service (MMS) requires the operator to remove the rig within a year of abandonment (stopped production ) and lease end. Once a rig stops producing at economic rates, the site is usually abandoned. (Most production platforms do not have such equipment installed.) Within the industry, "rig" refers to an apparatus with a derrick that can drill and service wells. Note that production platforms are often called "rigs" that terminology is used occasionally in this article-and indeed in the term Rigs-to-Reefs. They create shelter for marine life in open waters where there was none. The rig's steel structures are stable and durable. All coastal states in the US have such artificial reef programs in the interest of increasing ocean fisheries but not all participate in RTR. An alternative to removal is to turn the rig into a reef through the Rigs-to-Reef (RTR) program.
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At the end of their productive lives they must be decommissioned and removed (in the US within one year). These platforms continue to function as long as the reservoirs underneath them provide oil at a profitable rate. Inevitably, marine organisms attach themselves to the underwater portions of oil production platforms, transforming them into artificial reefs. Similarly, environmental opposition has prevented implementation of Rigs-to-Reefs in the North Sea. Opposition in California has prevented a rigs-to-reefs program on the West Coast of the US. The program has been generally popular with fishers, the oil industry, and government regulators in the Gulf of Mexico, where offshore platforms develop into coral reefs, and as of September 2012, 420 former oil platforms, about 10 percent of decommissioned platforms, have been converted to permanent reefs.
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In the United States, where the practice started and is most common, Rigs-to-Reefs is a nationwide program developed by the former Minerals Management Service (MMS), now Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE), of the U.S. Such biotic reefs have been created from oil rigs in the United States, Brunei and Malaysia. Rigs-to-Reefs ( RTR) is the practice of converting decommissioned offshore oil and petroleum rigs into artificial reefs. Rigs-to-reef locations in the Gulf of Mexico (Dauterive, 2000)