Tuesday, May 18, 2010

i'm on a boat! (or ship?)

But maybe it was an FDPSO. Specifically, this thing and whatever you want to call it. FDPSO stands for floating, drilling, production, storage, and offloading. As the very sexy name implies, it floats in the water, drills wells, produces oil, stores said oil, and then offloads the oil into tankers. Here’s a picture of it (that will prompt for download).

Actually, I’m no longer on the boat. They block a lot of websites including blogger which I suppose makes sense since bandwidth is limited. Instead, I’m back on the non-slowly undulating land. It was somewhat reminiscent of the recent cruise I took back in January, complete with pretty decent food, but less onboard entertainment, and the “moon pool” on the rig is not for swimming.

The trip also included my first helicopter ride. In the picture linked above, the tower at the front of the ship is actually the flare stack and it is (almost?) always burning. As we approached the vessel, the music from Jurassic Park was going through my head and I was picturing the scene when the chopper first lands on the island by the waterfall. As a point of clarification, there were no dinosaurs on the rig.

I suppose I could discuss why I was there (work of course), but you know I generally won’t go into too much detail about work-specific matters in this forum.

1 comment:

Scott Hayman said...

On the contrary. There were LOTS of dinosaurs there. They were just subjected to millions of years of heat and pressure before they got there.

Also, the Jesusraptor is always there. Everywhere you go.