Offshore Engineering & Exploration Articles

Power is required to run the shipboard or rig machinery. It is needed on every rig and normally comes from the internal combustion engines usually powered by diesel fuel. A rig may have from two to four engines, mainly depending on how deep the oil well is expected to be drilled. Bigger rigs typically possess three or four 1215 horsepower engines with 1200 kva generators that together may develop 4860 horsepower, or 3624 kilowatts.

The power generated by the engines is then transmitted to the rig components via mechanical or electrical drive. On mechanical rigs, belts, chains, sprockets, or pulleys transmit the power to electric motors at each of the components. Most of the rigs today are electric as they are much simpler to rig up and easier to maintain than mechanical rigs.

The rig power systems use the engines, i.e. prime movers together with the drives to generate and transmit power required for such fundamental activities as hoisting, circulating, and rotating. The rig prime movers convert the energy released by fuel combustion into the energy of motion and force. As noted above, a rig may need 2-4 engines with their aggregate power ranging somewhere between 500 and 5000 horsepower.

In the United States, all offshore oil and gas operations began in the late 19th century. It was Edwin Drake who drilled the very first oilwell in the America in 1859. He did it on a piece of land near Titusville, Pennsylvania. It was only thirty-eight years later, in 1897, that another enthusiast drilled the first offshore well in U.S. He drilled it offshore Southern California, immediately south of Santa Barbara...

   In the late 1800s, a group of people founded the town of Summerland, California. The founders picked the site because of its pleasant, sunny climate. Coincidentally, it also had numerous springs. These springs did not, however, produce water; natural gas and crude oil bubbled out of them...