Читать книгу Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells – Our Ride to the Renewable Future - Amanda Little - Страница 9

From my helicopter window, the Cajun looked like a child’s toy—a multicolored Erector Set floating on a buoy. But once we landed and I stepped out into the salty, sunny Gulf air, the rig gave an entirely different impression, awesomely vast and imposing. Looming above us like an elephant above ants was a massive hydraulic drill encased in a 250-foot cage of steel scaffolding. The rest of the hulking industrial curios on the platform looked miniature by comparison. Siegele explained these objects and their functions as he walked me past two huge red cranes; six smokestacks releasing exhaust from the rig’s diesel generators; a robotic submarine that oversees drilling activity on the seafloor; mountainous piles of metal pipes used to tap the dormant oil bed; and steel holding tanks for the sediment, mud, and thick black crude that soon would be pulled up from below.

We entered the boxy three-story cement building that houses the dorm rooms and offices. So austere were the surroundings—and so far removed from civilization—that I found myself heartened by the daily, familiar details of a Snickers wrapper crumpled on the floor, a dust bunny underneath a desk, and a family snapshot tacked to an office wall—evidence that people actually do live and work on this floating city.

“It isn’t the Queen Elizabeth,” Siegele told me, “but we’ve got what we need.” The cafeteria was a grim, prisonlike chamber of gray linoleum and stainless steel, supplying a diet of rib-sticking but tasty fare: bratwurst, cheese fries, Frito pie, and twice-baked potatoes were the items piled on my lunch plate, for instance. The living quarters, which taken together house up to 150 workers, are each the size of a walk-in closet, crammed with two cot-sized Murphy beds. I poked my head into one room, finding that it held little trace of its occupants except for a wooden crucifix and a Sports Illustrated swimsuit centerfold Scotch-taped to the wall. These are temporary dwellings—most of the occupants work two weeks of each month, going ashore in between.

While the Cajun did have an Internet café, a gym, and a movie theater (starkly furnished venues that look more like conference rooms than recreation areas), these luxuries are rarely used. Few of the men (the rig workers I met were invariably men) have the energy for entertainment after working twelve-hour shifts on the drilling floor. There’s not much contact with family on the job: cell phones don’t work this far offshore, so workers have only the options of e-mailing (by satellite Internet connection) or calling from a community phone. And while the sapphire ocean views are beautiful, especially when painted with the pale light of dawn and fiesta-colored sunsets, the workers don’t indulge in recreational swimming. I found out why when I saw a lone dorsal fin circle the platform—this is shark territory.

But not one Cajun Express worker I spoke to complained about the unforgiving environment. As global demand for oil increases and supplies become scarcer, oil industry profits in recent years have never been higher—and there are generous salaries to show for it. Entry-level tool pushers make about $60,000 a year and high-level geologists and engineers can make in the middle six figures. There’s also the guaranteed Rocky Balboa–sized testosterone rush of this type of work: “This is the best big-boy toy you’ll ever find,” said Chevron’s public affairs manager Mickey Driver, patting a railing on the platform. “There’s more horsepower beneath this puppy than in all the engines of the Indy 500.”

Rising from the concrete floor and up through the bottoms of my boots was a strange and subtly apocalyptic vibration. “The thrusters,” said Siegele, noticing my puzzlement. Thrusters, he told me, are gigantic engines at each corner of the platform relentlessly pushing and pulling against the ocean currents. Picture yourself standing in shallow waters at a beach and incessantly shifting your weight to stay balanced as the waves surge and the tides ebb and flow. Thrusters do an extreme version of this in order to keep the rig “on station,” meaning within six inches in any direction of the drill’s charted entry point into the seabed below. Anchors can’t be used to moor drilling vessels at these depths—the motion of the ocean would strain even the strongest of moorings, and rigs need to be able to motor to safety in the event of a hurricane.

The thruster solution is ingenious, but it carries an astonishing energy burden: these 9,500-horsepower engines use a combined total of 27 megawatts of power when running at full capacity—enough to power about twenty-one thousand homes. The generators that power the thrusters and keep the lights on, the electric drill turning, and the computers humming in this village at sea require about 40,000 gallons of diesel per day. It’s roughly the amount of fuel that 13,300 Hummers consume in a typical day of driving.