Thursday, March 7, 2013

The Channel Island oil platforms

It's fascinating for me to look at what it takes in infrastructure to retrieve and get the oil ready from the wells at sea or near shore to a refinery. Union Oil was the first major oil company to drill offshore in the Santa Barbara Channel and unfortunately, the first to have a huge spill from a blowout in 1969 that flowed up to the oceans surface for the next 10 days killing thousands of mammals and sea birds. If one could glimmer a ray of light from the horrific mess then it would be the strong environmental policies put in place after the Union Oil catastrophe.

As best as I can tell, this rig is called Gilda which is about 3 miles off the Ventura coast and 7 miles from me. I took this photo as night was falling only because it was the only rig I could see burning off methane gas.

I would assume there are plenty of people who can't stand the sight of the rigs in their backyards but when they are driving to work or vacation they might want to think about what is being pumped into the fuel tank?

How could you not love having "Christmas trees" lit up every night of the year?

This artificial island off of Mussel Shoals, just south of Carpinteria, was built as  one of the gathering sites for some of the pipelines that are all connected to shore from the drilling platforms and in addition, it has 56 (I believe non-producing) oil wells also within the structure.

I stole this image from the internet just to show how much better the island looks from shore than from the air.

This is one partnership that went into bankruptcy around the end of the 1990's and apparently Greka Energy Company of Santa Barbara bought the troubled assets and but was then shut down a number of times by the California State Lands Commission. Not too sure the island is still in operation.


 Behind this sign and fence is where some of the offshore oil is first processed. Water has to be separated from the oil before it is shipped by rail, tanker or truck to a refinery.

This and a few other "pumpjacks" are the only ones I could find near the coast that are still pumping away. 







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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Tom,
Like you, all this oil stuff fascinates me. Thanks to the geology, the whole Santa Barbara Channel area abounds in natural oil seeps. It’s been leaking oil since long before the white eyes showed up! Given the fragile sea floor, best thing ever is, to extract the oil (drill baby drill) and relieve pressure on known reservoirs. Just sayin……

Good stuff, keep on blogging……..:-)
Jack

March 10, 2013 at 1:40 PM
Unknown said...

Jack,
As always you are correctly informed about the channel seepage. I was going to put in the figures but got side tracked. The "natural" seepage has been going on for eons and estimated at 6000 gallons a day which is more than 2 million gallons a year, all from the broken crust. Right again about the pumping relieving some of the pressure...forgot that too. That's quite a bit but most are hydrocarbons that evaporate on the surface the rest is the heavy tar type leakage.

March 10, 2013 at 2:04 PM

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