Rigs to Reefs: Re-purposing and Re-imagining the world’s offshore oil and gas platforms as some of the most productive marine ecosystems on the planet
From Blue Latitudes with Emily Hazelwood and Amber Sparks
Thursday March 31st at 7pm
Virtual World Oceans Experiences
In our daily lives, we all contribute to the global demand for offshore oil and gas, by driving our cars, turning on the lights in our homes, and continuing to rely on plastics. This demand has led to the development of thousands of offshore oil and gas platforms in almost every ocean on the planet. Although intended to produce oil, the complex latticework structures of the platform jackets harbor some of the most productive ecosystems on the planet. Many of these platforms are aging relics, leftover designs from an era in hot pursuit of developing and extracting the world’s offshore oil reserves, with little thought given to their eventual removal. However, as the global economy has begun to shift away from traditional petroleum based energy resources towards renewables, the removal of many of these structures has become inevitable, and the technical, economic and environmental implications associated with their decommissioning must now be addressed.
