The images above are from the website below. The text below accompanies these pictures. The Great Pacific Trash Vortex… January 21, 2013Leave a commentGo to commentsLeave a commentGo to comments Something definitely in the” Things I don’t like…” category today. I’m ashamed to admit that I only recently became aware of The Great Pacific Trash Vortex (or Garbage Patch), an area of floating rubbish whose size is difficult to assess, but is estimated to be at least 250,000 square miles (i.e. the size of Texas), possibly up to as much as a mind numbing 6 million square miles (or roughly 1/10th of the entire pacific Ocean) and which contains an estimated 3.5 million tons of rubbish, reaching a depth of between 10 and 30 meters below the surface. There are five of these huge floating rubbish tips, one in each of the ocean gyres, a natural phenomenon connected to the Coriolis effect and the oceans currents, where the sea forms a huge slowly circulating body of water that despite its circular motion, remains relatively static in terms of where it is. Although the Pacific rubbish tip is the largest of these accumulations, between all five of them, it’s estimated that they might cover upwards of 30% of the surface of the sea (although that can’t possibly be right can it?) Approximately 90% of all the rubbish in the seas is plastic based. Not as you may think as recognisable bottles and bags etc. but broken down into billions and billions of tiny granules that are not only undetectable by planes and satellites, but are often invisible to the human eye. Which explains why these huge areas of rubbish weren’t much known about until the late 90’s, especially after being discovered and publicised by the American yachtsman Charles J. Moore.Charles J. Moore Some facts that we would all do well to remember : Plastic never totally biodegrades. It breaks down into ever smaller pieces through photodegradation, losing colour and form along the way, until the polymers become almost microscopic and small enough to be ingested by organism’s like plankton and krill at the bottom of the food chain… A single 1 litre plastic drinks bottle will break down into enough fragments to put one on every mile of every beach on the planet. More than 60% of the plastic in the sea is 1mm or smaller. 70% of all plastic that ends up in the sea sinks to the bottom. It is estimated that over 1 million sea birds and upwards of 100,000 marine mammals and turtles die each year from deaths related to plastics, usually ingestion or entanglement. Apart from any that has been burnt, every bit of plastic that has ever been produced since its invention about 120 years or so ago, still exists. To end on a more positive note (although I accept that it won’t make the impending disaster go away), I came across this interesting architectural proposal that suggests a way to deal with these floating continents of waste. Designed by three young architects from Serbia, and entitled Lady Landfill (although I can’t work out why) it was an entry into a 2011 Skyscraper competition and received an honorable mention. To radically summarise the key aspects of the scheme, these huge, self-sufficient systems are floated to the areas where the rubbish accumulates whereupon they set to work vacuuming it out of the sea. The islands can move around to enable all areas to be covered, and as the facility fills up with rubbish, any additional weight is offset by pumping air into and out of the structure to keep the habitation zone at the top at the correct height above the water. All the rubbish that is collected is then transformed into energy via a number of on board and inbuilt methods (including conversion into plasma)… I don’t know much about plasma, but I’m guessing that some of the technologies in the proposal are not currently practical, not least building the Eiffel Tower sized islands in the first place. Still it’s a very neat idea, elegantly presented and very worthy of recognition. It’s also a big step in the right direction in terms of raising awareness of this fundamentally critical issue, one which we should all do our best to address, no matter how small the gesture feels… RECYCLE OR DIE (as my good friend Waitey is always telling me) There’s more here and here if you’re interested…here

Could we clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch? al/green-science/clean-up-garbage-patch.htm Check out the 4 minute video embedded in the first page of the article

19-Year-Old Develops Ocean Cleanup Array That Could Remove 7,250,000 Tons Of Plastic From the World’s Oceans remove tons-of-plastic-from-the-worlds-oceans/ Check out the comments. A lot of great ideas to prevent trash buildup and improve recycling. One comment talks about cleaning up the world’s water supplies to eliminate the need for bottled water. [REDUCE]

Recycled Island to Be Built from Ocean Garbage Patch Mar 31, :20 PM ET // by Amy DustoAmy Dusto ocean-garbage-patch htm Awesome keyword tags at the end of the article to consider for additional research topics Check out the video at the bottom of the page for the recycled island concept- AWESOME! Here’s the link-

PayPal Founder Funds Creation of Man-Made Island Nations Read more: island-nations/#ixzz3pkRk5NI2http://dornob.com/paypal-founder-funds-creation-of-man-made- island-nations/#ixzz3pkRk5NI2 Peter Thiel is famous for founding PayPal and investing early in Facebook, but may become known next as the godfather of an oceanic Utopian movement. The catch, of course: even if they are constructed, not everyone can afford to leave their mainland homes to live on such expensive-to-build aquatic libertarian paradises. There are, in fact, many marvelous precedents for what he and the Seasteading Institute are attempting, from a scratch-built floating trash island (constructed not once but twice in Mexico by another man on a mission) called Spiral Island to such recycled micronations as Sealand, adapted from an army sea fort. Only time will tell, but Thiel, ever the early adopter, anticipates tens of millions of people living on these luxury platforms within the next decade Read more: man-made-island-nations/#ixzz3pkSogv6n Seasteading InstituteSpiral Island Sealandhttp://dornob.com/paypal-founder-funds-creation-of- man-made-island-nations/#ixzz3pkSogv6n

Man makes Island from Trash in Mexico This guy is great.

Offshore Platform Design structures-presentation

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endredi 22 mai 2015 About the extraction of oil and gas onshore & offshore production Facilities and-gas-onshore.html

Offshore Offshore, depending on size and water depth, a whole range of different structures are used. In the last few years, we have seen pure sea bottom installations with multiphase piping to shore and no offshore topside structure at all. Replacing outlying wellhead towers, deviation drilling is used to reach different parts of the reservoir from a few wellhead cluster locations. Some of the common offshore structures are: See more at: /about-extraction-of-oil-and-gas- onshore.html#sthash.q65JV8zg.dpuf

Shallow water complex, characterized by a several independent platforms with different parts of the process and utilities linked with gangway bridges. Individual platforms will be described as Wellhead Platform, Riser Platform, Processing Platform, Accommodations Platform and Power Generation Platform. The picture shows the Ekofisk Field Centre by Phillips petroleum. Typically found in water depths up to 100 meters. Photo: Conoco Phillips

Gravity Base. Enormous concrete fixed structures placed on the bottom, typically with oil storage cells in the “skirt” that rests on the sea bottom. The large deck receives all parts of the process and utilities in large modules. Typical for 80s and 90s large fields in 100 to 500 water depth. The concrete was poured at an at shore location, with enough air in the storage cells to keep the structure floating until tow out and lowering onto the seabed. The picture shows the world’s largest GBS platform, the Troll A during construction. Photo Statoil ASA

Compliant towers are much like fixed platforms. They consist ofa narrow tower, attached to a foundation on the seafloor and extending up to the platform. This tower is flexible, as opposed to the relatively rigid legs of a fixed platform. This flexibility allows it to operate in much deeper water, as it can 'absorb' much of the pressure exerted on it by the wind and sea. Compliant towers are used between 500 and 1000 meters water depth.

Floating production, where all topside systems are located on a floating structure with dry or subsea wells. Some floaters are: FPSO: Floating Production, Storage and Offloading. Typically a tanker type hull or barge with wellheads on a turret that the ship can rotate freely around (to point into wind, waves or current). The turret has wire rope and chain connections to several anchors (position mooring - POSMOR), or it can be dynamically positioned using thrusters (dynamic positioning – DYNPOS). Water depths 200 to 2000 meters. Common with subsea wells. The main process is placed on the deck, while the hull is used for storage and offloading to a shuttle tanker. May also be used with pipeline transport.

A Tension Leg Platform (TLP) consists of a structure held in place by vertical tendons connected to the sea floor by pile-secured templates. The structure is held in a fixed position by tensioned tendons, which provide for use of the TLP in a broad water depth range up to about 2000m. Limited vertical motion. The tendons are constructed as hollow high tensile strength steel pipes that carry the spare buoyancy of the structure and ensure limited vertical motion. A variant is Seastar platforms which are miniature floating tension leg platforms, much like the semi submersible type, with tensioned tendons.

SPAR: The SPAR consists of a single tall floating cylinder hull, supporting a fixed deck. The cylinder however does not extend all the way to the seafloor, but instead is tethered to the bottom by a series of cables and lines. The large cylinder serves to stabilize the platform in the water, and allows for movement to absorb the force of potential hurricanes. Spars can be quite large and are used for water depths from 300 and up to 3000 meters. SPAR is not an acronym, but refers to its likeness with aship’s spar. Spars can support dry completion wells, but is more often used with subsea wells.

Subsea production systems are wells located on the sea floor, as opposed to at the surface. Like in a floating production system, the petroleum is extracted at the seafloor, and then can be 'tied-back' to an already existing production platform or even an onshore facility, limited by horizontal distance or “offset”. The well is drilled by a moveable rig and the extracted oil and natural gas is transported by undersea pipeline and riser to a processing facility. This allows one strategically placed production platform to service many wells over a reasonably large area. Subsea systems are typically in use at depths of 7,000 feet or more, and do not have the ability to drill, only to extract and transport. Drilling and completeion is performed from a surface rig. Horizontal offsets up to 250 kilometers, 150 miles are currently possible. Photo:Norsk Hydro ASA