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Americas Issue: December 2006
For Starters
OADM to Take Sting Out of Hurricane
by Georgia Mullen
Lucky for us the 2006 hurricane season was a drizzle compared to the downpour of ’05. No one smart thinks that’s going to last, least of all the offshore oil community, which knows how essential to survival reliable communication is during galloping gales.
The eventual repeat of a catastrophic hurricane season has forced offshore oil and gas providers to turn to OADM (optical add/drop multiplexer) technology in an attempt to stem what oil services provider Schlumberger tags the loss of more than $1 billion every year to unplanned events.
Big Rigs, Big Bucks
Revenue from a single oil platform can easily exceed $10 million per day, Schlumberger says. A single floating platform in water depth of 1,900 meters with 25 subsea wells is designed to produce 250,000 barrels of crude and 200 million cubic feet of natural gas per day. At current wholesale market prices ($55 per barrel and $7.50 per thousand cubic feet) this output has a value of more than $15 million per day.
Every platform/well operator seeking to protect this production knows that communication among rigs and with the shore is vital during a tempest. Enter OADM, which enables constant communication among rigs during turbulent events by allowing each rig to tap into the backbone of a system that connects multiple rigs, while connecting the individual rigs to a dedicated optical fiber.
Each rig has its own secure bandwidth, and its communications system is protected from downtime when torrential storms cause complications on another tapped-in rig.
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