Building Perdido - the world's deepest floating oil platform

World records don’t stand for long in the frontier-busting business of deep-sea oil and gas, but when Shell’s Perdido platform goes online early next year, it will, for a while at least, be the deepest drilling and production facility on the planet.

Situated 200 miles offshore in the relatively untapped Western belt of the Gulf of Mexico, Perdido — which is co-owned by Shell, BP and Chevron — is expected to produce around 100,000 barrels of oil and 200,000ft³ of gas per day. Operating in water that’s 7,500ft deep and tapping into oil and gas reservoirs that lie a further 8,000ft beneath the seabed, the heart of the facility is a 50,000 ton, 555ft-long spar — a giant, floating cylinder that was, last summer, towed 13,200km from its construction site in Finland, upended in the water and tethered to the seabed with nine strong polyester mooring lines. This summer, the ‘topside’, containing living quarters and production equipment, was mounted on the Spar.