The Hutton tension leg platform was in the news again early this month, following its sale by Kerr-McGee North Sea (UK) Ltd., a unit of Kerr-McGee Corp., Oklahoma City, to Monitor TLP Ltd. for $29 million, net to Kerr-McGee (OGJ Online, Sept. 6, 2002).
The TLP's sale and removal from Hutton field in the North Sea received relatively little notice from either the media or the offshore industry. But 20 years ago, reporters in both the trade and general media were using an ocean of ink to tell a fascinated industry about the innovative design of the Hutton TLP, the first of a new kind of offshore platform that shattered all previous concepts.
Newest technology
The Hutton TLP, pioneered by Conoco Inc.—now ConocoPhillips—was on the cutting edge of offshore technology at that time. It even had a space-age image: The floating platform tethered to the ocean floor was somewhat like a space-walking astronaut connected by cable to his spaceship in a potentially hostile environment.
Although Conoco designed the Hutton TLP for installation in 485 ft of water, company officials were talking from the start of someday extending it out to depths of 2,000 ft. When it came to dreams of going "where no man had gone before," the television program Star Trek had nothing on Conoco's engineers. And since it was the first of its kind, no one knew for sure whether the TLP's tension mechanism and relatively spindly "legs" really could withstand North Sea storms as its designers and tank tests indicated.
The Hutton TLP generated even more news reports once workers began building it. Construction of its hull at Highlands Fabricators' shipyard on Nigg Bay in northeastern Scotland was plagued by delays. Repair of faulty welding caused Conoco to miss the summer 1983 weather window for installation of the TLP. But that problem stemmed from conventional production techniques, not the pioneering aspects of the 46,900 tonne floating structure.
Still, the delay was expensive. Unofficial sources estimated that the original projected cost of $900 million for the Hutton TLP had escalated to $1.3 billion before the hull was mated with the superstructure, built at the McDermott Scotland Ltd. facility in Ardersier.
Installation was 11 months behind schedule, which cost Conoco the revenues from almost a year's production from Hutton field.
A special visit
Back before TLPs started popping up like mushrooms around the world, this reporter had the brief distinction of being the only person, outside maybe a few Conoco employees, to have been aboard the two or three TLPs then in existence. The first, and by far most interesting, trip was to the Hutton TLP.
In Scotland on other business, I wheedled a spare seat on a flight of local "VIPs" going out to the platform. The VIPs turned out to be a class of preteen Welsh schoolgirls who were among the top winners of a UK-wide energy contest. The prize they picked from a list of corporate sponsors was this trip to the Hutton TLP.
Getting them fitted in survival suits for the flight to Hutton was a challenge for their Conoco hosts. The smallest insulated suit was far too large for even the tallest 12-year-old; with the arms and legs of the bulky suits bunched up on their small figures, they looked like a flock of scarlet penguins. And that only escalated their squeals of laughter.
Conoco faced a more serious problem once the group landed on the TLP. North Sea winds whipping across the exposed helipad with near-gale force could catch some student like a kite in her bulky gear and sail her out to sea. So the adults aboard the helicopter joined with some big roughnecks to form a human wall between the girls and the helipad's leeward edge. As they exited the helicopter, the girls were passed hand-to-hand along the line and down the ladder to safety.
The girls got a first-class tour of the TLP. I got to tag along, but it was the girls' day, right down to a special cake baked for them at lunch. They were bright as new pennies and asked good questions during their tour.
Maybe today one of them is working for ConocoPhillips or some other oil company, dreaming up new technology for offshore development.
Sam Fletcher | Senior Writer
I'm third-generation blue-collar oil field worker, born in the great East Texas Field and completed high school in the Permian Basin of West Texas where I spent a couple of summers hustling jugs and loading shot holes on seismic crews. My family was oil field trash back when it was an insult instead of a brag on a bumper sticker. I enlisted in the US Army in 1961-1964 looking for a way out of a life of stoop-labor in the oil patch. I didn't succeed then, but a few years later when they passed a new GI Bill for Vietnam veterans, they backdated it to cover my period of enlistment and finally gave me the means to attend college. I'd wanted a career in journalism since my junior year in high school when I was editor of the school newspaper. I financed my college education with the GI bill, parttime work, and a few scholarships and earned a bachelor's degree and later a master's degree in mass communication at Texas Tech University. I worked some years on Texas daily newspapers and even taught journalism a couple of semesters at a junior college in San Antonio before joining the metropolitan Houston Post in 1973. In 1977 I became the energy reporter for the paper, primarily because I was the only writer who'd ever broke a sweat in sight of an oil rig. I covered the oil patch through its biggest boom in the 1970s, its worst depression in the 1980s, and its subsequent rise from the ashes as the industry reinvented itself yet again. When the Post folded in 1995, I made the switch to oil industry publications. At the start of the new century, I joined the Oil & Gas Journal, long the "Bible" of the oil industry. I've been writing about the oil and gas industry's successes and setbacks for a long time, and I've loved every minute of it.