Wave Heights and Risk for Oil Platform Damage

I thought I would add a bit more detail on the potential threat of hurricanes to oil and natural gas platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. While wind can definitely wreak havoc on platforms what typically takes them down are waves. Often times rogue waves with heights that go over the decks of the platforms. The result look something like this:

The Mars Platform was one of the deep water platforms that was taken out by Katrina resulting in a large amount of lost production. Before 1988 the recommended deck height by the MMS was about 40 ft. This was significantly increased after Hurricanes Ivan, Rita and Katrina -

“the 100-year event wave height for anywhere in the entire NW Gulf of Mexico region was found to be 85-feet. For a typical platform site in this region, the 100-year wave was found to be 75 feet. This increase was a hard sell. Eventually, the 9th to 19th editions, API RP2A (MMS regulation) showed a reference level wave height of 70 feet, with a guideline range of 58-ft to 84-ft.”

The bad news is these regulations underestimated storm wave heights and new platforms like Mars were thought to be safe and failed. Although the energy lobbying groups would emphasize, “Though 113 platforms were destroyed by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, there are over 4,000 platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. This means that over 97 percent of the platforms survived these record-breaking storms.”

The good news is that based on current readings from NOAA buoys the wave heights for Ike are peaking around 40ft currently which should not impact any modern platforms. Pre-1988 platforms only account for about 1.5% of production. This can be roughly seen in the map below:

The orange squares are NOAA buoys and they are sized by the max wave height measured from each over the last 24 hours. The white circles are oil wells sized by the monthly production in barrels per day for June 2008.