Seabed sucker

摘要

Oil exploration and production has been moving into steadily deeper water in recent years as shallow reserves are worked out. And with the recent rise in oil prices, ever more difficult areas are becoming economic, particularly off the coast of West Africa. This has meant the use of new techniques because platforms simply cannot be built in depths of 1km or more of water. Instead, anchored rising pipelines are used attached to floating production offloading and storage vessels, or FPOS. These provide a surface reservoir to which tankers can connect for on-loading.