The Flintstone: finding hard-to-reach fossil fuels

Radio Netherlands Worldwide, 28 April 2010 - 2:00pm | By Thijs Westerbeek van Eerten

(Photo: The Art of Dredging)

There's still a lot of oil and gas under the earth's crust, but it's often buried extremely deep or found in barren locations subject to extremes of heat or cold. If you want to extract such costly energy sources and transport them to the civilised world, you'll need a brand new ship to make it possible.

The Flintstone is a 'fallpipe ship'. It's owned by the Dutch offshore specialist Tideway and has just been launched in Singapore. The ultramodern vessel has been designed for the exploitation of 'impossible' oil and gas fields. It can also simplify the laying of undersea energy cables intended to carry, for example, green energy from sea-based wind farms to land.

But what is a 'fallpipe ship'? Tideway Director Hugo Bouvy explains.

"A 'fallpipe ship' is a vessel used in the extraction of oil and gas to protect pipelines and cables with broken stones. It's a ship that carries an enormous cargo of stones that it can place - with the aid of an extremely long pipe, made from aluminium - in precise locations at extreme depths."

Such a layer of stones prevents damage to the pipe or cable by ships' anchors or fishing fleet dragnets.

GPS at sea

The ship is positioned with the aid of an advanced navigation system, a sort of GPS for the sea. This is carried out on the seabed by a travelling robot, which places the pipe under the belly of the ship exactly above the pipeline or cable.

The Flintstone has an exceptionally long fallpipe: one that descends 2,000 metres from under the ship. Until now, the record length for a fallpipe was 1,000 metres. What this means is that oil and gas fields previously not worth the effort of reaching can now be commercially exploited.

Icebreaker

The ship also has a reinforced hull, similar to that of an icebreaker, so that it can be deployed in frozen seas. Under these lie stocks of oil and gas that, up to now, have been unreachable. All in all, it provides a good deal of 'flexibility' in the world's reserves of fossil fuels, says Hugo Bouvy:

"In this way oil and gas can be extracted until approximately the end of this century. The problem becomes not so much the availability, but more the 'recoverability' due to the extreme conditions of their location".

Windfarms

Of course, the director of Tideway knows that oil and gas supplies are finite and that sustainable energy, such as that produced by offshore wind farms, will play an important role in the near future.

But the Flintstone can also make a valuable contribution in that area, too. Because although current-carrying cables from wind farms don't lie at great depths, there are a lot of them and they travel over enormous distances.

The Flintstone is now afloat, but its completion will take approximately another year. However, its first voyage has already been planned, says Mr Bouvy:

"It will go straight to Nova Zembla [an archipelago in the Artic Ocean, north of Russia]. A gas-drilling platform will be built there close to the surface. Rocks will need to placed around it to ensure that it remains stable".

And this means that on its first voyage, the Flintstone will do exactly what it was built to do, because up to now exploitation of the Nova Zembla gas field had been considered commercially unfeasible.