Texas Tea

Today for work I got the chance to travel down to Galveston, TX and visit the Ocean Star Oil Rig museum. It was awesome!

The Ocean Star is an actual oil rig that was decommissioned a few years ago. They dragged it into the port of Galveston and converted it into a museum -- complete with a self-guided audio tour and a complimentary 1980's-style introductory movie on the history of drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. You can walk on the pipe decks and drilling platforms and see all of the machinery that they use to get oil out of the ground.

I can't believe how massive these oil rigs are -- and this is a small one. But the most impressive thing that I learned is how much technology has been developed to explore, drill, and extract oil from the bottom of the ocean.

For example, in the 1940's when ocean drilling started to become popular, we were really just shooting in the dark on where to find oil. Drill a hole here, another one there... going on nothing more than a hunch because we couldn't see underground until we actually put a hole there.

Now we have all kinds of awesome sonar, magnetic resonance, and other visualization techniques that can give us a good picture of what's underground before we even start drilling. And while there are still times when we get down there and find that there's no oil... we've gotten a LOT more accurate even in the last decade.

And the most surprising part for me: running even the smallest oil rig costs an oil company on average $500,000 a day and it can take up to 10 years before a dollar of income can be made from the oil from that well. No wonder 'big oil' tries to keep so much cash on hand.

Anyway, here's some pics. What few I was able to get.

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