Rigging the Odds Against Climate Change

摘要

Climate change has enormous potential to impact on many types of ecosystem, not least our ocean environments. Melting ice caps, increasing sea temperatures and more extreme weather events mean that it is imperative that our marine-based infrastructure is resilient to withstand these challenges, both in the short-term and long-term future. Offshore platforms are a haven for marine life. Have we considered how biological activity, arising as a result of climate change, could affect the structural integrity of the marine infrastructure we build? Does the design basis for marine infrastructure account for additional biological hazards arising as a result of increasing sea water temperatures? What are the implications for the life of the platform? Do current plans for decommissioning, and/or life extension, need to be reconsidered to avoid escalating and unforeseen costs? Climate change is unpredictable; we must factor in the likelihood of both extreme and gradual changes. In this paper we tackle increasingly important issues: what would the impacts be on critical seawater abstraction points due to invasive species, excessive marine growth or jellyfish swarms? Would our oil platforms stand up to an extreme wave with many unaccounted for tonnes of marine growth? Would these additional tonnes of marine growth threaten structural integrity and mean additional millions to cover the costs of decommissioning the rigs? Will biologically induced hazards reduce the life of offshore assets and/ or challenge assumptions for life extension of assets? We suggest that if engineers consider these potential, and highly likely, concerns at an early stage, timely and costly delays to operations and decommissioning may be avoided. Using real examples we will explore practical solutions to the increasingly prevalent biological challenges facing marine infrastructure as a result of climate change. These practical challenges will be discussed with a focus on decommissioning and life extension of assets, taking into account unanticipated loads for lifting, increased problems regarding disposal of marine growth, further structural maintenance and the unwelcome costs these may all introduce.