Deepwater Horizon
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Key facts
- Name
- Deepwater Horizon
- Owner
- Transocean's Triton Asset Leasing
- Operator
- BP
- Port of registry
- Panama (23 February 2001 – 28 December 2004) Majuro (29 December 2004)
- Route
- Gulf of Mexico
- Ordered
- December 1998
- Builder
- Hyundai Heavy Industries
- Cost
- US$560 million
- Laid down
- 21 March 2000
- Acquired
- 23 February 2001
- Maiden voyage
- Long Beach, California – Freeport, Texas
- Out of service
- 22 April 2010
- Identification
- ABS class no. : 0139290 IMO number : 8764597 MMSI no.: 538002213
- Fate
- Sank on 22 April 2010, after an explosion and fire
- Class type
- ABS +A1 DPS-3 Column Stabilized MODU
- Displacement
- 52.587 Mg
- Length
- 112 m
- Beam
- 78 m
via Wikipedia infobox
~15 min read
Encyclopedic overview
Deepwater Horizon was an ultra-deepwater, dynamically positioned, semi-submersible offshore drilling rig owned by Transocean and operated by the BP company. On 20 April 2010, while drilling in the Gulf of Mexico at the Macondo Prospect, a blowout caused an explosion on the rig that killed 11 people and ignited a fireball visible from 40 miles (64 km) away. The fire was inextinguishable and, two days later, on 22 April, the Horizon collapsed, leaving the well gushing at the seabed and becoming the largest marine oil spill in history.
Built in 2001 in South Korea by Hyundai Heavy Industries, the rig was commissioned by R&B Falcon (a later asset of Transocean), registered in Majuro, and under lease to BP from 2001 until September 2013. In September 2009, the rig drilled the deepest oil well in history at a vertical depth of 35,050 ft (10,683 m) and measured depth of 35,055 ft (10,685 m) in the Tiber Oil Field at Keathley Canyon block 102, approximately 250 miles (400 km) southeast of Houston, in 4,132 feet (1,259 m) of water.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Deepwater Horizon” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.