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Comment by AnimalMuppet | Hacker News Reader

A seasteader would have to pay more than the rig's value as scrap (less the cost of scrapping it). That might turn out to be quite a bit of money.

Or, it might turn out to be zero. The article left it unclear whether they (the owners of the platforms) are making or losing money by doing this.

But there are two other concerns that would have to be addressed: Plugging the oil well, and navigational hazards. Neither seems to me to be insurmountable. Plugging the hole and leaving the platform there is easier than plugging the hole and removing the platform. And the navigational hazard has been there for decades. Leaving it changes nothing; an existing risk merely continues.

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These are production platforms, not drilling platforms. A production platform like the one mentioned in the article gathers oil and gas from dozens of wells connected by a system of piping laid on the sea floor. As such, they'd have no way to plug a well. Operators use mobile rigs to do a "P&A" (Plug and Abandon). There's no way that the permitting authority would allow the well operator to abandon any wellhead without plugging it, no matter who they'd sold the production platform to.

Plugging the hole and leaving the structure would also mean maintaining the structure. I can't imagine the costs of maintaining something that large.

Especially in the middle of the sea, which is not a very forgiving environment.

>A seasteader would have to pay more than the rig's value as scrap (less the cost of scrapping it). That might turn out to be quite a bit of money.

I suspect that number is actually negative without the rig owner's input. Thus the bit about Shell "watching over" the process to make sure the breakers are dealing properly with chemicals and asbestos.

On of the reasons the US Navy has taken to sinking decommissioned warships is the various hazardous materials make the cost of breaking them up more than the value of the materials. Rigs can't be that different.

Sure, you'd have to pay for the scrap value. But it's never [1] going to be cheaper than that anyway. I'm not sure what environmental hazards the (former) oil rigs themselves are.

-- [1] until we get self-assembling nanobots one day

If the platform weighs 100,000 ton and scrap iron is between $50 and $100/ton, then the rig's scrap value can't be more than $10,000,000, but it can be a lot less. Maybe it costs you a couple million dollars just to have it towed back, then maybe a couple million in labor and tools to cut it up, and a million in hazardous waste (asbestos) disposal, and so on. TBH, I don't know how much all of this really costs, but I can see where dismantling a rig could potentially cost quite a bit more than its scrap value, and thus the thing can have a negative value. In that case it might be quite attractive if the owner of the thing can transfer that responsibility to someone else. They might even pay you to take it.

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