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Comment by venomsnake | Hacker News Reader

I know my thinking is probably damaged by the war on terror, but my first thought was "engineering is doable, but how will you secure the thing". It is a nice juicy target. And as the recent events have shown - even small tinkering with supply and demand of fossil fuels can have global consequences.

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We have refineries on land, too. We just put fences around them. The ocean is a big fence.

On land we have them secured - solid rock from the bottom, national air defense from the air, and big security teams + police and even military forces ready to react at minimal notice.

Hijacking a plane that is traveling between second and third world countries is plausible - MH370 showed that there are deficiencies in aircraft tracking. And while submarine attack is not trivial it is not totally impossible.

And if we have a couple of years down the road a situation like the current - with free falling oil prices, there are state actors for which some disruption will be welcome.

I'd expect this to be easier to secure than the LNG plant that it replaces. No pipelines to secure, just ocean around, so it's very hard to sneak up on it. Access can be controlled much better since there's no fence somebody might throw equipment over. A small dinghy is not going to put a major dent in that beast, even if loaded with explosives. The sides are impossible to scale. It's a floating fortress.

Will it have sonar? Approaching from below would be trivial.

Cynical: only state actors have access to attack submarines. Realistic: if you have reliable underwater access you may just want to siphon the gas.

Didn't Russia recently have subs in Swedish waters covertly?

In the petro field, I would be most concerned about state actors at the moment who have a huge incentive to decrease supply to increase the price on the world market.

It's certainly not trivial to approach from below. The facility will be located 100 miles off the coast - it's not like you'll just jump in the harbor and swim that distance. So you'd need a ship to bring you close and then bring explosives with you. So you need them waterproofed and large enough to actually damage that beast. Puncturing a few holes in the hull will not significantly damage this. If you're trying to attack a LNG plant on land you can at least try and drive a large van through the gate.

Addressing you and some other grandchild comments:

This is why we have a navy, not to mention the supporting apparatus of land-, sea-, and space-based monitoring of the air and seas.

Unless this thing is placed under a heavily-trafficked air route, attacks from non-state groups are unlikely to succeed, as the divergent flight-path of a commercial airliner will set off alarms.

And state actors would be declaring war by attacking this thing.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Cole_bombing

Divers attaching charges to the hull would be another low-tech way to take a vessel like this down. Low tech mines would probably do a pretty good job too.

That was at port, though. This ship is planned to spend 25 years at sea. Certainly a ship carrying divers would have to get close enough so as to be obvious.

This thing will be permantently moored in a part of the planet reknowned for the ferocity of the cyclones it gets each season.

Mother Nature will be attacking it too, and the designers know it. So it would probably have to be big mine.

And state actors would be declaring war by attacking this thing.

France didn't declare war on New Zealand with the Rainbow Warrior bombing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_Rainbow_Warrior

Don't worry, most 'terrorism' is about control of oil fields/pipelines. No terrorist will be stupid enough to blow up this.

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