This post has been de-listed
It is no longer included in search results and normal feeds (front page, hot posts, subreddit posts, etc). It remains visible only via the author's post history.
They're oil platforms, but not like the massive skyscraper sized modern ones we know and love on reddit.
Those ones there are absolutely ancient structures, many built before the 1960s. They're very basic small wood and steel piers just for the wellhead. The oil is then piped back to shore for processing through interconnected bridges that's all falling apart.
Update: the brightest cluster in the middle is the newer Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli field, discovered in the 80s and still being developed today. The older platforms are the ones closer to shore, you can see them on normal Google Earth.
Subreddit
Post Details
- Posted
- 7 months ago
- Reddit URL
- View post on reddit.com
- External URL
- i.redd.it/2hz7jkr65moc1....
The "simplest" and thus earliest drilled petroleum reservoir is an anticlinal trap.
Imagine a book with pages made of alternating permeable sandstone as a reservoir rock, and impermeable shale as a capping rock preventing the oil from escaping away.
Give it a few tens of millions of years of tectonic activity and the book is bent into an arch. Petroleum from deeper regions will "float" up to the high point of the arch. If you look at it from above that high point looks like a line across the surface. That's where you drill to hit oil and not water.
Of course in real life it's more complex.