Compliant Tower

A compliant tower is similar to a traditional platform and extends from surface to the sea
bottom, and it is fairly transparent to waves.
a compliant tower is designed to flex with the forces of waves, wind and current.
It uses less steel than a conventional platform for the same water depth.
Compliant towers are similar to fixed platforms in that they
have a steel tubular jacket that is used to support the surface
facilities. Unlike fixed platforms, compliant towers yield to
the water and wind movements in a manner similar to
floating structures. Like fixed platforms, they are secured to
the seafloor with piles.
The jacket of a compliant tower has
smaller dimensions than those of a fixed platform and may
consist of two or more sections. It can also have buoyant
sections in the upper jacket with mooring lines from jacket
to seafloor (guyed-tower designs) or a combination of the
two.
These differences allow the use of compliant
towers in water depths ranging up to 3,000 ft. This range is
generally considered to be beyond the economic limit for
fixed jacket-type platforms. Shell provided an artists
rendering of a recently installed compliant tower in the GOM
The water depth at the intended location dictates
platform height. Once the lower jacket is secured to the
seafloor, it acts as a base (compliant tower) for the upper
jacket and surface facilities. Large barge-mounted cranes
position and secure the jacket and install the surface facility
modules
Compliant tower
graphic. Courtesy of Shell
Deepwater Development
Systems Inc.
Table 1.4 compares the structural weights for Bullwinkle, the worlds deepest fixed platform, with
the tallest compliant structures in the Gulf of Mexico.
Table 1.4 Structural weights of compliant towers
Baldpate
In 1998 the Baldpate platform was installed in the Garden Banks block in the Gulf of Mexico.
Petronius
The Petronius Compliant structure is located in the Viosca Knoll block in the Gulf of Mexico. It
stands in 535 m of water and is composed of two tower sections. It is the tallest bottom mounted
offshore structure ever built. The Petronius support structure has a base width of 33 m and
weighs approximately 43000 tons. The structure relies on flex piles to give the structure its
flexibility.
The metocean conditions experienced by the offshore structures are the subject of this
chapter. Metocean refers to the combined effect of the meteorology and oceanography.
As such, the metocean condition refers to a number of meteorological and oceanographic
conditions. These factors include:
local surface wind,
wind-generated local waves,
swell (long-period waves) generated by distant storms,
surface current also generated from the local storms,
energetic deep water currents associated with low frequency, large basin circulation, and.
non-storm-related currents, which are site-specific, such as loop current in the Gulf of
Mexico or coastal current in the Norwegian northern North Sea.