This blog post explores the prediction techniques and design processes used by designers to safely engineer marine plants even under extreme natural conditions.
Can we predict the next 1000 years? Of course, accurately predicting all the changes and events that will occur over a thousand years is extremely difficult, bordering on impossible. Often, it’s even hard to anticipate events happening tomorrow. Despite rapid advances in science and technology, the ability to know the future with certainty remains beyond our grasp. Yet, there are people whose job is to predict 1000 years ahead. They are offshore plant designers.
Offshore plants refer to large-scale facilities that produce oil or gas from the sea. Recently, due to the depletion of onshore oil fields, offshore oil fields are gaining more attention, and the role of offshore plants is becoming increasingly important. To fully extract the resources from a single offshore oil field, an offshore plant must be positioned at sea and operate continuously for at least 30 years. During this time, the plant must withstand strong winds and rough waves while minimizing the impact of severe weather changes and the marine environment.
The daily oil production volume of an offshore plant is enormous, reaching trillions of won. Consequently, the stability of the offshore plant is directly linked to the oil company’s profits, making uninterrupted operation essential. If an offshore plant is halted due to unexpected waves, the company suffers astronomical losses. Therefore, accurately predicting the wave heights that will occur in the environment where the offshore plant is installed is critically important. This is where the concept of design wave height comes into play.
Offshore plant designers predict the ‘maximum wave height occurring once every M years’ before design begins. Here, M years refers to the probability of occurrence once every 100, 500, or 1000 years. This prediction is a critical factor determining how long the facility can operate safely at sea. Offshore plants are typically designed to withstand waves that occur once every 100 to 1000 years. This varies based on the shipowner’s requirements, and design criteria are set differently for each project.
However, predicting the design wave height is not a simple task. Since humans lack the ability to predict the future, offshore plant designers use past data to forecast the future. Historical weather patterns and observational records play a vital role in this process. The process of determining design wave height is akin to learning about the future through history. That is, by analyzing records of waves that occurred in the past, we predict the maximum height of waves that will occur in the future.
The specific method for determining design wave height is as follows. First, the height and number of waves occurring over a specific period in the region where the offshore plant will be installed are measured. Based on this, the probability of each wave height occurring is calculated. For example, if a 12-meter wave occurred 12 times out of 10,000 waves, its probability is 0.0012. After calculating the occurrence probability for each wave height, this data can be used to estimate the height of a wave that occurs once every 1,000 years.
In actual design processes, predictions are not based solely on observed data. Predictions also incorporate decades of accumulated ocean observation records, climate models, and even AI technology to forecast future weather changes. The unique environmental characteristics of the specific sea area where the offshore plant will be installed are also considered. For instance, in extreme environments like the Arctic Ocean, where unusual waves or weather phenomena not typically experienced are highly likely, even more cautious design is required.
This predictive work by offshore plant designers carries significance beyond mere design. If they fail to accurately predict wave heights, the plant could suffer major damage, potentially leading to severe environmental disasters like oil spills. Furthermore, failure to secure marine resources reliably could deliver a major shock to the global economy. Therefore, their efforts to predict conditions a thousand years into the future are not merely for corporate profit; they are intrinsically linked to the future of our planet.
Ultimately, the role of offshore plant designers is to prepare for extreme situations that might occur once every 1,000 years. Without their thorough predictions and preparations, the development of marine resources would have been significantly delayed, and as a result, we might have faced crises like energy shortages much sooner.
