From Mud to Dust

Janos Bergob-Sowicz



Oil rigs have always been engines of transformation. Since their first arrival in the North Sea, the landscapes of remote territories have undergone massive changes to accommodate their construction. The North Sea is a uniquely hostile environment where vast swells sweep in from the Atlantic and collide with the icy waters of the Baltic. To endure the harsh surroundings, the steel structures had to be enormous. Completely new yards had to be built for platforms this size, these first began to occur near deep water in the far north of Scotland. In Cromarty Firth, 400 acres of mudflat were reclaimed and dredged, transforming the land into a ‘territorial factory’ for the production of platforms. It was an era of mass land exploitation inspired by man's desire to master his environment.



Eventually, all usable oil from a plot is processed, and these giant steel platforms come to the end of their service lives. Shell, the first oil company to examine how to decommission platforms, initially proposed to tow them out to sea and sink them in the ocean. Due to environmental concerns, Greenpeace advocated against this, resulting in new legislation which obliged oil companies to decommission platforms on land. What the legislation did not specify, is where.

If an oil rig is a fixed-drill platform, built into northern bedrock, exacting regulations and conventions would insist that this structure be dismantled and recycled in place. When an oil rig has an engine and a propeller, however – when she is classed as a vessel; a mobile ‘she’, not a stationary ‘it’ – regulations can be outdistanced. Berths can be sought where conventions are not quite so stringent. So, two parallel worlds unfold; one of highly technical decommissioning along the shores of specialist European sites and another of illicit disposal in the shadowlands of shipbreaking yards in Turkey and Bangladesh.


Decommissioning vessels or, ‘ship breaking’, can be carried out in Turkey and Bangladesh, where the natural configuration of land and sea (for example, a gradually sloping tidal shelf and extreme tidal activity) allows large ships to be beached. The landscape in Aliaga and Chittagong is permanently changed. In a process of self-burial, huge oil tankers are piloted inland and made to mount the beach at speed, inscribing long scars onto the landscape in their final act of beaching. With the sterns half-ashore, breakers can then cut in and dismantle the vessels laterally. Carcasses of ships and rigs are disassembled by blowtorches. Eventually the oil rig disappears, its traces can only be measured as particles of dust in the air, or in the ardent orange stains on the lapels of workers.


The Impact of decommissioning can now only be measured as particles of dust, or the coloration of an entire landscape from a satellite. When there are fewer ships on the beach the landscape is stained rust red. What are the frameworks implemented that limit contamination? And where should they be? Is there a place for them in Europe or can they only exist in the distant shadowlands of remote beaches?


“All that is solid melts into air” - Marshall Berman