Now here’s an interesting one, what happens to an old oil rig when it runs out of oil and is decommissioned? These hulking great structures that are dotted across the globe will all eventually run out, but, according to Morris Architects, over the next century there’s roughly 4000 that are scheduled to be decommissioned in the Gulf of Mexico alone. Now, the Bldg Blog is asking, is potentially turning all of these into luxury hotels a good idea?
Well, normally the way of getting rid of these things is to simply blow them up, obviously causing massive environmental damage along the way. So, recycling them is a good idea right? But if you’ve got hundreds, if not thousands of these hotels out at sea, surely that can also have some sort of impact on the environment?
Either way, Morris Architects have proposed the idea, read a quote from them below:
“There are approximately 4,000 oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico varying in size, depth and mobility that will be decommissioned within the next century. If a deck on one of these rigs is about 20,000 square feet, then there is potentially 80 million square feet of programmable space just off the coast of the United States. The current method for rig removal is explosion, which costs millions of dollars and destroys massive amounts of aquatic life. What if these rigs were recommissioned as exclusive resort islands? Could the Gulf be America’s “Dubai” and the rig the artificial island on which to build it? This project examines the possibilities of creating a self-sufficient, eco-friendly high-end resort experience in our own backyard – the Gulf of Mexico.”
So, they do say, ‘self sufficient and eco friendly’, but you have to wonder just how they’d manage that with tens of thousands of people coming and going to these things all the time, it would probably be quite resource heavy. Let alone all the extra sea traffic it would create.
An interesting concept though definitely, and one to watch over the coming decades when the oil rigs start to dry up. There’s the full take on this over at the Bldg Blog, technology fiends Gizmodo have had their say and the original story is available at Curbed.
Let us know what you think of such a project, good, bad or just plain ugly?
