Over 12,000 oil infrastructures exist in Earth’s Oceans today. Many are nearing the end of their production life. In the EU, the law requires the structures to be removed from the water and disposed of on land. Steel and concrete jacket legs are habitats to diverse marine ecosystems, and their removal is also the death of those creatures.

Project Archipelago proposes the adaptive reuse of these marine infrastructures as a literal and figurative platform for marine research as well as a facilitative and collaborative system to increase biodiversity and biomass. Over a longer period of time, the vertical structures would biomineralise, hardening into self-sustaining islands.

How it Works

Oil platform topsides are fitted with an autonomous system to harvest material in situ and build 3d printed modular units that are added to the structure via cable-threaded ROVs. By adding more surface area, as well as a diversity of shapes and textures, a larger and more diverse ecosystem will form.

Additionally...

Remote sensing systems will send data back to scientists in order to further understand the variables (water Ph, temperature along the water column, precipitation currents, and so on), identify the species present, and recognise patterns and change in the environment. Scientific tools will focus on meta optics as better than human perception tools.

Composite Material

Modular units are created from harvested calcium carbonate from biowaste (shells), harvested ocean plastic, and sediment from the sea floor.

Dive deeper...

The ocean covers 71% of the earth but is only 5% explored.

Climate messengers, oil exploration, microfossils

“Oil is nature at its most elemental; black ooze from the depths of the earth. And yet oil is also the stuff of cars, plastic, the Industrial Revolution; it collapses any distinction between nature and not-nature.”
-Timothy Morton

“When an altered system cannot be restored to a chosen historical baseline, the value of the novelty needs to be the focus of research.”
- Marie-Lise Schlappy

The ocean absorbs more carbon than the trees and soil combined.

the future of synthetic islands...

Further Reading

©Peter Iaian Campbell

Oil Exploration

North Sea Transition Authority Offshore Oil and Gas Activity

Norwegian Petroleum

EKOFISK

North Sea Transition Authority
Offshore Oil and Gas Activity