AI Representation: ExxonMobil toppled the 27,000-ton Lena platform 50 miles off Louisiana. Image credits: Chatgpt
On July 3, 2020, ExxonMobil’s Lena Compliant Tower jacket was toppled in place about 50 miles southeast of Grand Isle, Louisiana, converting the 1,078-foot structure into a deepwater artificial reef. Installed in 1983 as the Gulf’s first cable-stabilized platform, Lena operated for more than three decades before decommissioning. The Lena Compliant Tower was constructed in 1983 at Mississippi Canyon Block 280 at depths of about 1,000 feet, and became famous as the first cable-stabilized, or guyed, production platform ever to be erected in the Gulf of Mexico region. The jacket of the platform itself stood at an elevation of 1,078 feet and weighed 27,000 tons, while including the platforms and drilling rig, it stretched to 1,300 feet, about 50 feet higher than the Empire State Building’s roofline of 1,250 feet, not counting its spire, according to Offshore Magazine and BSEE (2020). It remained a productive well for 33 years and stopped producing in 2016. Instead of towing the Lena offshore or dismantling it at the shore, the jacket structure of the Lena was disconnected from its original mooring and was deliberately toppled right at its current location on July 3, 2020, forming a reef on the Gulf of Mexico’s outer continental shelf. In the Gulf alone, the BSEE has given its approval to more than 500 Rigs-to-Reefs initiatives since the launch of the program in 1987, of which 47 approvals were done just in the three years before the Lena reefing.
The decommissioning project manager of ExxonMobil, the aim was to maintain the structure’s ability to support life because the formation of a reef would mean that the rare deep-water corals of the Gulf of Mexico would still survive, along with encrusting organisms, which would then attract other marine life, according to Keith Matocha.
It became the tallest oil and gas platform in the Gulf of Mexico ever converted into a reef under the Rigs-to-Reefs Program, according to the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement. The Lena reefing was part of a long-running Gulf of Mexico program. U.S. Congressman Garret Graves, whose constituency is Grand Isle, called the program a method of making a decommissioning liability an asset.
