Statfjord B tomorrow, a post oil scenario

Abstract

Decades of oil and gas production in the North Sea have left immense traces. Almost invisible to society, one of the largest and most active industrialregions in Europe stretches across the entire North Sea. With the end of the era of fossil fuels, the enormous number of physical structures developed for the purpose of oil production is becoming obsolete. Decommissioned and disused drilling platforms will be gradually returned to land for dismantling over the coming decades, which will reveal the hidden world of the North Sea giants to the public. The heritage of the northern European oil nations is also returning with an immense potential for temporary or permanent conversion.The exploration of their visual, functional and spatial potential is the starting point of this thesis. A strategy of Adaptive Reuse will be presented, which deals with political, ecological, economic and socio-cultural issues. In the second part of this thesis, a case study will be developed using the example of the Norwegian concrete platform Statfjord B, built in 1981. A scenario of a long-term reuse of offshore platforms will be developed. The concrete structures built for an eternity have the potential to provide space for a new relevance through conversion. A new programme in the context of "Research, climate, environmental and marine protection" can contribute to compensate past decades of oil production. Last but not least, the impressive giants of the North Sea represent an enormous engineering achievement, which justifies it to be considered an industrial cultural heritage and worth preserving. This work attempts to underline the regional and global relevance of the North Sea as a historical trade and economic zone on the one hand, and to point out a hidden world of oil structures in the North Sea which holds enormous architectural potential for conversion. Adaptive Reuse is applied as a concept for preservation of industrial monuments.