Four decades of DP G
Gurbachan Singh Virk, a Transocean Consultant and formerly Manager of Engineering, Global Marine Drilling Company, has a wealth of experi- ence in the offshore industry and although he shies away from the idea, he is known as one of the world’s Dynamic Positioning specialists. Gurbachan talks to Report about innovations the market has seen over the last four decades and how he sees the future of DP and DP drillship.
6 report
innovation at Transocean Report interviews one of the pioneers of DP drillship
Gurbachan Singh Virk
urbachan has an extensive history in the DP sector, dating back nearly 40 years. His first exposure
to DP systems came when he joined Global Marine (now Transocean) in 1972. “Global Marine’s very birth is synonymous with the offshore drilling industry because it special- ised in offshore drilling without any land operations.” At the time, Global Marine was operating Glomar Challenger (built in 1968), a DP drillship that specialised in deepwater coring operations under contract to National Science Foundation’s Scripps Institute of Oceanography. This was very exciting to be involved in, he says, because over the 15- year coring programme, this drillship finally proved the theory of sea floor spreading and consequently, for continental drift.
But for the birth of DP, it is necessary to travel back to the 1950s. The predecessor to Global Marine was the CUSS Group, formed in 1956 by four oil companies, Conoco, Unocal, Superior Oil and Shell Oil. The mission of CUSS, led by Robert F. Bauer, was to develop techniques for drilling from a mobile platform, including techniques for positioning the platform over the well. The CUSS group bought an old US Navy barge, fitted it with four joystick-controlled, steer- able propellers and took the barge to Mission Bay offshore San Diego, in 1961. The DP concept resulting from the tests for controlling the position of the barge with joystick-controlled thrusters was the fore- runner of modern-day DP systems, he says. This concept later resulted in the first full
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