In announcing the ambitious renewable energy push this week, the Biden administration highlighted a ship under construction in Brownsville as a testament to green economic opportunities.
Along the Brownsville Channel and directly into the Gulf of Mexico as a drill bit, one of the largest manufacturers of offshore oil rigs on the Gulf Coast turned 180 acres of soil into a veritable gold mine. The shipyard has a maze of 43 buildings, including 7 hangar-sized assembly sheds, where welders’ sparks fly, and pneumatic hammers burst in them, warning in bold that any mistakes may lead to disability. Sign. The steel plate behind the three-ton steel plate was slid into one end of the factory. At the other end, like some complex toys from Santa’s workshop, rolling some of the heaviest and most sophisticated energy industrial machinery in the world.
During the oil boom in the early 21st century, the shipyard continued to produce “jack-up drilling rigs.” These offshore platforms are as high as skyscrapers and extract oil for miles under the sea floor, each selling for about $250 million. Five years ago, a 21-story beast was born in the yard, named Krechet, which was the largest land-based oil rig in history. But Krechet-”gyrfalcon” in Russian, the largest falcon species and predator of the Arctic tundra-has proven to be a dinosaur. Now extracting oil for Irving-based ExxonMobil and its partners on the island of Sakhalin near Russia, this may be the last such oil rig to be built by the shipyard.
Today, at a critical moment reflecting the transformation of the oil and gas industry that is sweeping across Texas and the world, workers at the Brownsville Shipyard are building a new type of ship. Like an old-fashioned oil rig, this offshore energy ship will sail to the sea, put its heavy steel legs on the bottom of the sea, use these hips to support itself until it crosses the rough water, and then, in the dance of power and precision , A machine that falls into the dark depths that will penetrate the rocks on the sea floor. However, this time, the natural resource the ship seeks to develop is not oil. It’s the wind.
The Richmond, Virginia-based power producer Dominion Energy that ordered the ship will use it to drive piles into the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. On each 100-foot-tall nail immersed in the water, a three-pointed steel and fiberglass windmill will be placed. Its rotating hub is about the size of a school bus and is about 27 stories above the waves. This is the first wind turbine installation ship built in the United States. As offshore wind farms, still mainly found in Europe, emerge more and more along the coast of the United States, the Brownsville Shipyard may build more similar ships.
This momentum further strengthened on March 29, when the Biden administration announced a new U.S. offshore wind power expansion plan, which said it would include billions of dollars in federal loans and grants, as well as a series of new wind farms aimed at accelerating Policy measures for installation. On the eastern, western and Gulf Coast of the United States. In fact, the announcement uses the ship built at the Brownsville Shipyard as an example of a US renewable energy project that it hopes to promote. The government claims that the offshore wind industry will “give the birth of a new supply chain that extends to the heart of the United States, as demonstrated by the 10,000 tons of domestic steel supplied by workers in Alabama and West Virginia for Dominion ships.” This new federal goal is that by 2030, the United States will employ tens of thousands of workers to deploy 30,000 megawatts of offshore wind power capacity. (One megawatt powers approximately 200 homes in Texas.) This is still less than half of what China was expected to have at the time, but it is huge compared to the 42 megawatts of offshore wind power installed in the United States today. Given that the US energy sector usually plans to make large investments within a few decades, the government’s timetable will be very fast.
For any Texan who tends to laugh at the renewable energy business, offshore wind power provides an exciting reality check. From the amount of bet to the required engineering, it is just like the oil industry, suitable for those with deep pockets, big appetite, and big equipment. A group of politicians, oil-hungry allies, mistakenly blamed frozen wind turbines for the catastrophic failure of the Texas power system during the February winter storm. They imply that fossil fuels are still the only reliable energy source. However, more and more oil companies must be accountable not only to their own politicians but also to global shareholders. They are showing through their investments that they see alternative energy sources as a source of corporate profit growth, and these corporate profits are epic by the oil industry. The impact of the downturn.
The multinational companies that own the Brownsville shipyard and the multinational companies that design wind energy ships are among the world’s largest petroleum industry contractors. Both companies had revenues of more than $6 billion last year; both suffered huge losses in these sales; both sought a foothold in the renewable energy market. The oil problem is profound. Part of the reason is the short-term shock of COVID-19, which has reduced global economic activity. More fundamentally, the seemingly unstoppable growth in oil demand in the last century is gradually disappearing. Increasing attention to climate change and advances in clean technology — from electric cars to homes powered by wind and solar energy — have triggered a long-term transition to cheaper and cheaper alternatives to fossil fuels.
George O’Leary, an energy-focused analyst at Tudor, Pickering, Holt & Co., based in Houston, said that although oil and gas returns have been poor recently, “a lot of money is coming” in the renewable energy sector. investment bank. The company is a symbol of the changing worldview of the Texas oil region-it has long focused on oil and gas, but is now actively diversifying. O’Leary likened the Texas oil executives’ new enthusiasm for renewable energy to their fascination with shale oil and gas extraction 15 years ago; until new technologies reduce the cost of extraction, mining this rock has been widely regarded as unsuitable. economy. O’Leary told me that fossil fuel alternatives are “almost like shale 2.0.”
Keppel is a Singapore-based conglomerate and one of the world’s largest oil rig manufacturers. It purchased Brownsville Shipyard in 1990 and made it the core of the AmFELS division. For most of the next 30 years, the shipyard flourished. However, Keppel reported that its energy business will lose approximately US$1 billion in 2020, mainly due to its global offshore oil rig business. It announced that in an attempt to prevent financial leaks, it plans to exit the business and focus instead on renewable energy. Keppel CEO Luo Zhenhua vowed in a statement to “build a flexible industry leader and prepare for the global energy transition.”
The range of alternatives is equally urgent for NOV. The Houston-based behemoth, formerly known as National Oilwell Varco, designed the wind turbine installation vessel that Keppel Shipyard is building. NOV is one of the world’s largest oil and gas industry machinery manufacturers, with approximately 28,000 workers. These employees are scattered in 573 factories in 61 countries on six continents, but nearly a quarter of them (approximately 6,600 people) work in Texas. Due to the exhaustion of demand for new petroleum machinery, it reported a net loss of US$2.5 billion in November last year. Now, using its accumulated expertise in the oil and gas sector, the company is designing five new wind turbine installation vessels that are being built around the world, including one in Brownsville. It is equipped with jack-up legs and cranes for several of them, and it is converted from offshore oil for offshore wind power. Clay Williams, chief executive officer of NOV, stated that “renewable energy is interesting for organizations when oil fields are not very interesting”. When he said “fun”, he didn’t mean entertainment. He meant to make money.
Crucial to the Texas economy, the energy business is often described as almost religiously divided. On the one hand, Big Oil is a model of economic realism or environmental slander—depending on your worldview. On the other side is Big Green, a champion of ecological progress or bad charity-again, it depends on your point of view. These comics are becoming more and more outdated. Money, not ethics, shaping energy, structural economic changes are redefining the energy landscape in Texas: the decline in the oil industry is more fundamental than the recent down cycle, and the rise in renewable energy is more durable than subsidies-driven bubbles .
During the fiasco of the winter storm in February, the residual differences between the old energy and the new energy were revealed at the ceremony. The polar vortex that other states calmly dealt with has caused serious damage to the power grid, which has been ignored by a series of governors, legislators and regulators for ten years. After the storm took 4.5 million homes offline, many of them were powered off for several days and killed more than 100 Texans. Governor Greg Abbott told Fox News that the state’s “wind and solar power were shut down “This “just shows that fossil fuels are necessary.” Jason Isaac, director of the energy project of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, wrote that the foundation is a think tank with a large amount of funding provided by oil interest groups. He wrote, The power outage shows that “putting too many eggs in the renewable energy basket will have countless chilling consequences.”
Approximately 95% of the planned new power capacity in Texas is wind, solar, and batteries. ERCOT predicts that wind power generation may increase by 44% this year.
It’s no surprise that the choir is well informed. On the one hand, no one seriously suggests that Texas or the world will soon abandon fossil fuels. Although their use in transportation will decrease in the next few decades, they may last longer as energy sources for industrial processes such as steelmaking and various raw materials from fertilizers to surfboards. On the other hand, all types of power generation — wind, solar, natural gas, coal, and nuclear power — failed during the storm in February, largely because Texas energy officials did not pay attention to the ten The warning from years ago allowed the factory to survive the winter. From Dakota to Denmark, wind turbines for cold work are also good in cold conditions elsewhere. Although half of all wind turbines on the Texas grid were frozen on those ill-fated days in February, many wind turbines that continued to spin produced more electricity than the Texas Electric Reliability Board As expected, the commission is responsible for managing the state’s main power grid. This partly makes up for the large amount of natural gas production that has been eliminated.
However, for critics of fossil fuel alternatives, the fact that approximately 25% of Texas’s electricity in 2020 will come from wind turbines and solar panels somehow means that power outages must be dazzling. The fault of the green machine that speeds up. Last year, wind power generation in Texas exceeded coal power generation for the first time. According to ERCOT, about 95% of the new power capacity being planned across the state is wind, solar and batteries. The organization predicts that the state’s wind power generation may increase by 44% this year, while the power generation of large-scale solar projects may more than triple.
The surge in renewable energy poses a real threat to oil interests. One is to intensify competition for government generosity. Due to differences in what is included, the accounting for energy subsidies varies greatly, but recent estimates of the total US annual fossil fuel subsidies range from US$20.5 billion to US$649 billion. For alternative energy, a federal study indicated that the 2016 figure was $6.7 billion, although it only counted direct federal aid. Regardless of the numbers, the political pendulum is moving away from oil and gas. In January of this year, President Biden issued an executive order on climate change, which required the federal government to “ensure that, within the scope of compliance with applicable laws, federal funds do not directly subsidize fossil fuels.”
Losing subsidies is just one danger for oil and gas. Even more terrifying is the loss of market share. Even fossil fuel companies that decide to pursue renewable energy may lose out to more flexible and financially strong competitors. Pure wind and solar companies are becoming powerful forces, and the market value of tech giants such as Apple and Google now dwarfs the market value of the dominant listed oil companies.
Nevertheless, more and more Texas companies are using the skills they have accumulated in the fossil fuel business to try to develop a competitive advantage in the fiercely competitive clean energy market. “What oil and gas companies are doing is asking,’What do we do and what these skills enable us to do with renewable energy?’” said James West, an oil industry analyst at Evercore ISI, an investment bank in New York. He said that “companies in the Texas oil region, which are entering the alternative energy sector, have some FOMO.” This is a nod to the strongest capitalist drivers who are afraid of missing opportunities. As more and more Texas Petroleum executives join the trend of renewable energy, West describes their reasoning as: “If it works, we don’t want to be someone who looks stupid in two years.”
As the oil and gas industry re-uses renewable energy, Texas is particularly able to benefit. According to data from the energy research company BloombergNEF, so far this year, the ERCOT grid has secured long-term deals to connect more new wind and solar power generation capabilities than any other grid in the country. One of the analysts, Kyle Harrison, said that large oil companies with extensive operations in Texas are buying a significant portion of renewable energy, and these companies feel getting hotter to reduce their carbon footprint. In addition, many of these companies have large employee rosters, and their drilling skills apply to more environmentally friendly resources. According to Jesse Thompson, Texas has approximately half of U.S. oil and gas production jobs, and nearly three-quarters of U.S. petrochemical production jobs, with “incredible engineering, materials science And organic chemistry talent base”, senior business economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas in Houston. “There are many talents that can be transformed.”
The power outage in February highlighted that the fossil fuel business is one of the most greedy power users in Texas. A large part of the state’s natural gas production has ceased, not only because of the freezing of pumping equipment, but also because many of the non-frozen equipment has lost power. This desire means that for many oil companies, the simplest renewable energy strategy is to buy green juice to fuel their brown business. Exxon Mobil and Occidental Petroleum have signed a contract to purchase solar energy to help power its activities in the Permian Basin. Baker Hughes, a large oilfield services company, plans to obtain all the electricity it uses in Texas from wind and solar projects. Dow Chemical signed a contract to purchase electricity from a solar power plant in southern Texas to reduce the use of fossil fuel power at its Gulf Coast petrochemical plant.
The deeper commitment of oil companies is to buy shares in renewable energy projects—not only to consume electricity, but also in return. As a sign of the maturity of alternative energy sources, many people on Wall Street are beginning to think that wind and solar energy are more reliable than oil and gas to pay in cash. One of the most active practitioners of this strategy is the French oil giant Total, which acquired a controlling stake in California-based solar panel manufacturer SunPower several years ago, and the French battery manufacturer Saft, whose project can be Consider that renewable energy and electricity production will account for 40% of its sales by 2050—admittedly, this is a long time. In February of this year, Total announced that it would purchase four projects in the Houston area. These projects have a solar power generation capacity of 2,200 MW and a battery power generation capacity of 600 MW. Total will use less than half of its electricity for its own operations and sell the rest.
Grow through the tenacious intention to dominate the market in November. Now it is applying its unlimited strategy honed in oil to renewable energy.
The most disciplined oil companies participating in the alternative energy race do more than just write checks. They are evaluating where they can best use their oil and gas extraction skills. NOV and Keppel are trying this repositioning. Unlike oil producers whose main assets are hydrocarbons buried in underground rocks, these global contractors have the skills, factories, engineers, and capital to redeploy them to the non-fossil fuel energy sector with relative ease. Evercore analyst West refers to these companies as the “pickers” of the oil world.
NOV is more like a bulldozer. It has grown through aggressive acquisitions and stubborn intentions to dominate the market. West pointed out that its nickname in the industry is “no other supplier”-which means that if you are an energy producer, “you have a problem with your rig, you have to call NOV because there is no other supplier. “Now, the company is applying its unlimited strategy honed in oil to renewable energy.
When I talked to NOV’s leader Williams through Zoom, everything about him made the Petroleum CEO scream: his white shirt buttoned at the neckline; his quiet patterned tie; the conference table occupies him The space between his desk and the wall of uninterrupted windows in his Houston office; hanging on the bookcase behind his right shoulder, there are paintings of three cowboys riding through the oil boom city. With no intention of exiting the oil industry in November, Williams expects that the oil industry will provide most of its revenue in the next few years. He estimates that by 2021, the company’s wind power business will only generate about 200 million US dollars in revenue, accounting for about 3% of its possible sales, while other renewable energy sources will not significantly increase this number.
NOV has not turned its attention to renewable energy out of the altruistic desire for green and environmental protection. Unlike some major oil producers and even the American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s main trade organization, it has not committed to reducing its carbon footprint, nor has it supported the government’s idea of setting a price for emissions. Williams sympathizes with those whose motivation is to “change the world,” he told me, but “As capitalists, we must get our money back, and then get some money back.” He believes that alternative energy sources-not only wind energy, but also There are solar energy, hydrogen energy, geothermal energy and several other energy sources-it is a huge new market whose growth trajectory and profit margins may far exceed those of oil and natural gas. “I think they are the future of the company.”
For decades, NOV, like many of its oilfield service competitors, has restricted its renewable energy activities to one technology: geothermal, which involves using naturally generated underground heat to power turbines and generate electricity. This process has a lot in common with the production of oil: it requires drilling wells to extract hot liquids from the ground, and installing pipes, meters, and other equipment to manage these liquids coming out of the ground. Products sold by NOV to the geothermal industry include drilling bits and fiberglass-lined well pipes. “This is a good business,” Williams said. “However, compared with our oilfield business, it is not that big.”
The oil industry is a rich mine in the first 15 years of the 21st century, and the uncontrolled growth of the Asian economy has promoted the expansion of global demand. Especially after 2006, in addition to the brief downturn during the 2008 global financial crisis, prices have soared. When Williams was appointed CEO of NOV in February 2014, the price of a barrel of oil was approximately US$114. When he recalled that era in our conversation, he blushed with excitement. “It’s great,” he said, “It’s great.”
One of the reasons why oil prices have remained high for a long time is that OPEC has supported oil prices by restricting production in the face of increased production in the United States. But in the spring of 2014, oil prices fell. After OPEC announced at a meeting in November that it would keep its pumping units vacillating, oil prices fell further, a move that was widely interpreted as an attempt to drive away its American competitors.
By 2017, the cost per barrel will stay at around US$50. At the same time, the increasing popularity of wind and solar energy and the plummeting cost have prompted the government to actively promote carbon reduction. Williams convened about 80 November executives to participate in an “energy transition forum” to find out how to manage in a world that suddenly became less interesting. He commissioned a senior engineer to lead a team to look for opportunities at the alternative energy conference. He assigned other engineers to work on “secret Manhattan project-type undertakings”-ideas that can use NOV’s oil and gas expertise to “create a competitive advantage in the field of clean energy.”
Some of these ideas are still working. Williams told me that one is a more effective way to build solar farms. With the investment of large companies, solar farms are getting bigger and bigger, from West Texas to the Middle East. He pointed out that the construction of these facilities is usually “like the largest IKEA furniture assembly project anyone has ever seen”. Although Williams declined to give details, NOV is trying to come up with a better process. Another idea is a potential new method to store ammonia-a chemical substance NOV has been built to produce hydrogen equipment, as a means of transporting large amounts of wind and solar energy for power generation, this element is getting more and more attention .
NOV continues to invest heavily in wind energy. In 2018, it acquired the Dutch builder GustoMSC, which has a dominant position in ship design and serves Europe’s booming offshore wind power industry. In 2019, NOV purchased a stake in Denver-based Keystone Tower Systems. NOV believes that the company has devised a way to build taller wind turbine towers at a lower cost. Instead of using the popular method of manufacturing each tubular tower by welding curved steel plates together, Keystone plans to use continuous steel spirals to make them, a bit like cardboard toilet paper rolls. Because the spiral structure increases the strength of the pipe, this method should allow the use of less steel.
For companies that manufacture machinery, “the energy transition may be easier to achieve”, rather than companies that make money by selling black gold.
NOV’s venture capital arm invested millions of dollars in Keystone, but declined to provide exact figures. This is not big money for November, but the company sees this investment as a way to use its advantages to enter a fast-growing market. The deal allowed the reopening of a plant for the construction of oil rigs in November, which was closed last year due to a downturn in the oil market. It is located in the town of Panhandle in Pampa, not only in the middle of American oil fields, but also in the middle of its “wind belt”. The Pampa plant shows no signs of a high-tech energy revolution. This is an abandoned mud and concrete yard with six long and narrow industrial buildings with corrugated metal roofs. Keystone is installing its first-of-its-kind machines there to start producing spiral wind turbine towers later this year. The factory had about 85 workers before it closed last year. Now there are about 15 workers. It is estimated that there will be 70 workers by September. If sales go well, there may be 200 workers by the middle of next year.
Overseeing the November Keystone strategy was former Goldman Sachs investment banker Narayanan Radhakrishnan. When Radhakrishnan decided to leave Goldman Sachs’ Houston office in 2019, he was working for an oilfield service company, not an oil producer, because he analyzed the survival challenges of the industry. In a Zoom call at home in February, he argued that “energy transition may be easier to achieve” for companies that manufacture energy machinery, rather than companies that make money by selling black gold. NOV’s “core competitiveness does not lie in the final product; it is about building large, complex things that work in harsh environments.” Therefore, compared with oil producers, NOV is easier to shift the focus, whose “assets are underground of”.
Radhakrishnan hopes that applying NOV’s experience in mass production of mobile oil rigs to Keystone’s spiral wind tower machines can open up large areas of the United States and the world and become a profitable wind power market. Generally, wind turbine towers are far from the factory where they are built to the location where they are installed. Sometimes, this requires a circuitous route to avoid obstacles, such as highway overpasses. Under these obstacles, the tower tied to the truck bed is not suitable. Building the tower on a mobile assembly line temporarily erected near the installation site, NOV bet that the tower should be allowed to double in height—up to 600 feet, or 55 stories. Because wind speed increases with altitude, and longer wind turbine blades produce more juice, taller towers can cast more money. Eventually, the construction of wind turbine towers may be moved to the sea—literally, to the sea.
The sea is a very familiar place for NOV. In 2002, with the growing interest in the new concept of offshore wind power in Europe, the Dutch shipbuilding company GustoMSC, which NOV later acquired, signed a contract to provide the world’s first ship designed for wind energy with a jack-up system. -Turbine installation, Mayflower resolution. That barge can only install turbines at a depth of 115 feet or less. Since then, Gusto has designed approximately 35 wind turbine installation vessels, 5 of which were designed in the past two years. Its nearest ships, including the one built in Brownsville, are designed for deeper waters—usually 165 feet or more.
NOV has adopted two oil drilling technologies, especially for wind turbine installations. One is a jack-up system, with its legs extending into the sea floor, raising the ship to 150 feet above the surface of the water. The goal is to ensure that its crane can reach high enough to install the tower and blades of the wind turbine. Oil rigs usually have three jack-up legs, but wind turbine ships need four to cope with the pressure of moving heavy equipment in such high altitudes. Oil rigs are placed on an oil well for several months, while wind turbine ships move from one location to another, usually up and down every day.
Another November modification from oil to wind is a retractable, 500-foot-long version of its traditional rig mounting crane. NOV designed it to be able to push wind turbine components higher into the sky. In January 2020, a model of a new crane was placed in Keppel’s office in Chidan, the Netherlands. In November, about 40 executives from all over the world flew to participate in a two-day seminar on the company’s renewable energy strategy. . Ten “key areas” have emerged: three are wind energy, plus solar energy, geothermal, hydrogen, carbon capture and storage, energy storage, deep-sea mining, and biogas.
I asked Frode Jensen, senior vice president of NOV sales and drilling rigs, an executive who attended the Schiedam meeting about the last item, a technology that involves the production of gas that can be combusted to generate electricity. Especially the source of natural gas? Jensen laughed. “How should I put it?” he asked loudly in a Norwegian accent. “Cow shit.” NOV conducts research on biogas and other technologies on a farm that has been transformed into a corporate research and development center in Navasota, a small town between Houston and the university city, known as ” The blues capital of Texas”. Do Jensen’s biogas brewing colleagues think NOV can make money from it? “That,” he was expressionless, with a hint of doubt about his 25-year oil career, “this is what they think.”
Since the meeting in Schiedam nearly a year and a half ago, Jensen has shifted most of his time to the wind. He is instructing NOV to advance the next frontier of offshore wind power: large turbines are far away from the coastline and therefore float in such deep waters. They are not bolted to the bottom of the sea, but are tied to the bottom of the sea, usually by a set of cables. There are two motivations for incurring costs and engineering challenges for constructing such a long building offshore: to avoid the opposition of coastal residents who do not want their vision to be destroyed by wind turbines that are not in my backyard, and to take advantage of the wide-open ocean and the high wind speeds. .
This ship will be called Charybdis, named after a sea monster in Greek mythology. Considering the severe economic situation facing the energy business, this is an appropriate nickname.
Some of the world’s largest multinational oil companies are spending huge sums of money to buy their way of leading the way in this rapidly escalating floating wind turbine stampede. For example, in February, BP and German power producer EnBW jointly drove other bidders out of the water to snatch the right to establish a “territory” of floating wind turbines in the Irish Sea near the UK. BP and EnBW bid more than Shell and other oil giants, agreeing to pay $1.37 billion each for the development rights. Given that many oil producers in the world are its customers, NOV hopes to sell them most of the machinery they will use for offshore wind power.
The use of wind energy also changed Keppel’s yard in Brownsville. Its 1,500 workers—about half of the people it hired at the height of the oil boom in 2008—in addition to wind turbine installation vessels, are also building two container ships and a dredger. Approximately 150 workers have been assigned to this wind turbine, but when construction is in full swing next year, this number may increase to 800. The shipyard’s total labor force may increase to approximately 1,800, depending on the robustness of its overall business.
The initial steps to build a wind turbine installation vessel for Dominion are very similar to those that Keppel has long used to build oil rigs. The heavy steel plates are fed into a machine called Wilberett, which corrodes them. These pieces are then cut, beveled and shaped, and then welded into large pieces of the boat, called “sub-pieces.” Those are welded into blocks; these blocks are then welded into the container. After smoothing and painting — an operation carried out in buildings called “explosive rooms”, some of which are three stories high — the ship is equipped with its machinery and its living area.
But there are significant differences between building oil rigs and building sailboats. When they built the Dominion ships — construction started in October last year and scheduled to be completed in 2023 — Keppel workers in Brownsville were trying to master them. Perhaps the most intractable difficulty involved is that, unlike oil rigs, sailboats need a wide open space on their deck to store the towers and blades that will be installed. This forced engineers to locate the ship’s wiring, pipes, and various internal machinery so that anything passing through the deck (such as vents) was downgraded to the outer edge of the deck. Figuring out how to do this is similar to solving a difficult problem. In Brownsville, the task fell on the shoulders of the 38-year-old engineering manager Bernardino Salinas in the yard.
Salinas was born in Rio Bravo, Mexico, on the Texas border. He has been in Brownsville, Keppel since he received a master’s degree in industrial engineering from Texas A&M University in Kingsville in 2005. Factory work. Every afternoon, when Salinas carefully studies his electronic blueprint and decides where to put the next puzzle, he will use video to talk to a colleague at Singapore’s Keppel Shipyard, which has already built a wind turbine installation ferry. One February afternoon in Brownsville—the next morning in Singapore—the two discussed how to piping the bilge water and ballast water system to make the water flow around the ship. On the other hand, they brainstormed the layout of the main engine cooling pipes.
The Brownsville ship will be called Charybdis. The sea monster in Greek mythology lives under rocks, churning the waters on one side of a narrow strait, and on the other side, another creature named Skula will snatch any sailors who pass too close. Scylla and Charybdis forced ships to choose their routes carefully. Given the severe economic situation in which Keppel and the energy business operate, this seems to be an appropriate nickname.
An oil rig still stands in the courtyard of Brownsville. Brian Garza, an affable 26-year-old Keppel employee, pointed this out to me during a two-hour visit through Zoom on a gray afternoon in February. Another sign of the oil industry’s woes is that London-based Valaris, the owner of the world’s largest oil rig, went bankrupt last year and sold the rig to SpaceX’s affiliated entity for a low price of 3.5 million US dollars. Founded by billionaire Elon Musk, he made headlines when he announced at the end of last year that he would move from California to Texas. Musk’s other creations include electric car maker Tesla, which has contributed to the fester of the Texas oil industry by eating away at oil demand. Garza told me that SpaceX renamed the rig to Deimos as one of Mars’s two satellites. Musk hinted that SpaceX will eventually use rockets launched from offshore platforms to transport people from Earth to the Red Planet.
Post time: Oct-16-2021