The Assassin (Sha ren zhe Tang Zhan)

Perdido, the world's deepest

production and drilling platform.

What we do is like the space program in the other direction.

To push engineering frontiers

to the absolute limit...

These machines can easily work

at 10,000-foot depths or greater.

Engineers look to the pioneering innovators

of the past...

What once was the wall has now become the floor.

So the intumescent paint now is charring

due to a chemical reaction.

That made the impossible possible.

captions paid for by discovery communications

Since the 1940s, the Gulf of Mexico has provided

a vital source of energy for America.

Almost 2 million barrels of liquid fuel

are produced there every day, and almost half of the country's

entire petroleum-refining capacity is on the Gulf coast.

The challenge of accessing deep-water reserves

gets harder and harder.

We're exhausting the supply or access to the easy barrels.

With every new discovery and development,

it gets more challenging and it gets deeper.

That's what causes us to push the frontiers of technology.

To access these deep-water fuel reserves,

200 miles from shore is the revolutionary Perdido,

the deepest production and drilling facility in the world.

It's a $3 billion engineering colossus.

The structure itself stands as tall as the Eiffel Tower

from the bottom of the spire all the way to the top

of the drilling rig.

Weighing over 60,000 tons,

the world's deepest production and drilling platform

is anchored to the sea floor by nine 2-mile-long

steel and polyester mooring lines.

Oil and gas from 35 newly discovered Wells,

some as far as seven miles away from the platform,

are pumped to the surface.

At 550 feet long and 118 feet in diameter,

this floating spar provides the base

for the three decks where the oil and gas are processed.

There's space for two helicopters, a restaurant,

a gym, and multiple cabins to house the crew of 150-plus,

who live and work on this record-breaking platform

for 14 days at a time.

Perdido is an engineering achievement

once thought impossible.

You're going into a frontier area

in what we call the ultra-deep water.

We are going in reservoirs that had not truly been tested before

in new plays for the oil and gas industry

in the Gulf of Mexico.

You are going into one of the most severe

environmental conditions as you can imagine,

in 7,800 feet of water.

Making Perdido possible required

a giant technological leap.

Oil and gas fields wouldn't exist without the death

of tiny plants and creatures.

While dinosaurs roamed the earth,

gazillions of dead plankton and algae built up

on the sea floor...

Oh, crikey.

Before a crust of rock formed over the top.

Millions of years of pressure and the earth's heat

essentially cooked this into an energy-rich soup.

But getting to it underwater

has never been easy.

Because it had to operate at an unprecedented depth

of 7,800 feet, engineers determined Perdido

couldn't have legs like a standard oil rig.

The reason we couldn't use a conventional

tension leg platform was because the water depth was so great

that those tension legs would be too heavy

for any structure to be able to support.

To go this deep, Perdido's designers drew on

a breakthrough military technology

called the floating instrument platform.

In San Diego, California, mechanical engineer Dan Dickrell

is exploring one of history's most unique vessels.

In the early 1960s, the U.S. Navy was looking for

a new type of research platform from which to take precise

underwater acoustic measurements.

Now, the submarines they'd been using previously

were deemed unstable due to their shape.

They would yaw in the water, making it impossible

for the scientists on board to take the precise measurements

they needed.

Oceanographer and underwater explorer

Fred Spiess developed a more balanced solution

that changed deep-sea exploration forever.

After months of testing various designs,

Spiess and his team came up with this, the R.P. Flip,

a floating instrument platform.

But flip earns its name in another,

more extraordinary way.

This one-of-a-kind, 350-foot-long spar buoy

can go from horizontal to vertical in just 30 minutes.

But how does this work with crew on board?

During the flip itself, everyone comes,

stands out on the outside decks.

As the process occurs, the decks and the bulkheads

exchange places throughout

the horizontal-to-vertical transformation.

Most rooms on board have two doors...

One horizontal orientation, and another door

for the vertical orientation of the platform.

Now, in the configuration it is right now,

we're in the horizontal position.

But imagine what happens when the flip occurs.

What once was the wall has now become the floor,

and what once was the floor has now become the wall.

Everything on flip

is designed in two configurations...

Look at this.

It's a sink. It's a bathroom sink.

But, oh, it pivots.

How bizarre is that?

From rotating condiment racks in the galley

to tables on the walls.

To maintain its stable position in the horizontal,

there are huge concrete blocks

underneath what is now the floor.

But when it's time to change and flip from horizontal

to vertical, tons of seawater are pumped into

those ballast chambers slowly

that changes from horizontal to perfectly vertical.

It's so cool.

When flipped vertically,

amazing stability is provided by the 800 tons of water

inside a ballast tank in the long spar

sitting below the surface.

Flip is so steady it can deal with swells up to 275 feet high

and is still in use today.

Oh, this platform is too crazy.

Engineers in Finland built on the principles

of Spiess' flip design to construct the world's

biggest floating spar.

The spar itself is constructed quite ingeniously.

It's done in slices.

You cut it into slices.

And it's from the top of it to the can section,

and then the truss section you do.

And then it's welded together slice by slice.

Each of the seven-ring sections

has 12 self-contained compartments,

so if disaster strikes and a compartment is punctured,

then only that compartment would flood with water.

On the end of the can section, an open truss of pipe works

and the ballast area are added

to complete this massive structure.

Perdido's spar is about 550 feet.

In diameter, it's 118 feet.

Then the spar was delivered by ship

to the Perdido site in the Gulf of Mexico.

To reach depths of 7,800 feet, plugs are pulled to let seawater

into the ballast, and then, like Fred Spiess' flip ship,

Perdido's spar slowly begins the process

of switching from horizontal to vertical.

So they also pump water into the tanks

inside the can section, and that lowers it to give it

that stability to allow the pitch and the roll to stabilize.

Once upended, the spar must then be secured

to brace against storms, or so-called tropical disturbances.

We have a long duration... Relatively long duration

before we can get to storm-safe.

The first disturbance is predicted to be here within

about seven to eight days.

Nine supersized mooring lines had to be tethered

to the floating spar to the sea floor,

totaling around 20 miles of chain and rope.

So what we do in order to secure the structure

floating on the surface is we connect the suction anchors

on the sea floor with 2-mile-long,

huge polyester mooring lines, about 25 inches thick,

and massive steel chains on either side of the mooring line.

For maximum protection from storms,

the lines fan out for more than 1 1/2 miles around the spar.

Now, it's still sitting pretty high in the water,

so they put a weight in the bottom, essentially iron ore.

They pump into a tank at the bottom of that truss section,

so you have a lot of weight at the bottom tank.

With the additional weight and the mooring lines,

Perdido's spar is finally storm-safe.

But this was just the first step in creating the world's

deepest production and drilling facility.

It was critical to get the top sides

to be a certain weight because we wanted to do

the top sides' installation with a single lift.

To do this, the team had to produce

more engineering breakthroughs...

You just can't get people down there,

yet a considerable amount of work has to still be done

at these water depths.

To deliver this record-breaking feat

of impossible engineering.

Perdido.

About 200 miles off the Texas coastline in the Gulf of Mexico,

the world's deepest production and drilling platform