There are presently more than 4,000 offshore structures in the coastal waters of the United States and many more in other parts of the world. These structures have been constructed in water depths ranging from 6 meters to more than 300 meters. Some are more than 30 years old and many were designed according to criteria that fall short of today's standards. In spite of this, there is great pressure to extend the useful life of these structures so as to be able to recover the valuable remaining reserves of oil and gas.

The aging of offshore structures poses a number of serious challenges to the oil and gas industry and to the agencies which oversee and regulate their use. Not the lease of these challenges is to establish guidelines for the reassessment and requalification of existing offshore structures in light of presently available knowledge of environmental loads and structural performance. For structures located within the Pacific Rim earthquake zone, and in other seismic regions of the world, earthquakes are one of the primary environmental loads which must be considered in any reassessment.

The International Workshop on Seismic Design and Reassessment of Offshore Structures was held at the California Institute of Technology on December 7-9, 1992. The workshop was attended by 123 individuals from government, industry, and academia. The workshop was organized around five topic areas:

1. site seismic hazard and ground motion,
2. design, reassessment and requalification,
3. structural performance,
4. operations, and
5. public policy.

Invited state-of-the-art lectures were presented in each topic area. Working Groups further developed each topic and identified needed future action.

The Proceedings contain the findings, recommendations, and conclusions of the workshop participants.

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Last Updated: 07/28/2008, 02:48 PM