Riser and Subsea Equipment Designs for the Ocean Margin Drilling Program

The Ocean Margin Drilling Program (OMDP) is a program of scientific drilling and coring jointly sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and a consortium of ten major U.S. oil companies. The government-owned vessel Glomar Explorer will be made available to the program free of charge for conversion into the world´s largest, dynamically positioned drill- ship. The converted vessel will be capable of drilling and coring up to 20,000 ft below the seafloor in water depths to 13,200 ft with riser and well control equipment. This paper presents a description of the riser system and subsea equipment concepts which have been developed for the OMDP. The paper identifies the critical technical aspects of riser and subsea equipment design, summarizes the analytical work which was performed to confirm the validity of the designs, and identifies specific areas of component development which will be needed to implement the design.