Rethinking Oil Rigs - Offshore Data Centres

While the oil economy and its associated architecture gradually become a fragment of a polluting, outdated, carbon-centred era, Data and Data Centres are rising to prominence as the backbone of contemporary society. With fossil fuels and finite materials gradually becoming obsolete, oil rig structures used for extracting and processing these reserves will become defunct. As Architects we need to rethink these obsolete structures, giving them a new function in the fast-expanding circular economy. Telecom fibre cables running along the bottom of the North Sea with decommissioned oil rigs above, provide a favourable opportunity in repurposing them as future sites for connecting together Data Centre networks, fed by renewable and sustainable energy sources: wind powered plants, tidal waves and sea motion-based energy farms. The North Sea alone has over 500 platforms with plans for decommissioning by 2050 at an estimated cost to the taxpayer of £51bn. Over 15% could be reused for Carbon Capture with a large pool available for repurposing, which aligns with government policy of maximising economic recovery of the North Sea by 2050. Worldwide, it is estimated that data centres consume approximately 10 percent of the global power supply and account for nearly 2 percent of the total Green House Gas (GHG) emissions. Design for future Data Centres should not only be efficient but also aim at integrating innovative technologies in countering this loss while complementing its operational processes. In this report, we explore how we can rethink oil rigs as sustainable, offshore data centres of the future.