FPSO (Floating Production Storage and Offloading)

Ah, the ocean. So deep. So mysterious. And, in some cases, so totally right on top of a bunch of oil. When this happens, we can get the oil out via offshore drilling: big, fancy machines extend down from the water’s surface and extract the oil from beneath its depths.

But we can’t just pump it out of the ground and into our gas tank. It has to be processed and refined first, and this is where Floating Production Storage and Offloading vessels, or FPSOs, come into play. These bad boys hang out near offshore oil fields. Instead of building and maintaining a super-expensive drilling platform and then having to send super-expensive tankers back and forth to transport the oil, the FPSO can extract the oil and then store it and process it right there on the vessel before transporting it to its next destination. This saves everyone involved a lot of time and a lot of money.

FPSOs are becoming more and more popular. Not only are they cheaper and faster than the drilling platforms of old, but they’re portable. They can just float from one oil field to the next. And they’re fairly easy to adapt to technological advances, whether that means new extraction methods or the ability to drill in deeper or shallower water. The ocean will probably always hold a lot of mysteries, but thanks to FPSOs, figuring out how to get more oil from under it isn’t one of them.