Production Rig News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

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Carolina. and there is news that in the gulf of mexico, there is a oil platform on fire. 13 people have been rescued from the water, and of course, the immediate fear is another oil disaster. cnn's tom forman is working this story for us. tom, what is going on right now, and what do we know? >> well, the most important thing we know, wolf, is that the fire is now out on this rig which is about 102 miles south of the coast of louisiana out here, and here is a picture of it erl y fler the day when it was burning. important to know that this is a production rig which is different from the drill...

Hole they've drilled and the drilling platform goes away. then a whole new platform, a whole different platform actually comes in, uncorks the hole and gets the oil out of the well. two different types of rigs. two different processes. there's drilling and then there's production. drilling done with a drilling rig, production done with a production rig. the production platform pumps the oil back to shore through all of the green pipe lines you see there on the map. those are the green lines. again, drilling and production platforms, two different things. this is sort of oil industry 101. this ...

It was drilling for oil. there are two different things that happen on platforms in the gulf. you have a rig like the deepwater horizon that drills for oil. once it's done drilling, they essentially put a cork in the hole for lack of a less descriptive phrase. they essentially stop up the hole they've drilled and the drilling platform goes away. then a whole new platform, a whole different platform actually comes in, uncorks the hole and gets the oil out of the well. two different types of rigs. two different processes. there's drilling and then there's production. drilling done with a drillin...

Point. we don't know what caused the fire, whether there is a spill, conflicting reports on that. let's talk about what we do know. about 102 miles off the coast here, this is what it looked like when this explosion happened out there. this is a production rig. not an exploratory well, a drilling rig like we talked about with bp. that's important and i'll explain why in just a minute, bus this involved producing oil from a series of wells beneath the surface. that's a much more closed environment, an environment much more controlled than you have in a drilling process where they are still expl...