Innovative thinkers

	Vol. 231 No. 8
NELL L. BENTON, ASSOCIATE EDITOR

Making history with divers, robots and a semi called Uncle John

If you want to see Ken Duell be the first to accomplish something, just tell him it’s impossible. A 35-year-veteran of the underwater construction and diving industry, he has both starred in—and documented—the story of how the world’s offshore resources were developed.

Duell graduated from the Commercial Diving Center in California certified for saturation diving in 1974. He began his career with Subsea International removing pile guides and large flotation spheres and connecting the main pipeline going to shore from Forties Field in the North Sea. Duell bought a basic  Super 8 film camera at an airport and began filming his crew’s projects in his free time. “I ended up with close to 50 hours of film from 1974 to 1983, which literally was the documentation of the building of the North Sea,” Duell said.

Ken Duell, in March 1974, on his graduation day from diving school.

Camera and rolls of film in tow, Duell continued his work in subsea construction and installations in Forties, Thistle and Phillips Fields. He joined Santa Fe Construction as superintendent of the reel ship Apache in 1979 and soon after hired a brand new diving support ship, the Witch Queen. Both ships were equipped with newly introduced remotely operated vehicles (ROVs), preparing to do a job laying pipelines offshore West Africa.

While the ROVs were only installed as safety tools to monitor divers, Duell immediately saw another opportunity. When he took an ROV off the Apache and mounted it on a Texaco platform, his team could actually use it to monitor the pipeline being pulled through the risers. It was the very first time that an ROV was used commercially in that kind of an environment, and by 1981 Santa Fe was the largest ROV operator in the world.

After working to develop one of the first floating production platforms, Duell joined Cal Dive International in 1995 to launch the marine contractor’s deepwater and dynamic positioning (DP) initiatives. Later that year, he came full circle by purchasing the Witch Queen, which he had worked on 15 years earlier offshore Africa. With the purchase, Cal Dive became the first Gulf of Mexico-based company to buy a saturation construction DP vessel. Next, he flew to Europe and came to an agreement to buy the Uncle John vessel from Coflexip for $10 million.

The Uncle John had tackled some of the most challenging situations in the North Sea and was unlike anything that the US oil industry had ever seen. “The first week we had the Uncle John at Galveston, we had all of the oil companies come to visit,” Duell said. “They didn’t know what to do with it. It was a strange beast: a semisubmersible with two 100-ton cranes on it and an 18-man saturation diving system.”

The team removed one of the diving bells, installed an ROV system and went one step further in partnering with Fugro to install a derrick for both coring and well intervention. Cal Dive soon got a call from Shell about using the Uncle John in its Tahoe Field for a well intervention project. The duo partnered with FMC Technologies and performed the first-ever well intervention job in the Gulf from a vessel other than a rig.

With the Witch Queen and Uncle John working all over the Gulf of Mexico, Duell and Cal Dive CEO Owen Kratz started thinking in a new direction: partnering with an oil company. In 1998, the duo found out about a unique deepwater project at Gunnison Field, located 155 miles southeast of Galveston, Texas. Kerr-McGee, the operator of the field, was looking for partners, but had been turned down by more than 18 companies.

Kerr-McGee and Cal Dive decided to partner in the project and struck oil later that year, discovering an estimated 85 million bbl. “It was the first time a major oil company partnered with a diving company on an oil discovery,” Duell said. “When they rang the bell at Kerr-McGee announcing the discovery, they read the names of the oil companies that had turned the project down.” As it would turn out, this type of partnership hasn’t been successfully repeated since.

Years later, after working on constructing Cal Dive’s new Q4000 semisubmersible and several other successful projects, Duell had an epiphany. “For me, partnering with an oil company and striking oil at Gunnison [and] building a vessel that was capable of coring, well intervention and heavy construction was the ultimate. I had achieved everything I set out to do.”

Duell retired in October 2001, on his 50th birthday, but he didn’t stay away from the high seas for long. After spending several years as a competitive black and blue marlin fisher, Duell decided to return to his passion and accepted a job as a ship broker with Clarksons that worked with his fishing competition schedule.

Duell is also excited about his new project: editing all of his offshore video footage, including footage recorded in the ’80s that he recently discovered. As the diving footage he is showing on his iPad cuts to three-decade-old clips of his wife and newborn daughter, Duell laughs and says, “I have to say, I’ve had a wonderful life and can’t complain.”

As long as there is oil beneath the deep seas, Ken Duell will be out in the open waters thinking of solutions for the next big challenge. As the Q4000 is  working at the site of the Macondo well, Duell is optimistic about the future of the offshore industry: “One day you will be sitting in a building in Houston and steering a drill bit in 6,000 ft of water in Africa. That is truly amazing.” 

To see clips of Duell’s original footage of the development of the North Sea, visit www.worldoil.com.