Sunday, July 13, 2008

Africa

I recently spent two weeks in Angola while we were starting up a new project. It was fun to see that part of the world and be part of that project. Here are some pictures.


This is the center of Luanda, the capital of Angola. There are 4 million people in the city.

Here is a picture taken out the window of our car. Notice the woman behind the truck with the load on here head and the baby strapped to her back. We saw that a lot. Often the load was much bigger. The baby is just strapped on with a piece of cloth, kind of like a towel around your waste.


I spent a night on one of our floating production facilities (FPSO-Floating Production, Storage, and Offloading). Crude oil travels through miles of underwater pipelines and then up a mile-long riser to reach this vessel. It is processed and stored on board and offloaded to a tanker (if you watch the video below you will see a tanker slowly approaching, preparing to hook up and offload 1 million barrels of crude). They offload every ten days. Do the math on that with oil at $140 a barrel.
Here is the same view in the morning.

Here is some video of us taking off from the FPSO in the helicopter.

9 comments:

Liz Johnson said...

WOW. That is amazing. If I could carry stuff (and children) like that, I would probably be so productive. Do these African women give classes??

So are you guys moving to Angola soon? :)

Tori said...

Wow. Those are great pictures. I especially like the picture of you Scott.

Katie said...

I hope you know how much we LOVE knowing what is going on with you guys. Thanks for letting us know you are safe! :)

jeff and alli said...

Wow, Africa! Must have been very interesting.

Wendi said...

Wow! I know Mike will be totally fascinated by this blog post. This stuff is so amazing.

Amelia said...

Thanks for the pictures Scott! It's so nice to see what you've been up to lately. Sounds like you guys have had an exciting (and busy) couple of months!

Don and Becky Larson said...

Thanks for the post. You have a real interesting job. How many helicopter rides have you taken now? We are proud of you son and proud of Lesley and Ian who held down the fort while you have been traveling.

Troy and Nancee Tegeder said...

You must be really important to travel in a helicopter. That was a cool post. I learned a lot about oil. Glad you made it home safely.

Jean said...

Wow, what a great experience!! I would love to go to Africa. It's so great that you have a job that enables lots of travel (although I'm sure it's hard to be away from your awesome fam)!