With a pulling capacity of up to 1.2 million tons, a height of 472 meters, and a dry weight of 650,000 tons, Troll A is one of the most monumental structures in human history.
Off the western coast of Norway lies one of the largest and most complex engineering projects in human history. Additionally, the Troll A natural gas platform is also the largest object ever moved by humans on the surface of the Earth.
With a submerged buoyancy mass of 1.2 million tons, a height of 472 meters, and a submerged concrete height reaching 369 meters, Troll A stands as a magnificent engineering masterpiece.
The Troll A platform was a television sensation as it was towed into the North Sea in 1996, where it is operated by Statoil.
Typically, the legs of the platform are transported separately by a floating device, and once on-site, everything is assembled together.
However, in the case of Troll A, workers and engineers assembled the entire platform at the village of Vats in the Rogaland region of Norway and then towed it over a distance of more than 200 kilometers to drop it in a sea area approximately 80 kilometers northwest of the city of Bergen. The towing process took 7 days.
The distance from the platform’s surface to the seawater is 303 meters, and there is a massive shaft equipped with an internal elevator. It is estimated that it takes more than 9 minutes to move from the platform to the seabed. Surrounding the elevator is a reinforced concrete wall more than 1 meter thick for protection.
In 1996, the Guinness World Records recognized Troll A as the largest offshore gas drilling platform in the world. However, that title currently belongs to the Petronius platform in the Gulf of Mexico, located 610 meters above the ocean floor.
It is estimated that Troll A cost approximately $650 million at the time of its construction in September 1991.
