While drilling in that depth of water was prohibitively expensive a decade ago, it's now easy for a company Triton's size to rent a drillship to find the oil and set up a floating production platform to process it.

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Blue H, a wind-power company based in Britain, has developed a floating wind turbine based on designs first used by oil-drilling platforms.

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Royal Dutch Shell, an oil company, will use Darwin as a maintenance base for a floating processing plant for LNG from the Prelude field off Western Australia.

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The firm, which concentrates on trading oil, metals, ores and bulk commodities, may in the future consider floating Puma Energy, its rapidly expanding fuel station business.

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And it will try to get around sanctions by turning its oil tankers which are not currently sanctioned into de facto floating bank accounts, for a regime which has long treated terror networks and munitions as a higher priority than putting bananas and rice on the table.

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Plastic floating in the five sub-tropical gyres of the world, and the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, are two petroleum disasters.

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Equipped with a turntable mechanism at its bow, the floating production platform can swivel a full 360 degrees in treacherous winds while pumping more than 100, 000 barrels of oil a day.

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