A storm night on a North Sea oil rig

You're in the bunk under the window of a small steel cabin, a long way east of Aberdeen. It's 3.17 in the morning and a gale is throwing rain at the glass. Out past the crane, the flare is burning. Half the platform is asleep. The other half is at work.

What a night out there is like

A production platform never shuts for the night. Offshore installations run 24 hours a day, with the crew working alternate 12-hour day and night shifts, and a trip offshore typically lasts two to three weeks (Oil & Gas UK medical guidance). The National Careers Service gives the same picture for a roustabout: 10 to 12 hours a day for two weeks, then two weeks' leave (National Careers Service).

So at 3am half the crew is working, and the person who shares your cabin may be one of them. HSE's accommodation guidance allows exactly that: a small cabin can be used by one person on day shift and a second on night shift, but nobody should have to share a bed, which the industry calls hot bunking (HSE Operations Notice 82).

It's a big workforce for somewhere so remote. Offshore Energies UK counted 40,023 people who travelled offshore on the UK continental shelf in 2024, 22,342 of them spending more than 100 nights a year out there, and the average offshore worker is 44 (OEUK Workforce Insight 2025). The government puts the number of offshore installations at around 290 (Building the North Sea's Energy Future, 2025).

Getting there from Aberdeen

Crews fly out by helicopter, and the flight takes one to two hours (Oil & Gas UK). Many go through Aberdeen: in 2025 more than 316,000 passengers passed through the airport's four helicopter terminals on their way offshore (Aberdeen Airport noise report 2025). For a sense of distance, the Forties field sits 103 to 109 nautical miles east of Aberdeen Airport (AAIB Bulletin 6/2020).

Before flying out, workers train for the worst. The basic offshore safety course, BOSIET, is about 20 hours of guided learning and covers helicopter emergencies, with particular focus on escaping from a helicopter that has ditched in the sea; this version of it trains with a compressed-air emergency breathing system (OPITO). And the weather has the last word: high winds or fog can stop flights for two or three days (Oil & Gas UK).

The cabin

Cabins are usually shared by two people, less often by four (Oil & Gas UK). HSE now calls single or double cabins good practice, and its guidance is precise about the room: at least 4.5 square metres of floor for one person, beds that can be stacked as long as the lower one is at least 300 mm off the deck, at least 610 mm of head room above each bed, and a privacy curtain on every bed (HSE Operations Notice 82). There's no drinking: no alcohol is allowed offshore (Oil & Gas UK).

That curtain is the whole world at 3am. Draw it, and the cabin shrinks to a mattress, a reading light and the window.

Storms in the North Sea

The Met Office defines a gale as a wind averaging 34 to 40 knots, or 39 to 46 mph, over ten minutes (Met Office). That's force 8 on the Beaufort scale, where the waves are probably around 5.5 metres high and up to 7.5. At force 10, a storm, those figures are 9 and 12.5 metres (Met Office Beaufort scale). The 43 mph wind in this scene is a gale.

The North Sea has produced worse. On 1 January 1995 a laser on the Draupner gas platform measured a single wave 25.6 metres high, in a sea where the significant wave height was almost 12 metres (ECMWF). Sailors and platform crews follow the Shipping Forecast, which splits the waters around the British Isles into 31 sea areas (Met Office).

Why the flare burns all night

The flame at the top of the flare stack is excess gas being burned off. The North Sea Transition Authority says some flaring can't be avoided for safety and operational reasons, and that it makes up about a fifth of the emissions from producing oil and gas in the North Sea (NSTA, 2023). The regulator's aim is zero routine flaring and venting by 2030 (NSTA).

Field notes

The real place behind the scene: who lives there, the wildlife they share it with, and a few things worth knowing. The same notes open from Field notes in the player.

• Who is out there tonight

  In 2024, 40,023 people travelled offshore on the UK continental shelf, and 22,342 of them spent more than 100 nights of the year out there. The average offshore worker is 44. (OEUK Workforce Insight 2025)

• Fish round the legs

  A platform works like a reef. Traps set at 10, 50 and 100 metres round a large steel platform caught mostly saithe, haddock and cod. Platforms and their safety zones cover only 0.08% of the North Sea, but a much bigger share of its fish gather round them. (Fujii, 2015; University of Aberdeen, 2011)

• Coral on the steel

  Cold-water coral grows on the underwater legs. In the northern North Sea, Lophelia pertusa was found on 13 of 14 platforms checked, 947 colonies between 59 and 132 metres down, some growing about 26 mm a year. (Gass and Roberts, 2006)

• Porpoises in the dark water

  The 2022 summer survey counted about 339,000 harbour porpoises in the North Sea, much the same as in 2016 and 2005. The thickest numbers were in the central and south-western North Sea. (SCANS-IV survey report, 2023; TiHo Hannover, 2023)

• Kittiwakes on the platforms

  Kittiwakes usually nest on sea cliffs, but in the southern North Sea plenty nest on platforms, and in 2024 the industry and JNCC started counting them. Britain has about 205,000 pairs of kittiwakes, a red-listed bird, and about 350,000 pairs of fulmars. (OEUK, 2024; BTO, kittiwake; BTO, fulmar)

• The sea under the bunk

  The Greater North Sea covers about 750,000 square kilometres and holds about 94,000 cubic kilometres of water. Nowhere is it deeper than 700 metres, and that deepest water is in the Norwegian Trench, in the Skagerrak. (OSPAR Commission; OSPAR Quality Status Report 2000)

• There were hills down there

  After the last ice age the southern North Sea was dry land, now called Doggerland, with hills, plains and river valleys. The sea took it over more than 4,000 years, and by around 5500 BC Britain was an island. It was mapped from the seismic surveys made to find oil. (Mesolithic Research Framework)

Somewhere else tonight

If you'd rather have snow than rain, there's a research hut on Svalbard in a polar-night blizzard. For a storm right out at sea, there's a container ship in the North Atlantic. On the coast, there's a lighthouse keeper's cottage in a gale. Every place is on the map.