This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato.

Later in the hour, the current Ebola epidemic in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is the second largest outbreak.

We'll hear from a first responder on the ground there.

But first, offshore drilling of oil and natural gas has always had its technical challenges.

The first one being, of course, where do you put the pumps

and the processing plants when you're out in the middle of the ocean? Well, right now that

equipment sits on huge floating platforms, and until companies start building underwater factories,

which could make drilling technology more productive, energy efficient, maybe even safer.

Here to share that story with us as well as other short subjects in science this week is

Amy Nordrum, news editor for the ICCLE spectrum. Good to see it again, Amy.

Thanks, Ira.

So let's talk about it. So companies are looking to put their equipment underwater instead of

on top of it. That's right. The oil and gas industry has for years been talking about moving more of its oil and gas drilling

and processing equipment down to the seafloor instead of having it on these big expensive

platforms where they have to, you know, helicopter workers out to maintain and run it.

And so they've been, you know, in the process of working on this step by step, and they have moved some equipment down from platforms to the seafloor in the past. But for every piece of equipment you put down there, you have to string a power line down to it because it's really hard to generate power that far underwater. So the next step really is to put an actual power distribution station down on the seafloor that would work underwater be there for 30 or more

years and be able to distribute power from one power line to other pieces of equipment on the seafloor.

So there's two companies, A, B&B and Siemens, that are getting pretty close to this goal.

So they've got versions and prototypes of this kind of station that can now operate in shallow water.

And then within the next couple of months to a year, they're hoping

to put this in a real-world site that's actively drilling oil and gas and that would serve

as sort of a pilot or a test project of this idea.

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