This is the Guardian.

This article contains some strong language.

The Guardian Archive Long Read.

Hi, my name's Tom LeMont. I'm a writer at The Guardian.

This is a story I wrote in May 2017 called Where Oil Rigs Go To Die.

Sometimes the genesis of these stories is really exotic and exciting and sometimes it's

as simple as sitting down and typing a few words into Google.

I was sitting in the British Library for lawnly casting myself around the internet trying to find an idea.

I'd always been interested in oil rigs.

My father was from the Scotch Coast. We used to go up to Aberdeen every year.

I was always seeing oil platforms off the coast, just like a kid being interested in these weird shapes on the horizon

and being told that there were men who sort of went out for two or three weeks at a time and lived on these platforms and worked on them.

As soon as I was given these opportunities to write longer stories for the Guardian Long Read,

it was one of the things I knew I wanted to explore a bit closer.

The story ended up finding when I Googled the term oil rigs was this incredible story about one that had crashed into the coast of a Scotch island.

I suppose my ideas weren't very much further developed at the time than get up to Scotland and see this thing.

Quickly I just became obsessed with the idea of getting a board this old oil rig that nobody wanted anymore that was on its way to the Mac as Yard.

The story of its final journey became interesting to me.

Where do these giant structures go and we don't want them anymore?

How do we take them apart? How on earth do you sort of at best recycle, at worst scrap,

a enormous structure made out of metal that's the size of a school?

The more people I spoke to, the more I realized this is a question that greatly vexes the oil industry because they've got too many platforms.

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