A project that I submitted for the 2022 RSA global design competition brief ‘Steel appeal’, which was shortlisted as a runner up along with 4 others: How might we re-use steel from decommissioned oil & gas rigs for next generation agriculture?


This project was all about the efficient and circular reuse of steel from decommissioned oil rigs.
And these oil and gas rigs were huge, a small group of us went out to visit ‘Brent Alpha’ down in Seaton where it was being decommissioned to get a grasp of the quantity and quality of the steel coming ashore.

I decided the realm of future agriculture was a good space for the project; I played with the idea of steel intensive renewables infrastructure, but future agriculture felt more human.

My resulting proposal was effectively a system of reusing the ‘bread and butter’ structural components from the top-sides of these oil rigs as the main structural elements of intensive greenhouses. These types of greenhouse are already prevalent in the Netherlands and USA and have began to pop up within the UK. They seem to be a happy medium between better crop productivity and a better natural alignment – so I got to designing.