Anatomy of a Jack-Up Rig: Systems, OT and Where AI Fits
We built this for our conference booth: a typical Gulf of Mexico cantilever jack-up, assembled one system at a time from the seabed up, then cut open so you can see where the machinery and the people are. It runs 47 seconds with no sound. Every label is on screen.
Take it apart yourself.
The same model runs in your browser. Drag to turn it, pull every system apart with the slider, and cut the hull open. It works on a phone.
We also built a fixed platform and a semisubmersible the same way. See all three exhibits.
What you are looking at
The build follows the order the systems sit on the structure, bottom up. These are the parts the video labels, in the order they land.
- Three legs on the seabed. Open lattice legs, four chords with X bracing in every bay, each standing on a spudcan that spreads the load into the seabed.
- The hull. A triangular, watertight hull, 250 ft long in this model. It floats while the rig is towed to location, then climbs its own legs.
- Jacking houses. One at each leg, where the jacking machinery grips the leg and raises or lowers the hull.
- Engines, mud pits, tanks. The machinery spaces inside the hull: power generation, the pits that hold drilling mud, and storage tanks.
- Main deck. The working surface everything else is built on.
- Living quarters. The accommodation block for the crew, with the helideck on top.
- Pipe rack. Where drill pipe and casing are stored until the drill floor needs them.
- Cantilever skid beams. The beams that slide the drilling package out past the hull, so the rig can drill over a platform or open water without moving the hull.
- Drill floor and derrick. Where the drilling happens, and the tower that hoists pipe in and out of the well.
- Pedestal cranes. They lift pipe, equipment and supplies between the deck and supply boats.
- The crew. Small on purpose. The scale is the point.
The video closes on the rig standing in 190 ft of water, hull jacked clear of the waves.
Twelve systems, and what controls them
Every system in the interactive rig has its own link. Each one opens the rig on that part with a short explanation and, for most, a line on what the rig's control systems measure or decide there. That second layer is operational technology (OT): the PLCs, drives, sensors and safety systems that run the machinery, as opposed to the IT that runs the office.
| System | What runs or decides it |
|---|---|
| Drill floor | Blowout preventer control. US offshore rules require one full control station on the rig floor and one off it (30 CFR 250.735). |
| Derrick | A networked drilling control system for the drawworks, top drive and mud pumps, inside limits the driller sets. |
| Cantilever skid beams | Skidding the drilling package out over the well, within published combined load limits. |
| Crane and lift zone | A load moment indicator that alarms as a lift nears its limit. The go or no go stays with a person. |
| Jacking house | Electric pinion drives, with sensors comparing the chords of each leg as the hull climbs. |
| Open-truss leg | Leg position counted off the rack during jacking. |
| Spudcan | Preload: leg penetration, pinion loads and ballast watched together. Continue, hold or dump ballast is a human call. |
| Main deck and walkways | Gas, flame and smoke detection feeding a fire and gas system that can shut the rig down automatically. |
| Accommodation block | The link to shore, and with it the boundary between office systems and the systems that run the rig. |
| Monkeyboard | Pipe racking at height. |
| Pipe rack | Tubular storage on deck. |
| Helideck | Crew change and evacuation, decided by weather. |
What a modern jack-up is rated for
Our model is a typical unit, not a real rig, so the numbers below come from real ones. They are ranges across published spec sheets from Valaris, Borr Drilling, Shelf Drilling, Vantage Drilling and the GustoMSC and Friede & Goldman designs, for premium cantilever rigs rated to 350 to 400 ft of water. Every range is backed by at least three named rigs. Contractors publish these as design ratings, subject to a site assessment, not guarantees.
| Figure | Published range | Rigs |
|---|---|---|
| Water depth | 350 to 400 ft | 9 |
| Legs | 3 open-truss legs, 486 to 547 ft long | 8 |
| Jacking | Electric rack and pinion, 54 to 72 pinions | 5 |
| Cantilever reach | 70 to 80 ft aft, about 15 ft to either side | 11 |
| Derrick height | 160 to 210 ft | 9 |
| Hook load | 1.5 to 2.5 million lb | 10 |
| Drilling depth | 30,000 to 40,000 ft | 7 |
| Blowout preventer | Surface stack, 13-5/8 in. 10,000 psi to 18-3/4 in. 15,000 psi | 8 |
| Variable deck load, elevated | 7,500 to 9,700 kips on most rigs | 8 |
| Power | 5 to 6 diesel generators, AC variable frequency drives | 5 |
| Cranes | Usually 3 pedestal cranes, about 50 to 70 tons | 8 |
| People on board | 108 to 160 | 9 |
Two figures people ask about are missing on purpose. Jacking speed appears on only two of the sheets we read (about 1 to 1.5 ft a minute), and no sheet gives a total preload figure, because preload is set for each location.
How many jack-ups there are, and who owns them
Roughly 500 jack-ups exist worldwide, and about 380 of them were under contract or committed to work in August 2026, according to Westwood's RigLogix data. Counts run from about 490 to 512 depending on whether stacked and older units are included, so treat any single precise number with suspicion.
The US Gulf is a small and shrinking part of that. Westwood data shown in a House Natural Resources hearing in February 2025 puts US Gulf jack-up supply at 116 rigs in 2004 and 20 in 2024, a fall of 83%. Of those 20, 14 were cold stacked and 4 were working in January 2025.
The largest owners, with the source for each count:
- ADES. The Saudi driller completed its acquisition of Shelf Drilling in late 2025, and by Esgian's count the combined fleet holds about 76 competitive jack-ups, far more than anyone else (Drilling Contractor, OE Digital).
- Borr Drilling. 29 wholly owned jack-ups, all built after 2008, plus five in a Mexico joint venture since July 2026 (Borr's Q2 2026 report).
- ARO Drilling. The Saudi Aramco and Valaris joint venture operates 16: 9 it owns and 7 leased from Valaris (Valaris 10-Q, June 2026).
- Valaris. About 25 to 29 jack-ups, depending on whether leased and recently sold units are counted (Esgian; Valaris fleet status report, August 2026).
In the US Gulf itself the names are smaller. White Fleet Drilling brought the WFD 450 back after seven years cold stacked and a $65 million refurbishment; it began a multi-well program for Arena Energy in about 400 ft of water at Southern Eugene Island in 2026 (White Fleet press release, September 2026). Enterprise Offshore Drilling manages 15 US Gulf jack-ups, many of them stacked (Westwood, 2025).
Each of these counts comes from one data provider or the company itself, and they define "jack-up" differently. We name the source on every one rather than blend them.
The control layer is where the decisions are
The steel in this model is decades of settled engineering. What is changing is the layer that runs it. A modern jack-up is a network of programmable controllers, variable frequency drives, sensors and safety systems, and more of that data now leaves the rig. Shelf Drilling's fleet, for one, runs on Marlink SD-WAN with Starlink as a second channel on some rigs. Transocean has described sending second by second data from the BOP, drilling, power and positioning systems of its floating rigs to shore.
Look at where the documented decisions sit, though. When the chords of a jack-up leg drift out of line during jacking, one system described by Noble sounds an alarm at a 3 inch difference and leaves it to the operator to stop. Whether to keep preloading, make a crane lift or shut in a well is a person's call, and in the case of the BOP the regulations specify where that person can make it from. The automatic shutdowns that do exist, in fire and gas and emergency shutdown, run on certified safety systems kept apart from everything else.
The AI arriving on rigs is mostly advisory, and mostly on floaters so far. Seadrill describes its equipment lifecycle system on drillships as deterministic rules and thresholds, with image recognition for BOP element wear and engineers still in the loop. We found no published account of a predictive or AI system running on an existing jack-up. That leaves the question every operator will face as these tools reach shallow water: when an analytic says keep going, who owns the decision, and what record shows how it was made?
Eleven OT devices where AI fits, and where it has to stop
Every system on this rig already produces a stream of measurements. That is what makes it a candidate for AI, and also what makes the governance question concrete. The table is our read of where analytics would add the most on a jack-up's OT, and who should still own each decision. It is a map of opportunity, not a list of what any contractor runs today.
| Device | Already measures | What AI could add | Who should decide |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jacking pinion drives and leg sensors | Motor torque, pinion load, chord position | Trend every leg across every jacking cycle and flag one that behaves differently before it reaches the alarm | Jacking supervisor. Existing alarms and trips stay in charge |
| Preload and leg penetration instruments | Leg penetration, pinion loads, ballast volume, hull level | Compare live penetration with the site's soil model and show punch-through risk as it builds | Barge master, with the site assessment engineer |
| Drilling control system | Hook load, torque, rotary speed, standpipe pressure | Tune rate of penetration, and warn of stuck pipe from patterns in torque and drag | Driller, inside limits set by the well plan |
| Mud pit and flow sensors | Pit volumes, flow in against flow out | Spot a kick sooner by telling a real gain apart from routine pit transfers | Driller. Shutting in the well stays a human, hydraulic action |
| BOP control system and accumulators | Pressures, function times, test results | Track element wear and test trends to plan maintenance and test intervals | BOP and well control engineers. AI stays out of the actuation path |
| Diesel generators and drives | Load, temperature, vibration, fuel burn | Predict engine faults, and recommend how many engines the next operation needs to save fuel and emissions | Chief engineer or electrician |
| Rotating equipment sensors on the top drive, drawworks and mud pumps | Vibration, temperature, load cycles | Estimate remaining useful life, so parts are inspected when worn rather than by the calendar | Maintenance supervisor |
| Crane load moment indicator | Load, radius, boom angle | Plan lifts against forecast sea state and supply boat motion | Crane operator and deck foreman |
| Fire and gas detectors | Gas, flame, smoke, detector health | Separate nuisance alarms from real ones and catch detectors drifting out of calibration | Offshore installation manager. Shutdown logic stays in the certified safety system |
| Drill floor cameras | Video of the work area | Detect a person inside the red zone around moving pipe handling equipment | Driller. Machine interlocks remain the hard stop |
| Network gateways between rig and shore | Traffic between OT systems and the outside | Flag unusual traffic on the control network, the industrial security view of IEC 62443 | OT security team onshore, with the installation manager |
The pattern in the right hand column is the point. The higher the consequence, the further AI should sit from the actuator. We would hold any of these systems to three rules:
- Advise, then decide. The model recommends, a named person decides, and the record keeps both: what the model saw, what it said, and what was done.
- Stay out of the safety path. Well control, emergency shutdown and fire and gas trips stay in certified, independent systems. AI can watch them and help plan their maintenance. It should not be the thing that fires them or holds them off.
- Know where the model learned. A model trained on drillship or land rig data is not evidence for a jack-up in 300 ft of soft clay. Validate on the asset class, and say so in writing before anyone relies on it.
Those rules are what ModalPoint works on. AI decision governance is about the decision, not the database: who signs off, what gets logged, and how you prove it later. On a rig, the same discipline applies to OT. Standards bodies are already there: DNV's RP-G108 applies the IEC 62443 industrial control security standard to oil and gas, and the US Coast Guard reported as early as 2015 that malware brought aboard on personal devices disabled thruster signals on a floating drilling unit in the Gulf, which drifted off the well.
Connectivity is the next layer. Private networks for energy were the subject of "Private Networks. Real Energy.", an invitation-only reception Ericsson held during OTC week in Houston on May 4, 2026. Among the jack-ups we could document, the link to shore is still satellite. As private networks move offshore, more of the OT on these rigs will be connected, more of the decisions will be made from that data, and the question of who owns each one gets harder to leave unanswered.
Where the model comes from
Every piece was traced from figures in two public domain US patents: US 6,481,931 (a cantilever supported drilling rig: the plan view, the cantilever, the drill floor) and US 8,911,179 (a jack-up drilling unit: the side elevation, the leg bays, the spudcans, the leg and hull junction). It is a typical unit, not a depiction of any specific rig or operator.
The video and the interactive version are the same model. The video is rendered frame by frame from the page you can open above, so what you take apart is exactly what you watched.
Why a decision intelligence firm built a rig
The expensive decisions in this industry get made about physical assets like this one: which rig to contract, which vendor to trust with its data, which AI system to let near its operations. The people making those calls are rarely standing on the deck. We think they decide better when they can see the whole thing, and we wanted a booth that started that conversation instead of a brochure that ended it.
The fixed platform and the semisubmersible are built the same way. If there is a structure you want taken apart next, tell us which. Heading to a show this year? Our 2026 oil and gas conference calendar has the dates.
Sources
- Valaris JU-123 rig specification
- Borr Drilling, Thor short specification
- Shelf Drilling, Scepter spec sheet
- Vantage Drilling, Topaz Driller specification
- Drilling Contractor, Noble JU-2000E jacking and RPD (2006)
- 30 CFR Part 250 Subpart G, well operations and equipment
- Westwood RigLogix, US Gulf of Mexico rig market (House hearing exhibit, Feb 2025)
- Westwood offshore energy data dashboard
- Drilling Contractor, ADES completes Shelf Drilling acquisition
- OE Digital, inside the ADES and Shelf fleet merger
- Borr Drilling, Q2 2026 report
- Valaris, 10-Q for June 2026
- Valaris, fleet status report, August 2026
- White Fleet Drilling, WFD 450 program for Arena Energy
- Marlink, Shelf Drilling SD-WAN and Starlink
- Drilling Contractor, Seadrill lifecycle management
- CSIS, Coast Guard Commandant on offshore cyber vulnerabilities (2015)
- Ericsson, Private Networks. Real Energy. reception at OTC 2026