Texas News Hundreds Of Decommissioned Oil Rigs Are Now Thriving Marine Habitats By Texas Standard Published April 16, 2019 at 10:58 AM CDT Twitter LinkedIn Email Your browser doesn’t support HTML5 audio NOAA Photo Library/Flickr (CC BY 2.0) Through the federal government’s Rigs to Reefs program, oil companies have converted more than 500 rigs in the Gulf of Mexico into reefs, which are popular with divers.