Ever seen the effect on the seabed of a 300t BOP dropped from a rig? Marin's George Stroud, aka Boris or the 'Deepwater Red Adair', has and he likens it to a carpet tack being driven into the floor with the force of an impact hammer. The subsea…
Recent events in North Africa provide a stormy backcloth to the Offshore Mediterranean Conference (OMC) in Ravenna 23-25 March, but the region nonetheless remains a highly prospective one for the offshore sector especially with Noble beginning to unlock the treasures of the Levantine Basin…
The Macondo well disaster and its ramifications were never far from the surface during the recent GE Oil & Gas annual meeting in Florence, where business leaders gathered in large numbers to discuss the technological and regulatory challenges…
Seaway Heavy Lifting will shortly take delivery of its second heavylift crane vessel, the state-of-the-art Oleg Strashnov. David Morgan looks at some of the new HLV 's novelties and niceties. The Oleg Strashnov has been a while coming…
Coring practices and equipment used in the Gulf of Mexico's Lower Tertiary needed to adapt to formation conditions to improve on past recovery success. Petrobras' James Meyer opens OE's drilling & completion technology two-parter with a review…
Within a fortnight of closing its $3 billion acquisition of compression, flow technology, measurement and distribution infrastructure provider Dresser, GE last month announced plans to lay out another $2.8 billion to secure the well support division of John Wood Group…
Utilization trends for the worldwide mobile offshore drilling fleet are slightly depressed of late. Overall utilization dipped to an average of 69% last month. Global utilization rates for semis are 78%, below the average for the prior six month period of 82%…
‘Securing Safe, Smart, Sustainable Supply' is the highly alliterative theme for this year's Offshore Europe conference, to be held in Aberdeen 6-8 September. It will be chaired by Amec chief executive Samir Brikho.--It is not just about having energy…
In the wake of the July 1988 Piper Alpha disaster in the UK North Sea, the Cullen Report introduced a risk management approach to offshore safety, making the production and maintenance of a risk-based ‘safety case' a legal requirement for every UKCS offshore facility…
The Marin Subsea asset recovery team was recently called in to recover a blowout preventer and lower marine riser package from 488m of water in Brazil. Within 20 minutes of the initial phone call, the Marin team had made a preliminary assessment…
Turbulent times in the oil & gas sector will be the backdrop for this year's two premier offshore industry events – Houston's annual Offshore Technology Conference in May and Aberdeen's SPE Offshore Europe gathering in September. But that's…
China constantly shakes many of the world's beliefs, for better or worse, from its economic growth to trade to human rights. There is no doubt that China will become before not too long the world's dominant economic power. It also provides an additional…
A 2000ft plume of volcanic ash from Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull brought chaos and confusion to European airspace last year. North Sea offshore helicopter operators are accustomed to dealing high winds, driving rain and freezing fog, but how did they cope with this new phenomenon…
A week after the long-awaited release of a presidential commission’s report on the Macondo disaster, US Interior secretary Ken Salazar announced the latest moves in the reorganization of the agency that oversees offshore oil & gas activities…
Floating systems consultant Peter Lovie pinpoints some of the perils of speculative FPS building and wonders if the practice may now have become just too risky for operators or contractors to consider.In the service vessel business and in the…