March's Japanese earthquake, tsunami and resulting nuclear contamination at the Fukushima power plant spawned a disaster that will be hard to remedy or forget. As usual the events have had a number of dimensions, mostly unfortunate for that country no matter how developed and prosperous it has been…
Greene's Energy Group has opened an operational base in Singapore to serve the company's Asia Pacific region. The 140,000ft2 location includes offices, a warehouse and heavy equipment yard space, and will provide a regional base for all of Greene's business divisions…
Three Alaskan Beaufort Sea developments – BP Exploration (Alaska)'s Northstar, Pioneer --Natural Resources' Oooguruk and now Eni Petroleum's Nikaitchuq – have helped establish baseline experience for future arctic frontier pipelines. As well as demonstrating technical strides…
High-modulus polyethylene ropes for deepwater mooring were first trialled 10 years ago, but despite promising early results subsequent problems with excessive creep stalled their application. A decade on, the situation has improved to the point…
A new report estimates flaring of unused gas wastes about 5% of the world's annual production while emitting 400 million metric tonnes of CO2 per year. GE's Flare Gas Reduction: Recent Global Trends and Policy Considerations report estimates…
Multi-client specialist TGS took the marine seismic business by surprise last month with the purchase of Stingray Geophysical, a UK-based start up company focusing on seismic-based permanent reservoir monitoring (PRM). Andrew McBarnet discusses what prompted the move…
The UK offshore industry recognised that a key component to achieving a reduction in offshore hazards and incidents was to improve basic safety training for all personnel. OE looks at the e-learning programme designed to achieve that goal and now ready for roll out internationally…
Finland's Wärtsilä and Norway's Aker Solutions are combining their respective fields of expertise to develop the ultimate environmentally friendly offshore wind farm installation vessel concept, designed for operating in IMO emission control areas…
In the past decade, the oil & gas industry has been effective in finding new resources, but much less successful in bringing new supplies onstream. That was the verdict of Eni E&P executive vice president Antonio Vella, addressing this year's Offshore Mediterranean Conference in Ravenna…
An important milestone in Apache's UK North Sea Bacchus field development was reached recently with installation of a 6.7km pipeline bundle. The job was overseen by Flexlife, whose operations director John Marsden here describes how it was planned and executed…
Orders for newbuild floaters and jackups have surged to the highest level in years. But will tight shipyard capacity squeeze some drillers out of the market? Russell McCulley rounds up some opinions on the drilling business circa 2011, including a forecast of greater industry consolidation…
With wellbores drilled in ever deeper waters penetrating further into the earth and clients demanding improved performance from all parts of the drilling process, VAM Drilling has focused on two aspects of the drillstem it believes deliver on the reliability front…
Norwegian mechanical engineer Julius Espedal had his first real brush with the forces of nature when undergoing offshore safety induction and emergency training in the UK back in 1999. Now he is getting reacquainted with them as his company…
With over 27 years' of development and application work behind it, Nautronix is a company with subsea acoustics in its DNA. David Morgan looks at the company's provenance and projects, including the recent deployment of its NASNet technology…
With FEED almost complete and a final investment decision approaching, operator Inpex is moving ahead with the Ichthys LNG project, on --track to be the first field development in the Browse Basin off Western Australia. Russell McCulley talks to the operator about the Ichthys journey thus far…