With a year of incident-free operation in West Africa under their belt, Steve Douglas and David Brittan reckon combining the first CrewZer-class vessel with the latest Frog transfer devices has produced arguably the industry's safest crew supply…
Cape Wind clears another hurdleThe Cape Wind offshore wind power project in January received a final permit from the US Environmental Protection Agency to begin construction of the first US offshore wind farm. The agency's approval came a…
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…
During the recent inauguration of the new premises of Alstom Hydro Ocean Energy on the island of Nantes, the French group revealed some of the key characteristics of its Beluga 9 tidal electricity-generating turbine and announced it will undergo its first tests in Canada's Bay of Fundy in 2012…
Responding to consultant Ian Fitzsimmons' recent remarks in OE about BP's accident investigation report on the Gulf of Mexico's Macondo well disaster, drilling specialist Dr John Thorogood argues that it's time to stop pointing the accusatory finger and start learning the human factors lesson…
The Oil Council's recent World Energy Capital assembly in London shone a light on the new generation of smaller companies from disparate backgrounds now beginning to make their presence felt on the international exploration and production stage…
For this specially extended edition of his monthly OE column, Professor Michael Economides invited famed horizontal drilling pioneer Jacques Bosio to collaborate on a piece discussing the provenance of this breakthrough technology and its continuing influence on oil & gas well design today…
Newly published Polar class vessel rules from French classification society Bureau Veritas are aimed at speeding Arctic and Caspian Sea oil and gas development by facilitating the building of tank, cargo and offshore service vessels which can operate unsupported by icebreakers in very heavy ice…
New reports point, cautiously, to better times ahead for the industry in 2011. But uncertainty in the post-Macondo Gulf of Mexico remains, as Russell McCulley writes.World oil demand bounced back in 2010 to its 2007 all-time high, according to a December report from Wood Mackenzie…
The days may be numbered for resource nationalism, Robert Johnson told the Houston World Affairs Council at the Mayer Brown offices late October. ‘Not every country is equally capable of exercising a campaign of resource nationalism,’ said Johnson…
With a Norwegian sector breakthrough in the area of subsea gas compression very much on the cards for the next year or two, Statoil last month reaffirmed the case for compression in the Åsgard area while one the key vendors targeting this technology…
Post-Macondo efforts to improve well containment capabilities on both sides of the Atlantic moved into higher gear last month.In the US it was confirmed that Technip will handle front- end engineering and design of a proposed subsea well containment…
During the Cold War, leaders recognized that a robust energy supply was a sign of power, economic strength and prosperity. But now, two decades on, there appears to be an unquestionable sign of ‘change’ – and it’s not necessarily change for the better for the US…