In its drive to improve and align safety and competence standards in the global oil and gas industry, Opito International has commissioned new research to discover how companies are assuring the workforce is competent, rather than simply compliant…
The steady workload situation at Schiedam-based HSM Offshore continues to be the envy of many North Sea fabricators. Business was good when OE last visited the yard a year ago; it’s got even better since, as David Morgan reports.Back in the summer of 2010 Total’s K5-CU platform (850t topsides…
The trend of increasing wellbore complexity for extended reservoir contact, and greater reservoir heterogeneity along the contact, are demanding improved monitoring and control solutions. Tendeka's Garth Naldrett and Tor Inge Åsen review recent wireless wellbore advances offshore Norway…
The latest addition to Tideway’s fallpipe vessel fleet was named Flintstone during a high-tech ceremony in Zeebrugge, Belgium, in July – but the vessel itself was 11,000km away in Singapore being readied for an inaugural assignment in Chinese waters…
In the face of a lot of hard evidence on the failure of renewable energy sources to defeat the physics of energy and laws of economics, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its latest report on renewable energy development in May 2011 (www…
The proliferation of modern specialist vessels serving just about every sector of the offshore oil & gas business has not gone unnoticed by traditional shipping industry equipment and service providers, as was plain to see at the 2011 Nor-Shipping event in Oslo late May…
Time is running short for a collaborative and cost-efficient approach to decommissioning, believes Optimus consultant Stuart Heggie.Perhaps understandably, governments and operators have put off decommissioning as much as possible. However,…
Earlier this year the refrain was ‘$5 natural gas forever', based on the US Energy Information Administration's (EIA) annual outlook, which argued that natural gas prices will remain below $5 per million btu until 2022. The underlying rationale was growth in the ‘vast' US shale gas resource base…
Through industry technology facilitator ITF, Green Ocean Energy has secured funding to the tune of £45,000 to investigate the capability of its Wave Treader device to power offshore oil & gas structures. This is the first renewable energy venture to receive ITF support…
Innovative technologies aimed at improving the experience of personnel travelling to and from offshore wind farms were recently unveiled by BMT Nigel Gee and OSBIT Power.--As well as introducing an active motion damping system to a number…
An internal Transocean investigation into the explosion and loss of the Deepwater Horizon found that the tragedy was the result of ‘compromised' well integrity due to a series of well design, construction and temporary abandonment decisions made by operator BP…
The Deepwater Horizon's blowout preventer was a victim of the Macondo disaster, not the perpetrator. So says consultant Ian Fitzsimmons in his latest think piece for OE which takes issue with some of the findings of DNV's forensic study of the…
Statoil last month launched a campaign urging the UK to make natural gas a key component in its long-term future energy. The operator argues gas can be an important part of securing UK energy supplies and cutting CO2 emissions, although political…
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…
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…