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…
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…
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…
A decade and a half after its Mars TLP started production, Shell is gearing up for the Mars B development and its centerpiece, the Olympus TLP. Russell McCulley talks to Robert Patterson, Shell VP upstream major projects for the Americas, about…
Field development prospects on the UK Continental Shelf are gathering momentum again, with Nexen (Golden Eagle, Blackbird), Chrysaor (Solan) and BG (Blake increased production) firming up North Sea project and environmental impact details in recent weeks…
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…
Marathon Oil is spinning off its downstream business to create the upstream Marathon Oil Corporation, to be based in Houston, and the downstream Marathon Petroleum Corporation, based in Ohio. Marathon Oil will operate and report through three segments: exploration & production…
Exploration and production at greater depths and a heightened emphasis on safety could mean even bigger roles for ROVs in offshore operations. Experts say the machines are not just up for the challenge, but ahead of the game. Russell McCulley reports…
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…
A configuration change-up on traditional spars could spell out some relief in wind load, drop the unit’s center of gravity, slim down the hull, and cut the amount of tripping time needed for drilling operations from a spar. OE’s Jennifer Pallanich…
The overhaul of the reservoir model of the giant Forties oilfield – from data management to full field simulation – is described here by operator Apache North Sea’s Jeffery Pyle and Schlumberger’s Gordy Shanor.Production from the Forties field began in 1975…
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…
Worldwide utilization for the mobile offshore drilling fleet averaged 72% over the last month. Of late the global utilization rates for semisubmersibles have held steady at approximately 83% while rates for drillships have bounced around the mid-to-low 80% range…
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…
Merger and acquisition activity in the US oil & gas sector picked up steam 3Q 2010, despite ongoing uncertainty about business in the Gulf of Mexico, reported PricewaterhouseCoopers.For the three-month period ending 30 September, there were…
Subscribe
