Global upstream capital spending should rebound this year, according to IHS Herold director Nicholas Cacchione, author of the research firm’s 2010 Global Upstream Performance Review, released last month. ‘In North America, E&P investment increased 30% in the first half of 2010…
The US lifted the six-month moratorium on deepwater exploration in October, while codifying new rules governing drilling safety and well control. Russell McCulley looks at what the new regulations could mean for oil & gas companies doing business in the Gulf of Mexico…
In his think piece for OE’s July issue, consultant Ian Fitzsimmons drew parallels between the Deepwater Horizon tragedy and the earlier Titanic, Ixtoc-1, Piper Alpha, Comet and Challenger disasters in terms of their presumed design infallibility…
Litigation continues in US courts over the Obama administration’s Gulf of Mexico deepwater drilling moratorium, despite the early lifting of the six-month drilling ban in October. In a 19 October decision, US District Court judge Martin Feldman…
Long used in deepwater mooring, synthetic ropes are increasingly being employed in deepwater heavy lift operations. Russell McCulley talks to Samson's Dennis Sherman and Offspring International director Dave Rowley about the technology advances that are changing techniques…
Reporting from last month’s SEG annual meeting in Denver, Andrew McBarnet finds marine seismic contractors frustrated by contract bidding woes.There is no question about what was bothering the marine seismic community at last month’s well attended…
OE's analysis of current rig market data is updated monthly using statistics provided by Rigzone.com Worldwide utilization for the mobile offshore drilling fleet has averaged 74% over the last two months. Of late the global utilization rates…
BP put the final nail in the Macondo coffin 19 September with a successful relief well kill, ending a five-month ordeal that began with the deaths of 11 offshore workers and spilled some 5 million barrels of crude into the Gulf of Mexico.Now comes the task of repairing the company’s image…
Mexico's Pemex is preparing this month to issue the first incentive-based contracts allowed under the country's 2008 oil reforms. Most observers agree that the reforms didn't go far enough, but will a new president in 2012 pick up the pace? Russell McCulley reports…
Mexico just registered its first Clean Development Mechanism with the United Nations under a collaboration between Pemex and Statoil to reduce gas flaring at the onshore Tres Hermanos oil field in Mexico. Statoil said 26 October 2010 the registration…
With a major service point for the deepwater Gulf of Mexico in Port Fourchon, Louisiana among all US states has the most at stake in the federal government's six-month deepwater drilling moratorium. The effects so far haven't been as bad as some feared…
All dressed up and nowhere to go is never a good feeling. But that's exactly what has just happened to − of all companies − TGSNopec. The acknowledged maestro of the multiclient seismic survey business last month put out a terse statement that…
HYWIND’S HIDDEN ASSETS: Syntactic foam specialist Trelleborg Offshore recently released details of how it employed well-proven offshore oil & gas technology in the subsea buoyancy arrangements for the world’s first wind turbine ‘floater’,…
Cape Wind clears another hurdleAnother challenge to its long-delayed quest to become the US’s first offshore wind farm was successfully fought off by Cape Wind as federal regulators in August upheld an earlier decision that said the project posed no threat to airways…
BP in late August was in the final stages of permanently plugging the deepwater Gulf of Mexico Macondo exploration well, which spilled nearly 5 million barrels of oil between the 20 April blowout that destroyed the Deepwater Horizon rig and mid-July…
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