Andrew McBarnet tries to fathom the future of permanent seismic reservoir monitoring projects.A big pow-wow of industry specialists at the end of last month in Trondheim, Norway, was hoping to get to the bottom of the future prospects for…
Drilling system vibration was recognized as a potential cause of elevated drilling costs half a century ago. It has been thoroughly studied in the years since, and sound mitigation practices have been published. Shell's Mark Dykstra discusses the state of the art…
In the wake of the July 1988 Piper Alpha disaster in the UK North Sea, the Cullen Report introduced a risk management approach to offshore safety, making the production and maintenance of a risk-based ‘safety case' a legal requirement for every UKCS offshore facility…
The Marin Subsea asset recovery team was recently called in to recover a blowout preventer and lower marine riser package from 488m of water in Brazil. Within 20 minutes of the initial phone call, the Marin team had made a preliminary assessment…
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…
China constantly shakes many of the world's beliefs, for better or worse, from its economic growth to trade to human rights. There is no doubt that China will become before not too long the world's dominant economic power. It also provides an additional…
‘Securing Safe, Smart, Sustainable Supply' is the highly alliterative theme for this year's Offshore Europe conference, to be held in Aberdeen 6-8 September. It will be chaired by Amec chief executive Samir Brikho.--It is not just about having energy…
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…
Andrew McBarnet weighs up the value of research in the E&P marine geoscience sector and draws some surprising conclusions.We hear a great deal about the hard to find oil which needs to be discovered if the world's supply needs are to be met in the coming decades before…
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…
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…
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…
A new international offshore contracting giant, with a market cap above $5.5 billion, backlog of $5.3 billion and over 12,000 employees, came into being last month with the combination of Acergy SA and Subsea 7 Inc. Meg Chesshyre looks at the rationale behind this high-profile marriage…
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…