There were echoes of the UK’s Dragon’s Den and its US reality TV brethren Shark Tank when the great and the good of the private equity world gathered in Aberdeen last month to sample the wares of would-be oil & gas sector high fliers.The occasion…
Current projections indicate around £27 billion will be spent on UK offshore decommissioning over the next 40 years, of which £9.2 billion will be spent over this next decade, according to a 2010 Decommissioning Insight brochure presented at the conference by Robert Harris-Deans…
Cairn Energy has wrapped up its 2010 exploration drilling campaign offshore Greenland and released both the Stena Forth and Stena Don rigs, the company said 26 October 2010.Cairn suspended the Alpha-1S1 exploration well to allow possible re-entry to sidetrack or deepen the well at a later date…
A recent contract renewal for the small UK-based company WGP Group and its partner Thalassa Energy Services is a reminder that the first life of field seismic (LoFS) project on BP's Valhall field offshore Norway has been ongoing since 2003.…
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’,…
The effect of the continuing credit crunch last summer meant that North Sea field development activity was down last year, but the steadying of the price this spring has led to projects being dusted off in both the UK and the Norwegian sectors…
Finally, some sanity has surfaced in Europe on the subject of climate change and it is from a real scientific heavyweight to boot. Rarely have I found a book* so elegantly simple and yet compelling. Christian Gerondeau, a very well known French scientist and engineer…
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…
The six-month US moratorium on deepwater drilling following the Deepwater Horizon tragedy, along with tougher regulations and higher liability costs likely to follow, could put the squeeze on independent operators in the Gulf of Mexico. Russell McCulley talks to one company that's pushing back…
For more than 20 years, the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority has led various initiatives to reduce the risks to helicopters operating to moving platforms in the North Sea. Dr Athena Scaperdas and Dr Paul Gallagher of Atkins describe one such project which looks at helicopter on-deck safety…
OE 's analysis of current rig market data is updated monthly using statistics provided by Rigzone.comWorldwide utilization for the mobile offshore drilling fleet is tracking at 76%, near the top of a 74%-76% band that it has traversed over the past 11 months…
The last couple of years have seen fairly lean pickings for offshore fabricators in the Netherlands and on the UK east coast. But for one Dutch yard, paradoxically, things could scarcely have gone better.HSM in Schiedam, already sitting on a…
Continuous registration of vessel traffic above pipelines via the proposed Automatic Identification System (AIS) represents a significant improvement on pipeline operators' emergency response to possible mechanical damage, says Jens Erik Thygesen…
Nieuw-Lekkerland-headquartered Bayards, a key player in the offshore aluminium industry, is seeing early signs that the recession's grip on major oil & gas projects may at last be loosening.‘The market is coming back,' reports the company's commercial director Dick de Kluijver…
Wave and tidal energy specialist Marine Current Turbines and its project partners Queen's University Belfast, Mojo Maritime and Edinburgh University, have secured a grant of £250,000 from the UK's Technology Strategy Board and the Engineering…