Chemical tracers have long been used to keep tabs on what is going on in a reservoir, such as characterizing injection water flow through the reservoir, and to determine what type of fluid is flowing from a certain location along the well. Jennifer…
Boosting recoveryThe HiWay flow-channel hydraulic fracturing technique, formally released by Schlumberger late June, is designed to maximize production and hydrocarbon recovery through the creation of open flow channels within the propped fracture…
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…
Weather is a major factor when planning offshore drilling campaigns. Asbjørn Stålesen of FMC Technologies says the company's Real Time Operating Limits system has allowed it to increase the time available for carrying out drilling work.The biggest…
With a major Russian Arctic contract already in the bag for next year, the Tideway Group is looking at early payback on its €115 million investment in the industry's first ice-class fallpipe rockdump vessel.Dubbed Flintstone, the DP2 vessel…
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…
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…
With holding power over 100 times their own weight as well as clear economic advantages, the first drag embedment anchors made quite a splash in the offshore industry in the 1970s. Yet some project engineers still feel more comfortable with…
Within days of sister company Heerema Fabrication Group handing over the largest offshore deck ever built in the Netherlands, Heerema Marine Contractors was announcing plans to diversify its installation fleet with a multirole monohull vessel…
The first half of 2010 saw 118 new offshore wind turbines fully connected to European grids according to the latest statistics from the European Wind Energy Association (EWEA).Those 118 turbines have a capacity of 333MW – well over half the…
BP's Gulf of Mexico oil leak is an unmitigated disaster, not just because of the amount of oil that has to be skimmed, the oil-soaked birds that have to be cleansed and the beaches that require purification. It has allowed an Obama administration…
Subsea installation of the world's largest test facility for wave energy technology was imminent as OE went to press, with the loading of the UK South West Regional Development Agency's pioneering Wave Hub and its 25km power cable onto a cable…
Four of the largest oil companies have pledged $1 billion to build a rapid response system designed to capture and contain oil in the event of another Macondo-style blowout in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico.In a July 21 joint announcement, Chevron…
Unfair though it may seem, it is conceivable that the Macondo incident will have at least as damaging and persistent an impact on the offshore industry as Chernobyl does on the nuclear power industry. Professor Andrew C Palmer explains why.On…