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Monthly Archives: January 2012

Pressure mounts for separate safety agency

Posted on January 30, 2012

From Halifax Chronicle-Herald

Shell Canada’s recent winning bid to conduct deepwater oil exploration off Nova Scotia has renewed calls to establish a separate safety agency independent of the federal-provincial offshore regulator.

The petroleum giant has committed to spending $970 million over six years in the hopes of finding oil in four deepwater parcels about 200 kilometres off the province’s coast.

The return of exploration drilling off the Scotian Shelf for the first time since 2005 would be in depths ranging between 1,400 to 3,750 metres.

Richard Grant, an engineer and expert on safety issues related to offshore drilling rigs, said while Shell is reputable when it comes to its deepwater drilling expertise, the volatile North Atlantic presents some of the “harsh-est offshore environments in the world.”

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Burden of safety proof increasing on producers

Posted on January 12, 2012

From Houston Chronicle business columnist Loren Steffy

Other countries are learning the lesson from BP’s 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

In recent months, offshore disasters around the globe have prompted swift and stringent response from regulators.

After a 3,000-barrel spill from a deep-water well off Rio de Janeiro in November, in which no one was killed or injured, Brazil’s environmental regulator fined the rig’s operator, Chevron, and its owner, Transocean, about $34 million. That number likely will rise because it hasn’t specified an amount for a third fine levied late last month.

It also suspended Chevron’s drilling operations in late November and denied it access to new offshore fields.

While local politics figures into the response, it shows how regulators no longer trust the industry’s reassurances that it can contain – let alone prevent – a major deep-water disaster.

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UK investment at ‘record levels’ – report

Posted on January 10, 2012

High oil prices pushed capital investment in the UK oil and gas industry to “record levels” last year despite a dip in drilling activity, a report from an industry stalwart claims.

Eoin O’Cinneide  Upstream 10 January 2012 10:08 GMT

Such high investment is expected to continue “until at least 2014” although there will be a move away from exploration and appraisal (E&A) projects to development, according to industry consultancy Wood Mackenzie.

Some £7.5 billion ($11.6 billion today) in capital investment was pumped into the UK upstream oil and gas sector last year, a figure which represented “an all time high”, the research outfit’s latest report claimed.

“Wood Mackenzie expects investment to stay consistently high until at least 2014, as new fields are brought into development and incremental projects on existing fields are moved forward, including over £2 billion ($3 billion) expected investment in 2012 in the West of Shetlands area,” it wrote.

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