Blog

Pressure mounts for separate safety agency

Posted on January 30, 2012

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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Welaptega in the press

Posted on November 14, 2011

This article was featured in The Chronicle-Herald newspaper after CEO Tony Hall’s presentation to the Atlantic Provinces Economic Council.

By Brett Bundell

It’s the dead of night in the middle of the North Sea. As gale force winds pound against an aging oil rig, its ramshackle moorings give way.Petrified crew members are hoisted from the oil platform, bobbing up and down in the pitch-black waters, to the safety of a chopper.

“It happened last winter,” Tony Hall, founder and CEO of Welaptega Marine Ltd., said Thursday. “If you’re working on an offshore floating platform during a storm, it’s good to know the company has done everything possible to make it safe.”

The Halifax company has developed advanced technologies to inspect aging offshore oil and gas platforms.

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Thinking outside the business model

Posted on August 3, 2011

This feature tells the story of how Welaptega founder Tony Hall came up with new technologies and new ways of delivering them to the offshore oil and gas marketplace. It was recently published in POB magazine. It was written by Alexi Brumm.

Thirty years ago, Tony Hall never envisioned where his career would eventually take him. An artist, carpenter, mechanic and self-described “jack of all trades,” Hall pursued an undergraduate degree in agricultural sciences and then went on to receive a master’s degree in marine biology before founding Welaptega Marine Ltd. in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, in 1991.
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