Halifax, Nova Scotia, May 7, 2012 _ Welaptega Marine is pleased to announce that it will take part in the prestigious Joint FPSO Research Forum in Wageningen, The Netherlands, May 7-11.
Welaptega CEO Tony Hall, will join other members of the invitation-only forum to discuss issues around design, fabrication and operating of FPSO (Floating Production Storage and Offloading vessels.)
Hall is a founding member of the Joint Industry Project on Mooring Integrity. It began in 1998.
The FPSO forum will focus on structural and marine issues such as corrosion, fatigue, roll, double bottom/single bottom, metocean and rogue waves, welding rules, etc. Progress reports will be delivered on studies on ‘FPSO Integrity’ (MARIN), ‘Fatigue Capacity’ (DNV) and ‘LNG FPSO’ (Chevron).
Welaptega will join organizations such as ABS, MARIN, DnV and Noble Denton at the forum.
Welaptega develops imaging technologies to help operators solve complex subsea problems on FPSOs and other offshore structures.
By Tony Hall, CEO and founder of Welaptega Marine
Two years ago today, the Deepwater Horizon drill rig exploded and sunk in the Gulf of Mexico after a series of catastrophic failures.
A blowout of BP’s Macondo well caused a fire and explosion at Transocean’s rig, killing 11 workers and spilling 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
It was the worst offshore oil spill in US history.
Gulf of Mexico deep-water drilling was suspended for nearly six months in the wake of the spill.
The greatest lesson is that safety of the men and women working on the rig must trump all other concerns, according to James Watson, director of the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement at the U.S. Department of the Interior.
He says the U.S. government has made the most far-reaching reforms to offshore energy safety in history.
Sadly, all of those lessons had already been learned in other accidents and operations outside of US jurisdiction. This accident did not need to happen.
Industry is now required to meet strong new safety standards on everything from the design of wells to the way cement is tested to the way human and environmental risk is managed on drilling rigs and production platforms.
Welaptega played a role in stopping the spill. Our 3D modeling cameras were used on site to model the dimensions of the leaking wellhead. This information was used to verify the size of the cap which stopped the leak.
Let’s hope that new safety regulations will take into account the experience of the Deepwater Horizon and other accidents outside the United States so that a tragedy like this will never happen again.
We have entered the “age of the unthinkable” according to Statoil CEO Helge Lund. He was giving the keynote speach CERA2012 risk assessment conference in Houston Texas.
He says the energy industry must engage with a broader social and safety agenda to meet the needs of an increasing complex energy landscape.
“Over the past decades, safety has come even higher on the agenda. For the industry it is a moral obligation to protect our people and run safe operations. I believe our obligations goes beyond that.”
He urged the industry to form partnerships with regulators and society to collaborate on technology development for safety and operational efficiency.
For the full speech click here.
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.
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.
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.
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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Following the devastating effects of the economic downturn, companies in the oil and gas sector are now focusing on how to eliminate process failures.
Coupled with the catastrophic impact of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the sector is now under a greater deal of scrutiny than ever, and it is essential that organisations learn how to leverage a company’s most valuable asset to drive growth, manage risk and maximise production.
As well boosting growth, managing risk and retaining margins, efficient knowledge and information management in the oil and gas sector can give firms the skills they need to strategically manage human capital, bring about organisational change and transform the enterprise, and one company which has realised this early is PETRONAS.
The oil giant PETRONAS recently said it expects the oil and gas industry to remain highly “competitive and challenging”, but the company is positioning itself towards a “new reality” through cost optimisation, robust growth strategies and operational excellence, placing a major focus on knowledge and information management.
From Wire Services
The US Interior Department said today it gave final approval for Petrobras to use the first ever deep-water floating production storage facility in the Gulf of Mexico.
The facility will be used when the company begins oil and natural gas production at its Chinook-Cascade project in the near future, the department said.
The floating facility has a daily production capacity of 80,000 barrels of oil and 16 million cubic feet of gas, Reuters reported.
By Ben W. Heineman
From Harvard Business Review Blog
A potentially catastrophic technological problem, an incomplete crisis response plan, misleading early information, divided private and public authority, ineffective initial actions.
This could describe the current situation at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant and its six reactors. But, it also describes what happened after the April 20, 2010 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico.
