We all know that BOEMRE has lifted the Deepwater Drilling Moratorium. We also know that few rigs have gone back to work, either in the deepwater or the shallow water Shelf. That’s because of several factors, one of which is the new Interim Final Rule which governs all offshore drilling. Compliance with the Interim Final Rule is necessary for the operator to secure a permit. | Read More »
From the President’s State of the Union Address: We need to get behind this [green] innovation. And to help pay for it, I’m asking Congress to eliminate the billions in taxpayer dollars we currently give to oil companies. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but they’re doing just fine on their own. So instead of subsidizing yesterday’s energy, let’s invest in tomorrow’s. Now, clean energy | Read More »
Former Democratic Senator Bob Graham of Florida is co-chair of the President’s Oil Spill Commission. The Commission, stacked with environmentalists and Harvard lawyers and notably absent any working industry expertise, delivered its report to the President earlier this month. Its contents were predictable, calling for more regulation and more government. Here’s what Sen. Graham had to say this week: This is a wakeup call to | Read More »
This press release is the biggest load of hooey I’ve seen for a while. The Department of the Interior wants to create two new agencies to remedy what they term “conflicting missions” within a single agency. Hooey. WASHINGTON, D.C. – Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar and Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE) Director Michael R. Bromwich today announced the structures and | Read More »
Anyone can be misinformed, or suffer a mental lapse resulting in an incorrect statement. Any of us might be stricken with poor judgment, and take a questionable position on an important matter of state from time to time. But occasionally prejudice, bad judgment and contorted logic become woven together into a tapestry of wrong-headed thinking. And sometimes the people who issue these statements hold responsible | Read More »
As many of you know, your humble correspondent is a veteran of 32 years of service in the oil and gas industry, currently serving as the operations manager for a small Gulf of Mexico exploration and production company. This week, the President’s Oil Spill Commission published its 380-page report on the BP blowout and spill on the Deepwater Horizon. I won’t pretend to have read | Read More »
Rig Maintenance Supervisor Bill Masters of Trout, LA lost his job with Seahawk, a shallow water rig contractor, last June 23. After 38 years on the rigs, Masters hoped to go back to work fairly quickly; that’s the way it had always happened before. But not this time. Seahawk has laid off 300 workers. Only three of 20 rigs in its fleet are currently working. | Read More »
Offshore oil and gas wells typically are able to produce at high rates at the beginning of their lives. Reserves are not infinite, so that means a rapid natural rate of decline as reserves deplete. “Reserve replacement” is a big issue; we often say that every day that you don’t replace production in the oilfield means you’re just slowly going out of business. How do | Read More »
The President’s post-election remarks contained something of an “olive branch” to Congressional Republicans. It came in the form of a broad hint that the Administration might backpedal on its opposition to natural gas development. Obama’s Enthusiasm for Gas Drilling Raises Eyebrows “We’ve got, I think, broad agreement that we’ve got terrific natural gas resources in this country,” Obama said when he was pressed for issues | Read More »
The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management of the Department of the Interior published a 33-page Interim Final Rule covering new oil and gas drilling regulations for the Offshore. Buried within the bowels of this beast is a perfunctory assessment of the impact of the rules on the economy and on small business in particular. The impact on domestic deepwater hydrocarbon production as a result of | Read More »
In the aftermath of the BP spill, federal regulators promulgated sweeping new rules governing the drilling and operation of offshore wells. These new rules apply not only to the operators of deepwater wells, like BP’s Macondo, but to shallow water drilling as well. Largely as a result of these new rules, and uncertainty among regulators and the oil and gas operators as to their meaning | Read More »
Six months have passed since the Transocean drilling rig Deepwater Horizon, contracted to BP, exploded in a catastrophic and spectacular blowout, ending the lives of eleven brave crew members. The Macondo well would continue to flow, essentially unabated, for the next three months. Environmentalists predicted disaster. Let’s look at reality. Federal leaders of Gulf of Mexico oil spill response report only a few lingering trouble | Read More »
With the backing of the Obama Administration, the U.S. Export-Import Bank intends to guarantee $1 billion in loans to PEMEX, the Mexican government’s national monopoly oil company. The reason for the loans is to encourage PEMEX to buy supplies and services from American providers. Despite President Obama’s moratorium on U.S. deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, the U.S. Export-Import Bank intends to guarantee $1 | Read More »
…but the rate of OSHA recordable incidents in the oil and gas extraction industry is considerably less than most industries, including retailing, libraries and tortilla manufacturing. [As an aside, yesterday’s fire on Mariner’s Vermilion Block 380 A Platform sparked renewed calls for the higher levels of government regulation of the rigs (it wasn’t a rig), with some calling for an outright end to offshore drilling | Read More »
Scientists have discovered a hitherto-unknown oil-chomping microbes in the cold, briny depths of the Gulf of Mexico. As a result, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to find free oil out in the Gulf, either on the surface or in a subsurface plume, a little more than a month after the flow from the Macondo well was controlled. If you’re a bacteria, the BP spill was | Read More »
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