Last week, ExxonMobil filed a lawsuit against the Department of the Interior in the Western District of Louisiana. The lawsuit alleges that DOI, through the Minerals Management Service (MMS), acted improperly in cancelling three leases owned by ExxonMobil and Statoil, its 50% partner. The leases are in a field designated “Julia”, which lies in 7,000 feet of water, some 200 miles off the Louisiana coast. | Read More »
A new study from IHS-CERA, one of the leading energy think tanks, projects the cost of the Department of the Interior’s ongoing regulatory slowdown and its impact on the energy industry, employment in the coastal states, and the U.S. economy in general. The study, released on Thursday, was commissioned by the Gulf Economic Survival Team (GEST). We’re beginning to see the true cost of an | Read More »
On April 20, 2010, an explosion and fire on the Transocean drilling rig Deepwater Horizon caused the deaths of 11 rig workers. The subsequent blowout flowed uncontrolled to the Gulf of Mexico, ultimately spilling an estimated 5 million barrels of crude oil over the next 100 days. The regulatory aftermath continues to this day. “Vladimir” wrote dozens of diaries at RedState on the engineering, environmental, | Read More »
A March 17 press release from BOEMRE announced the approval of Petrobras’s permit application for the Gulf of Mexico’s first FPSO (“Floating Production Storage Offloading” facility), offshore Louisiana. I have no problem with FPSOs per se. The technology has been used around the world, in places like Brazil, Angola, the North Sea and off Australia. But this would be the first FPSO in U.S. | Read More »
In an effort to deflect blame for high gasoline prices away from the Obama Administration, the Department of the Interior today released a report which purports to show that the oil and gas industry, not DOI or BOEMRE, is guilty of dragging its feet on offshore energy exploration and development. This, in spite of a 10 month regulatory moratorium/permitorium that has brought new well drilling | Read More »
This entertaining and informative video was put together by the Offshore Marine Services Association, an industry association which represents, not oil companies or drilling contractors, but the owners of the supply vessels which service them.
The White House Blog, in a post entitled “Expanding Safe and Responsible Energy Production”, lays out the case for the Obama Administration as a long-time supporter of domestic oil and gas: One area where we have focused our efforts since the start of the administration – long before this current spike – is increasing responsible domestic energy production – including oil and gas. In fact, | Read More »
Judge Tells Government to Resume Permits for Drilling WASHINGTON — A federal judge in New Orleans on Thursday ordered the Obama administration to move quickly on permits for new deepwater oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico, saying that the government could no longer justify long delays in allowing new projects to go forward. … “Not acting at all is not a lawful option,” Judge | Read More »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
…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 »
The Obama Administration has filed some 27,000 pages of documents in Federal court which disclose the process by which it decided to forge ahead with a deepwater drilling moratorium in the Gulf of Mexico, in spite of expert advice, public opinion and a Federal judge’s ruling. The documents also show that the Administration stonewalled a U.S. Senator’s request for information, a point apparently lost on | Read More »
On one hand, Mr. Obama’s “Worst Oil Spill in History” theme serves as pretext for eviscerating the offshore petroleum industry, an industry that, until this spring, was relatively healthy despite the recession. By doing so, he may suck the economic life out of four very red Gulf States. On the other hand, Energy Czar Carol Browner has joined the “Where has the oil gone?” chorus, | Read More »
Remember back when BP severed the riser, so they could install the cap, the one that finally controlled the spill? Here is a photo taken by an ROV just after the severing was completed. The photo shows the outer shell of the riser, at one time a 21-inch cylinder, collapsed like a Coke can by the severing tool. Inside the collapsed riser are what appear | Read More »
Interior Secretary Salazar imposed a moratorium on deepwater drilling until November 30, contrary to the recommendation of a panel of experts from the National Academy of Engineering. For operations on the shallow water Shelf, the administration maintains, no official moratorium is in place. After all, the Shelf still enjoys a forty-year history of relatively safe and clean operations that is still intact, being several orders | Read More »
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