International news for oil and gas professionals
The Obama administration's renewable energy stool, with its three legs of biofuels, solar, and wind, has now tipped over, as all three legs start to crumble.
US President Barack Obama signed the Pipeline Safety, Regulatory Certainty, and Job Creation Act of 2011 into law Jan. 3, reauthorizing the Department of Transportation's existing pipeline safety programs through 2015 while also placing new requirements on both pipeline operators and regulators.
Groups representing North Sea oil and gas producers have stiffened their resistance to European offshore safety regulation.
The trading of allowances to emit carbon dioxide is supposed to be a market-based response to global warming. It's really politics.
Industry analysts lately have been counting barrels—barrels of refining capacity lost as plants shut down on both sides of the Atlantic; barrels of crude flowing into the US Midwest and their impact on prices for West Texas Intermediate; and barrels of supply that may be lost if the European Union activates its proposed embargo on Iran in 6 months or if Iran beats them to the punch by stopping shipments.
Conventional wisdom dictates that not much gets accomplished in Washington, DC, when it's a presidential election year.
Higher crude oil prices, breakthroughs in technology, and more access to prospective acreage are creating a US oil production revival that is a major break from nearly 40 years of declining production, two experts told the US Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on Jan. 31.
BP PLC is required to indemnify drilling contractor Transocean Ltd., the owner of the Deepwater Horizon semisubmersible drilling rig, against compensatory damages in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill off Louisiana in 2010, according to US District Judge Carl Barbier of New Orleans.
Chinese, French, and Japanese companies were among recent investors making long-term financial commitments to US unconventional oil and gas plays in a trend that is expected to continue despite economic uncertainty.
Chesapeake Energy Corp. announced plans to cut its operated dry gas drilling rig count to 24 rigs, a decline of 50 rigs from its 2011 average operated dry gas rig count, citing "the lowest natural gas prices in the past 10 years."
Cabot Oil & Gas Corp. has offered to meet with US Environmental Protection Agency representatives to discuss the EPA's plans to test the water wells of some homes in Dimock, Pa., a township within the Marcellus shale play where Cabot has done hydraulic fracturing.
The US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management will hold a consolidated central Gulf of Mexico lease sale in New Orleans on June 20, the US Department of the Interior agency announced.
If there was ever doubt that congressional Republicans would accept US President Barack Obama's Jan. 18 ruling against the proposed Keystone XL crude oil pipeline, it disappeared completely on Jan. 30 when three GOP members of the US Senate announced they would introduce a new bill to approve the project.
MarkWest Energy Partners LP, Denver, will add more than 600 MMcfd of processing capacity for the Marcellus and Utica shales, as well as 140,000 b/d of fractionation, the company reported.
The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers on Jan. 30 announced a set of hydraulic fracturing operating practices that it has adopted to improve water management and fluids reporting for shale gas and tight gas development across Canada.
Global oil price could rise by as much as 30% if Iran halts oil exports as a result of sanctions by the US and the European Union, according to a report by the International Monetary Fund.
Oil diplomacy is making very little headway in resolving issues between Sudan and the recently independent South Sudan, with both sides gearing more toward another war than to peace.
The government of South Sudan, faced with alleged obstructions by Sudan, announced plans to build a refinery and pipeline aimed at transporting recently discovered crude oil to an export terminal in Kenya.
The Eagle Ford shale play in South Texas has attracted more than 3,100 permitted locations since Petrohawk Energy Corp. revealed the first discovery in October 2008, the Texas Railroad Commission said.
The oil business abounds with "geological explorers." One might think that these geologists would be satisfied with simply finding the oil, then leaving it to reservoir and production engineers to get it out of the ground and off to market.
Madagascar Oil Ltd., Houston, said it is encouraged by brightening prospects for the blocks that contain its Tsimiroro and Bemolanga giant heavy oil deposits in nonproducing Madagascar.
In the opening paragraphs of the above article on dependencies between two reservoirs, the authors state that: "In particular, varying the allowed probability for the dependent reservoir is shown to not influence either the expected project value or the standard deviation around the expected value.
The purpose of this third and final article is to characterize the operating envelope under which Haynesville shale wells are economic and describe the profit space through generalized net present value functional relations.
Buru Energy Ltd., Perth, is gearing up to capitalize on what it describes as a significant series of exploration successes in the onshore Canning basin of northwest Western Australia during 2011.
A study of Saudi gas wells led to quick and simple analytical solutions for determining well geometries that improve productivity.
Optimization of the displacement flow rate improved the cement bonding of Tabamiao block's gas exploration wells in the Ordos basin of north central China.
Already witness to a number of changes in recent years, the global LNG industry in 2012 is likely to see further changes as unconventional LNG export projects begin to come on line, new countries begin LNG imports, and new gas discoveries make export projects possible in new regions of the globe.
Segregated condensate volumes produced east of the Suez Canal ("East of Suez") will only continue to grow in the near term, particularly among Mideast gulf countries and will reshape crude, oil product, and gas markets throughout the East of Suez region.
The pending bankruptcy of refiner Petroplus is only the start of further problems for nearly 40% of the European Union's 104 refineries now in need of refurbishment, according to a new consultancy report.
Planned pipeline construction to be completed in 2012 rose 6.7% from the previous year, with increases in planned crude and natural gas pipelines more than countering sharply reduced products pipeline construction plans.
In the past few months, the race for Caspian gas has shifted more rapidly and more frequently than it had in the past decade.
