When gasoline prices rise, as they have in the US this year, there is the inevitable backlash from misinformed gasoline consumers. Gasoline prices are increasingly featured in daily newspaper editorial cartoons and nightly newscasts.
Future US energy supply has a sore thumb—the colloquial symbol of something that stands out from everything else. Energy supply's sore thumb is undrillable federal land.
Increased production and higher oil and natural gas prices improved the first quarter earnings of most US producing companies in a sample of firms. Refining margins also improved for some companies, and foreign currency exchange rates helped to lift net income.
A stronger Canadian dollar relative to the US dollar appears to have suppressed the first quarter earnings of most of the companies based in Canada that OGJ sampled. While production volumes may have been higher, realizations declined.
Factors driving the unprecedented long period of high oil prices and their effects on oil supply, demand, and the oil company-oil service company relationship were dominant themes at the fifth international oil summit in Paris Apr. 29.
Energy security involves more than the supply assurance on which oil-consuming countries, especially the US, rivet their attention. To oil exporters, it also means assurance of markets, speakers emphasized May 10 at the Middle East Petroleum & Gas Conference (MPGC) in Bahrain.
Even as the US Navy vowed to use "deadly force" to prevent any further disruption of Iraqi oil exports, interior ministers of the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) have agreed to step up their cooperation on issues of security throughout the Persian Gulf region.
A leading Japanese shipping group has reported it will no longer send oil tankers to Iraq's Basra oil terminal (BOT) following suicide attacks that killed three US sailors and interrupted oil exports last month (OGJ Online, Apr. 24, 2004).
After a 3-year effort by the World Bank and Norway, 11 countries and 8 major oil companies met May 11 in Algiers to sign a voluntary global natural gas venting and flaring reduction standard.
The Trujillo basin project was initiated by Perupetro and completed by the PARSEP Group to investigate the remaining undiscovered hydrocarbon potential in the Trujillo basin, located offshore northwestern Peru. PARSEP, or "Proyecto de Asistencia para La Reglamentación del Sector Energético del Perú," is a joint venture between the governments of Peru and Canada.
Houston-based Apache Corp. experienced a 22% growth in production, 26% growth in reserves, and a 330% reserve replacement rate in 2003. It was a year in which "everything went right," said Mike Harris, Apache's director of worldwide drilling.
Operational experience shows that virtual metering of multiphase flow from subsea wells in the Malampaya project, off the Philippines, has been cost-effective, accurate, and reliable in determining individual well production.
Plant managers must understand how pacesetter facilities conduct maintenance turnarounds in order to maximize their turnaround's results; often the key strategy is to conduct single-unit turnarounds.
The current plant environment requires measurements that can predict, not just measure, the outcomes from maintenance activities. One strategy is to examine a set of leading indicators to judge how well the investments are going to pay backin advance of the results, which is a lagging indicator.
Pemex Refinación, part of Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex) and operator of more than 4,100 km of crude oil pipelines in several diameters, has tested a newly developed corrosion inhibitor on 30, 24, and 20-in. OD pipelines on a 220-km extension. The inhibitor, IMP-ICCA-9710, is manufactured and marketed by Pemex.
Oil tanker rates have proven very firm so far this year, following the pattern set in 2003 and leaving charterers to pay a hefty fee for their freight costs.
