Several Canadian and U.S. onshore drilling contractors successfully reduced drilling-fluid losses during pipe-handling operations by installing mud-bucket/spill-tray assemblies, vacuum systems, integrated rig-floor troughs, and splash guards.
The ability to use slim-hole, continuous core-recovery technologies incorporating wire line retrievable core bits, core barrel, and downhole shock absorber offers a new technique for drilling operations.
A reactive, water-based, lost-circulation material (LCM), used by Pemex Exploration-Production Co. in South Mexico, can effectively control lost circulation in a single treatment.
Agip North Africa BV, a unit of Italian state energy conglomerate Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi (ENI), has reached a final agreement with Libya's National Oil Corp. (NOC) on the development scheme for a major gas, oil, and condensate development project.
Repsol-YPF SA started up the 200 MMcfd Salam gas processing plant--part of a major gas project on the Khalda concession in Egypt's western desert (OGJ, Sept. 21, 1998, p.46).
An advisory panel has urged the U.S. government to restrict the use of methyl tertiary butyl ether in gasoline "substantially," because the additive has been showing up more frequently in drinking water supplies.
Petroleos de Portugal SA (Petrogal) announced a plan to invest $800 million at its Sines refinery to meet tighter European Union fuel specifications and to improve the existing refining process.
Cameroon's Societé Nationale des Hydrocarbures (SNH) has announced the country's third licensing round, which will include unlicensed deepwater and onshore acreage.
Repsol-YPF SA and partners have made an oil discovery in the Mediterranean Sea, 30 km off Tarragona, Spain. The news comes just after Spanish firm Repsol SA acquired the former Argentine state oil firm, YPF SA, and announced a name change and planned restructuring (OGJ, July 12, 1999, Newsletter).
BG plc plans to invest £5 billion in development projects in a bid to double the output of its BG International division, in energy-equivelent terms, during 1999-2003.
The Italian state energy company, Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi (ENI), has revealed that it achieved significant improvements in its environmental performance last year.
The Gas Research Institute and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (Nyserda) have agreed to undertake a series of cooperatively funded field tests to help validate new technologies for developing New York's unconventional gas and oil reserves, including tight sands and shales.
To put it kindly, pushing tax legislation through the U.S. Congress is a haphazard process, threatened at every step by fiscal and political complications.
The number of multiphase pumping installations is increasing, and it is becoming more important that operating companies understand how to analyze these systems.
In retrospect, it seems to have been inevitable. Someone got a headache after refueling an automobile with reformulated gasoline and blamed it on a new fuel additive. Questions about methyl tertiary butyl ether appeared in newspapers and on television. Public acceptance of the oxygenate began a long slide that approached bottom last week.
Simulation of operations at Pdvsa Western Division's Ulé LPG complex (Zulia) indicated changes to operating pressures to expand fractionation capacities were preferable to replacement of existing towers.
ARCO Oriente Inc. has taken steps to resolve, at least in the short term, the problem that all operators in Ecuador must contend with: lack of pipeline capacity out of the Oriente region.
Tanzania Canop Worldwide Corp., Calgary, let a contract to Polaris International Explorer Ltd., Calgary, for geophysical acquisition in Tanzania. Canop plans to conduct a 3D seismic program over portions of the Rufiji trough.
I enjoyed reading OGJ's online editorial forum on oxygen in gasoline except for the fact that it was totally irrelevant to the issue at hand. In case you don't know (although I suspect that you do, but chose to neglect it in your editorial), the point of adding oxygenates to gasoline is to reduce carbon monoxide (CO) emissions, period. As far as I can tell, only the ethanol zealots are making claims that oxygenates reduce NOx and/or hydrocarbon emissions.
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