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[Thirty] years after a vicious winter storm ripped across the Atlantic Ocean and helped sink the world's largest and most advanced oil rig, memories of the Ocean Ranger tragedy are still painful and fresh. All 84 crew members died when the Ocean Ranger toppled and then sank on the Grand Banks in the early hours of Feb. 15, 1982. "It's still — the way it happened, there's no closure. It doesn't feel like there's any," said Connie Foley, who was 19 when her father Ron and his colleagues died at sea...

A huge oil-drilling rig reportedly sank in a storm off the coast of Newfoundland Monday morning, and all 84 men aboard were said to be missing in 50-foot seas and feared dead... (Page A8.)

Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Europe’s largest oil company, is losing about $1 billion a year from drilling delays in the Gulf of Mexico since the 2010 Macondo disaster. Shell’s production in the region will be curbed by about 50,000 barrels of oil equivalent this year, similar to 2011, Chief Financial Officer Simon Henry said. The company expects to return to planned operations off the Gulf coast by 2014. “The cash flow implications are a billion dollars or more per year relative to where we want to be,” Henry said in London today. “We are catching up.” The company, which in...

A Chesapeake Energy drilling rig caught fire Thursday night outside of Sweetwater, Okla., according to a company spokesman and an online oil field drilling forum. The rig was drilling into a shallow gas pocket about four miles outside of Sweetwater when workers found an unexpectedly high pressure of natural gas at only 910 feet below the surface, Jim Gipson, a company spokesman, said in an e-mail. The site was supposed to be drilled to more than 12,000 feet vertically before being drilled horizontally, Gipson said. Soon after workers experienced the high pressure, the rig caught fire, sending flames several feet...

PITTSBURGH (AP) — One of the government's top scientists says much more research is needed to determine the possible impacts of shale gas drilling on human health and the environment. "Studies should include all the ways people can be exposed, such as through air, water, soil, plants and animals," Dr. Christopher Portier wrote to The Associated Press in an email. Portier is director of the National Center for Environmental Health at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

The jobs are plentiful. They pay very well, $29 per hour entry-level and up. No college degree is required, not even always a high school diploma. Training is provided, beyond prerequisite basic drilling and first aid classes. Yet Canada expects limited growth in drilling next year, due to a severe shortage of rig workers. "The greatest limiting factor when examining overall utilization rates will be the shortage of skilled rig workers," said the Canadian Association of Oilwell Drilling Contractors (CAODC) in a November statement. "Industry suffered a great loss of skills and knowledge during the downturn of 2009 and it...

Election '12: A governor of an energy-rich state would use the "energy of the past" to create the jobs of the present rather than placing bets on solar panels and tilting at windmills. During the GOP presidential debates, Gov. Rick Perry was criticized for taking all the credit for Texas' job-creation record since he was not responsible for the oil and gas in the ground that created many of those jobs. True enough. But like Sarah Palin, the governor of another energy-rich state, he did foster a business-friendly climate as free from NIMBY regulations as possible, making the extraction of...

President Obama's United States Department of Agriculture has delayed shale gas drilling in Ohio for up to six months by cancelling a mineral lease auction for Wayne National Forest (WNF). The move was taken in deference to environmentalists, on the pretext of studying the effects of hydraulic fracturing. "Conditions have changed since the 2006 Forest Plan was developed," announced WNF Supervisor Anne Carey on Tuesday. "The technology used in the Utica & Marcellus Shale formations need to be studied to see if potential effects to the surface are significantly different than those identified in the Forest Plan." The study will...

BP won approval from the Interior Department to drill its first exploratory oil well in the Gulf of Mexico since the blowout of its Macondo well a year and a half ago touched off the country’s worst offshore environmental disaster. The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement said that BP met more stringent safety requirements devised by the federal government in the aftermath of the disaster. The company also planned to follow even tougher voluntary standards that exceeded the government’s rules. “This permit was approved only after thorough well design, blowout preventer, and containment capability reviews,” said bureau director Michael...

Good news, domestic energy fans! After extraordinary delays, it looks like there will finally be some energy production activity in the Gulf of Mexico once again. This time it’s in the fertile fields to the south and west of Florida, employing some brand spanking new deep-water drilling rigs with all the latest technical features. This is terrific, and I’m sure you’ll all join me in congratulating President Obama for moving forward with this much needed expansion of … What’s that? We’re not the ones doing the drilling? Then who is? “Before the end of the year, a Chinese-made drilling platform...

As state, local and federal officials brace for a major offshore drilling operation to begin between Cuba in Key West in December, another exploratory well may be drilled a year later in the Bahamas. The Bahamian and Cuban governments on Oct. 3 signed an agreement delimiting the two nations’ maritime borders after nearly 40 years of negotiations. The move cleared a major obstacle in the way of the Bahamas’ oil exploration goals since leases identified for their potential oil finds are near Cuban waters.

In campaign appearances, Republican U.S. Senate candidate Adam Hasner has repeatedly said he supports oil drilling off Florida's shores, and that he opposed then-Gov. Charlie Crist's attempt to impose an offshore drilling moratorium. In a speech before the Palm Beach County Tea Party's Boca Raton chapter on Oct. 4, Hasner adamantly asserted, "We rejected Charlie Crist's plan to block offshore drilling off of the coast of Florida." The implication in the statement, which you can watch Hasner make in the video posted below, is that he has always supported drilling off the coast of Florida, and that just isn't true.

The petroleum industry is amid a tremendous wave of hiring that's occurring in response to the gradual retirement of the so-called "baby boom" generation, which was spawned in the wake of World War II. Much of the hiring focuses on the very young—both blue collar labor and newly minted petroleum geoscience and engineering grads. Another important trend is on the re-training of mid-career professionals into more labor-tight technical and management positions. The American Petroleum Institute says that it has no statistics on how much hiring is directed toward the young and middle-aged, but other statistics are compelling on how badly...

Mr. Hamm was one of the pioneers of this method in the 1990s, and it has done for the oil industry what hydraulic fracturing has done for natural gas drilling in places like the Marcellus Shale in the Northeast. Both innovations have unlocked decades worth of new sources of domestic fossil fuels that previously couldn't be extracted at affordable cost. Mr. Hamm's rags to riches success is the quintessential "only in America" story. He was the last of 13 kids, growing up in rural Oklahoma "the son of sharecroppers who never owned land." He didn't have money to go to...

Energy Policy: Deep-water drilling will resume in the Florida Strait when a giant, semi-submersible oil rig en route from Singapore arrives later this fall. The bad news is it will not be American. While U.S. oil and energy prices "necessarily skyrocket," as President Obama once said they would under energy policies that have imposed a de facto ban on offshore drilling, a massive Chinese-built semi-submersible oil rig is on its way from Singapore to a drilling position off northwest Cuba perhaps as little as 50 miles from Key West, Fla. The long-predicted move could come as early as November, as...

For anyone who's played the game "Animal, Vegetable, Mineral," it might seem obvious that the Marcellus shale isn't alive and doesn't grow -- it's a rock layer in the ground, so it's a mineral. In the Pennsylvania courts, the answer is not so clear. A Susquehanna County Common Pleas court is headed for a hearing to determine whether the gas-rich Marcellus shale is a mineral, and therefore, included in mineral rights. The state Superior Court ruled this month that case law is unclear, leaving big questions over who legitimately controls drilling rights and the valuable natural gas in the mile-deep...

Since the beginning of the 21st century, a fear has come to pervade the prospects for oil, fueling anxieties about the stability of global energy supplies. It has been stoked by rising prices and growing demand, especially as the people of China and other emerging economies have taken to the road. This specter goes by the name of "peak oil." Its advocates argue that the world is fast approaching (or has already reached) a point of maximum oil output. They warn that "an unprecedented crisis is just over the horizon." The result, it is said, will be "chaos," to say...

President Obama is reviving his battle to kill oil-and-gas industry tax breaks and seeking billions of dollars in other energy-related revenues as part of his wider deficit-cutting and jobs proposals . The White House on Monday sent Congress a plan to pay for Obama’s $447 billion “American Jobs Act” and also cut the deficit by over $3 trillion in 10 years. Several of Obama’s energy tax proposals have sputtered in the past amid resistance from Republicans and oil-state Democrats. But they are part of a White House effort to sharpen the contrast between the president and Republicans over raising...

A new report that predictably found huge potential natural gas supplies in the U.S. also contained news its own writers found surprising - that oil is more abundant than they thought. "Contrary to conventional wisdom the North American oil resource base also could provide substantial supply for decades ahead," the report said.

THE EUROPEAN Commission yesterday issued its strongest rebuke yet to Turkey over its threatening behaviour towards Cyprus’ efforts to drill for hydrocarbon reserves within its own Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). Unfazed, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan continued to raise the stakes in his row with Israel and Cyprus over hydrocarbon explorations in the eastern Mediterranean, vowing yesterday to stop them from exploiting natural resources in the area while also pledging to send warships to escort aid to Gaza. The EU, through Enlargement Commissioner Stefan Fule yesterday “urged Turkey to refrain from any kind of threat, sources of friction or...