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The centerpiece of a more than $1 billion system for containing oil spills will be stored and maintained at a site in Ingleside, Texas, creating additional jobs in the coastal region known for its platform building capabilities. Marine Well Containment Company announced the decision Wednesday. The company says its system will be capable of containing oil spilling from wells in waters up to 10,000 feet deep. It can contain oil flowing at a rate of 100,000 barrels per day, according to Marine Well Containment Company. The system includes a large collection of components that will be stored and maintained either...

A blowout preventer may have ignited the fire that caused a Gulf of Mexico rig to partially collapse Wednesday, after a natural gas well blew out, federal authorities reported. A leak in the natural gas well, owned by Walter Oil & Gas, ignited a fire on a jack-up rig operated by Hercules Offshore late Tuesday night, hours after its 44 workers had been evacuated, according to the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement. The blowout preventer has since collapsed and isolated the fire,reducing the danger of a fire on the remainder of the jack-up rig but making a top kill...

In the waning days of the Los Angeles oil boom, prospectors struck black gold below Torrance and Long Beach, touching off a renewed oil fever in the South Bay. Beachgoers sunned themselves in the shadow of drilling rigs, and nearby Signal Hill became known as "Porcupine Hill" for its spiny forest of derricks. But Hermosa Beach remained a 1.5-square-mile oasis, thanks to a 1932 vote that banned new drilling within the city. More than 50 years later, Santa Monica-based Macpherson Oil dangled the prospect of tens of millions of dollars in royalties, and voters in then-cash-strapped Hermosa voted to lift...

Congress can do more to advance offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean while boosting the economies of coastal states, eight governors said Friday. Options rage from giving states a greater share of federal drilling royalties to passing legislation that would force the Interior Department to make more coastal tracts available for oil and gas development, the group of coastal governors said. The governors, including Texas’ Rick Perry, made their pleas in a letter to their congressional delegations in the nation’s capital. “During this congress, legislators will consider several matters that directly and indirectly affect the future...

Shell’s Olympus platform is finally embarking on its last epic voyage. The Dutch company’s biggest and recently constructed tension leg platform started its final pre-production journey on Sunday, setting sail from the construction dock in Ingleside, Texas (near Corpus Christi) for a 425-mile voyage to the Mars B Field in the Gulf of Mexico. For the next ten days, multiple tugboats will haul the 120,000 ton Olympus through the Aransas Pass jetties to its site destination 130 miles south of New Orleans. Earlier this year, the hull made an 18,000-mile, two-month trek from South Korea to Ingleside. The Olympus is...

Transocean Ltd. announced that its ultra-deepwater drillship Dhirubhai Deepwater KG1 has set a new world record for the deepest water depth by an offshore drilling rig. The Dhirubhai Deepwater KG1 (UDW Drillship) recently drilled a well in 10,411 feet (3,174 meters) of water while working for India's Oil and Natural Gas Corporation Limited (ONGC) off the east coast of India. "This accomplishment surpasses Transocean’s prior world record of 10,385 feet of water (3,165 meters) also set by the KG1 while working for ONGC in India in February," Transocean said in a press release. ONGC reported that well # 1-D-1 in...

This Saturday a commemoration service will be held in Aberdeen, Scotland to mark the 25th anniversary of the world's worst offshore oil and gas disaster. On July 6th 1988, 167 oil workers were killed, while there were just 62 survivors, after a gas condensate leak led to an explosion and fire on the North Sea platform Piper Alpha, which was completely destroyed. The service, which will be held at Aberdeen's Hazlehead Gardens at 11 a.m. (UK time), will be another reminder of the risks taken by oil and gas workers in the North Sea and in other offshore locations around...

Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe’s GreenTech Automotive took advantage of a loophole that allowed the company an exemption from Securities Exchange Commission regulation.

Hello Russia news Freepers. Tired of all this talk about companies hiding money offshore and not paying taxes? If there is one man who can make some noise about this, it won't be Obama. It'll be Putin. He already is taking over from British PM David Cameron who first made overtures to the fact that offshoring was unfair.

Broad, bipartisan support is building among lawmakers at the state and federal levels for expanding access to offshore oil and gas drilling and development, said Erik Milito, American Petroleum Institute director of upstream and industry operations. Speaking to reporters during a June 5 conference call from Washington, DC, Milito said increased offshore access would mean increased jobs and revenue for the states of Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. “The United States must pursue smart federal policies” that would expand the Outer Continental Shelf program, Milito said. “Developing our offshore resources is vital.” Drilling off Virginia and other Atlantic states...

TOKYO - Three Japanese energy companies jointly said Wednesday they have confirmed natural gas and condensate reserves in exploration blocks offshore in Vietnam. Idemitsu Kosan Co., JX Holdings Inc. and Inpex Corp. have drilled three wells in two blocks located 300 kilometers southeast of Ho Chi Minh, they said in a statement. The three companies will further explore the blocks to gauge the size of the reserves and conduct test drilling on other prospective structures in the blocks, the statement said.

Royal Dutch Shell is making the final preparations to sail its state-of-the-art Olympus platform into the Gulf of Mexico, and showed it off to a group of journalists Wednesday. (Check back throughout the afternoon for more photos from inside Olympus.) The Olympus, designed to operate in water depths of 3,000 to 8,000 feet, will be Shell’s sixth tension leg platform in the Gulf. The platform is docked at the Ingleside shipyard near Corpus Christi and will leave in about a month to work at the Mars B project, comprising the platform and a six-well subsea development 130 miles south of...

Royal Dutch/Shell will build the world's deepest offshore oil and gas facility, pushing the boundaries of industry technology to search three kilometres (1.9 miles) underwater in the Gulf of Mexico. The project go-ahead demonstrates Shell's confidence in pricey offshore projects despite a recent downturn in oil prices. Last month, BP decided to delay development of its biggest new Gulf of Mexico project, Mad Dog Phase 2, citing tough market conditions and fast-rising costs. Shell's 100 percent-owned Stones field was discovered in 2005 some 200 miles southwest of New Orleans and encompasses eight lease blocks in the Gulf of Mexico's Lower...

Oil and gas companies will face a tougher regulatory regime in the United States as the U.S. government introduces new rules over the next two years to improve industry safety following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon incident, according to the findings of a recent survey by GL Noble Denton. The independent industry technical provider's new report "Reinventing Regulation: The impact of U.S. reform on the oil and gas industry" includes data gathered from over 100 senior oil and gas professionals and in-depth interviews with 10 industry executives, analysts and academics. Eighty-five percent of survey respondents told GL Noble Denton they expected...

Chevron struck oil in a well drilled more than 6 miles deep in a new field off the coast of Louisiana, the company said Monday. Operating in 6,000 feet of water, Chevron drilled through a thick underground salt layer to find oil at a depth of 31,866 feet below sea level. The well found 400 feet of net oil pay. Feet of net pay is a measurement used by oil companies to gauge the vertical thickness of the hydrocarbon-bearing area found in an exploration well. The so-called Coronado prospect is located more than 190 miles south of Louisiana and is...

The hull of Royal Dutch Shell’s latest offshore platform, which traveled from South Korea, arrived Saturday from at a Texas port where it will be assembled before it sails to its final location in the Gulf of Mexico. The new offshore platform, the Olympus, traveled more than 18,000 miles in two months to Ingleside, Texas, where its topside will be assembled over the next two months. Shell designed the Olympus as a tension leg platform, which provides a large enough deck to process oil on deck. The Olympus will be Shell’s sixth tension leg platform and its largest to date....

The Obama administration ordered a broad review of Shell’s Arctic drilling program on Tuesday, following a series of mishaps that culminated with the grounding of the company’s Kulluk rig on New Year’s Eve. The move calls into question whether Shell Oil Co. will be allowed to continue its hunt for crude under the Chukchi and Beaufort seas north of Alaska, after spending $5 billion and more than six years on the quest. In announcing the probe, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar stressed that the Obama administration “is fully committed to exploring for potential in energy resources in frontier areas, such as...

A massive campaign to free a grounded Arctic drilling rig that employed more than a dozen ships and some 730 people cleared a big hurdle Monday, as salvagers pulled the vessel to safe harbor in Alaska. Salvage teams anchored the Kulluk rig in Kodiak Island’s Kiliuda Bay after arriving there at 10 a.m. Alaska Standard Time, 1 p.m. Monday in Houston. But for Shell, which owns the 266-foot conical drilling unit and planned to use it to continue a $5 billion quest for Arctic oil this summer, the work is just beginning. Salvage specialists will conduct a detailed inspection of...

Even if Shell is able to free its grounded Kulluk drilling rig from a rocky Alaskan island shore, it may be too damaged to resume hunting Arctic oil this summer. The 29-year-old conical drilling unit is uniquely designed to weather floating ice, and replacements aren’t readily available. Even if Shell Oil Co. could find an Arctic-ready rig, it almost certainly would not secure air pollution permits for a different vessel in time to resume drilling wells this July. “These are very specialized rigs,” noted Dave Pursell, managing director of the Houston-based energy investment bank Tudor Pickering Holt & Co. “If...

Exxon Mobil Corp. is leading a $14 billion project to produce oil off of Canada’s northeast coast, the company announced Friday. Exxon Mobil expects the project to recover more than 700 million barrels of oil from a field in water about 300 feet deep off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador. Production at the Hebron field is set to start in early 2017 and will be capable of churning out 150,000 barrels of oil per day, according to an Exxon Mobil announcement. The project is among several massive efforts being pursued by Exxon Mobil, the world’s second largest publicly traded...