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Anadarko Petroleum Corp. has turned a 7,200-ton cell spar hull into a dark cave-like habitat for fish, sea anemones and other deep-sea creatures 200 miles off the coast of Louisiana. The Red Hawk spar facility, which began its operations in the Gulf of Mexico a decade ago, is a series of 560-feet-long steel cylinders used to keep Anadarko’s deep-water natural gas production equipment afloat. The Woodlands oil explorer hopes its $30 million investment to transform it into an artificial reef in late September will be a boon to the fishing industry that supports local economies along the Gulf Coast, said...

Anadarko Petroleum Corp. has harvested the first barrels of petroleum at its deep-water Lucius project in the Gulf of Mexico, one of the biggest startups expected in the U.S. offshore region this year. The Woodlands-based oil explorer’s massive Lucius production facility includes a 23,000-ton truss spar, which is a 110-foot-diameter floating cylindrical hull that can handle up to 80,000 barrels of oil and 450 million cubic feet of natural gas a day. The Lucius field, named after an heir to the Roman throne, houses 300 million barrels of oil equivalent about 230 miles offshore in 7,200 feet of water. The...

For China's shipyards, the oil rig market that was supposed to be a blessing is in danger of becoming a curse. As crude prices slide, oil producers are slashing new project spending. With a near 40 percent slice of a global market worth tens of billions of dollars, Chinese rig builders that offered juicy financing terms and discounts to leapfrog Asian rivals in recent years are now the most exposed to a slowdown. Diversifying to pull out of a downturn in traditional shipbuilding, China's state and privately owned yards have lured orders away from regional peers, building scores of rigs...

What is going on?? It appears that a fifth undersea communications cable has been damaged. The latest...an estimated 1.7 million Internet users in the UAE have been affected by the recent undersea cable damage. A total of five cables being operated by two submarine cable operators have been damaged with a fault in each. These are SeaMeWe-4 (South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe-4) near Penang, Malaysia, the FLAG Europe-Asia near Alexandria, FLAG near the Dubai coast, FALCON near Bandar Abbas in Iran and SeaMeWe-4, also near Alexandria.

More U.S. travelers may soon start flocking to Cuba, but don’t expect oil executives to follow them. Cuba is believed to hold sizable oil and gas resources off its northwest coast, in the eastern Gulf of Mexico — raising speculation that the Communist nation could become an attractive target for energy companies if Wednesday’s diplomatic thaw eventually leads to the end of the five-decade-old U.S. trade embargo. But exploration by Brazilian, Malaysian and Spanish companies in the past few years has failed to produce any gushers — and the current worldwide glut of cheap oil is not going to encourage...

Exxon Mobil Corp., ConocoPhillips and Canada-based Suncor Energy Inc. The parcel is in the Flemish Pass offshore Newfoundland in northeast Canada. That's where Norway-based Statoil ASA (NYSE: STO) last year made a major oil discovery, its third in the Flemish Pass Basin. The record-breaking bid comes as oil prices have fallen to their lowest levels in years, though production is still going strong, Houston Business Journal previously reported. The news helped boost ConocoPhillips' stock on Dec. 16, when it reached $64.94 per share, up nearly 6 percent, before closing at $63.24, up 2.5 percent. Similarly, Exxon's stock jumped to $89.14...

President Barack Obama’s decision to normalize relations between the United States and Cuba may lead to more commercial opportunities for Americans within the island nation. But don’t expect U.S. oil producers to move swiftly to take advantage of them. Although geologists believe billions of barrels of crude may be lurking off Cuba’s coast in the Gulf of Mexico, oil companies have had a hard time finding that black gold. When Repsol, Petronas and other oil companies bored exploratory wells in 2012 and 2013, they turned up dry. In some cases, oil wasn’t found, and in others, the discovery was not...

Oil and gas production has begun at the Jack/St. Malo project in the deep-water Gulf of Mexico, companies involved in the project announced. Chevron Corp. and Statoil said the fields are located about 25 miles apart in 7,000 feet of water 280 south of New Orleans. Chevron said the fields, discovered a decade ago, eventually will reach daily production of 94,000 barrels of oil and 21 million cubic feet of natural gas. Chevron has a 50 percent working interest in the Jack field, with Statoil and Maersk splitting the remaning half. Chevron holds a 51 percent working interest in the...

Norway's Statoil said it has postponed a decision to invest 40 billion crowns ($5.74 billion) in a mature field, saying that it needed more time to refine the project as its profitability was under threat. Statoil said it would decide in October next year instead of March whether to go ahead with a new platform at the Snorre field in the Norwegian Sea as it hoped to cut costs and get more precise cost estimates. The project, which could squeeze another 240 million barrels of oil out of the field, has been in doubt due to high costs, and uncertainty...

The federal government today announced that it will hold its largest-ever competitive lease sale for offshore wind development in January. The feds will allow a dozen developers to bid on access to more than 742,000 acres off the coast of Massachusetts (map) starting Jan. 29, the Interior Department said Monday. The sale would triple the amount of federal offshore acreage available for commercial-scale offshore wind development, the department said. That area — if fully developed — could support as much as five gigawatts of commercial wind generation, enough to power more than 1.4 million homes, according to the U.S. Department...

Statoil announced this morning that effective today it is cancelling its contract for the Stena Carron, an ultra-deepwater drillship constructed in 2008. The Stena Carron was under contract to Statoil for a 3-year term, and is only about a half-a-year in. The 2.5 year contract cancellation will cost Statoil $350 million. Statoil signed the contract for the Stena Carron back in March 2013, and was paying a dayrate of around $630,000 per day for the rig. The total contract value remaining was about $585mm for the rig, and ancillary costs mean the total spread cost here likely would have run...

Interesting here to see transhumanists again talking about moving offshore—literally!—to avoid government regulations. -- Mellonkronos “Researchers, Ahoy! Should Futurist Science Move… Offshore?" By Nikki Olson November 9, 2014 http://transhumanity.net/researchers-ahoy-should-futurist-science-move-offshore/ What is the likelihood of seeing research vessels devoted to scientific research outside the bounds of national jurisdiction? The idea of relocating for the sake of circumventing law, in particular the notion of establishing new nations in international waters, is an idea typically initiated with liberty in mind. The Principality of Sealand, for instance, established in 1967, was founded with the intention of creating a space free from “oppressive laws and...

In a bold move of aggression on Saturday morning, Spanish Navy rigid-hulled inflatable boats repeatedly slammed into Greenpeace protesters off the Canary Islands. The activists were protesting against an offshore drilling campaign headed up by Repsol utilizing the Rowan Renaissance drillship.

Norway's Fred. Olsen Energy said the global rig market would struggle with lower demand and oversupply as it reported third-quarter profits below expectations on Tuesday. Rates in the offshore rig market have fallen from a 2013 high as oil companies cut spending and as newly built rigs enter the market, creating overcapacity. "(There is) continued low contracting activity in all market segments," the firm said in presentation material. "An increase in number of idle rigs is seen, predominantly in international mid water and deepwater markets ... As a result, dayrates have decreased in all market segments." Rival Maersk Drilling, a...

Drilling in the Kara Sea will continue into next year, even if sanctions prevent US firm ExxonMobil from participating, Russia’s Deputy Energy Minister Kirill Molotsov said Monday. According to Molotsov, Russia can independently go ahead with the necessary drilling in the Kara Sea in 2015 with the help of drilling platforms owned by Russian companies. Russia’s largest oil company, Rosneft has opened a large deposit of oil and gas in the area. "In total, we have about eight units of 100 percent Russian-owned platforms,” the deputy energy minister said. In the event Exxon leaves, work in the Arctic will continue,...

There’s still plenty left to parse ahead of Scotland’s historic independence referendum tomorrow, not the least of which are very real concerns over what a “yes” vote might mean for the country’s energy ambitions. The North Sea is lousy with oil deposits (though production from many of these seems to be tapering off), and many of the pro-independence agitators have campaigned on a desire to claim more of the revenues from these offshore plays. But as the New York Times reports, these fields could prove fractious for the Scotland-UK relationship: [A] yes vote on Thursday could lead to protracted wrangling...

More details came to light Tuesday on Shell’s plans for exploratory oil drilling in the Chukchi Sea north of Alaska, as federal regulators released a copy of the company’s broad Arctic drilling blueprint. Shell filed the document with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management last month, a milestone in its quest to resume drilling in the region after its previous, attempt two years ago was marred by mishaps. Shell is aiming to drill up to six wells on separate lease blocks encompassing its Burger prospect in the Chukchi Sea, with work unfolding over several years. It plans to put two...

Investors are losing interest in Brazil's oil industry as the country's energy policies raise costs, reduce efficiency and increase risk, Brazil's oil industry association, the IBP, said on Monday. Without changes Brazil will likely lose out to places such as Mexico, Iran, Iraq and Algeria where policies are becoming more open to private sector investment. "I went to the three largest oil conventions in the world this year and you hardly heard Brazil's name mentioned," Milton Costa Filho, Executive Secretary of the IBP told reporters at an industry event in Rio de Janeiro. "Brazil is falling off the world oil...

A federal judge’s ruling that BP was reckless in the lead-up to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill hinged on mishandling of well integrity tests and a decision to drill deeper than was deemed safe, among other factors the judge said were “motivated by profit.” For years, the London oil company has been waging courtroom warfare over the events before the worst oil spill in U.S. history, pointing to alleged mistakes by cement contractor Halliburton and rig operator Transocean, which owned the Deepwater Horizon rig where 11 workers died in an explosion as the disaster unfolded. U.S. District Judge Carl...

Cuba has shifted its focus away from offshore oil, concentrating on renewable energy and improving output from onshore wells due to a lack of interest by foreign companies for further deepwater exploration,... With so much oil readily available around the world, oil companies...see little incentive in drilling off the Caribbean island, delaying the Cuban dream of oil wealth that could inject vigor into its socialist revolution... Russia's state-run Rosneft and the China National Petroleum Company separately agreed last month to help Communist-run Cuba extract more oil along the traditional northwest heavy oil belt, but did not sign on to deepwater...