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An estimated 21,000 gallons of oil dumped into the ocean from a broken pipeline just off the central California coast before it was shut off on Tuesday, creating a spill stretching about 4 miles along the beach, the U.S. Coast Guard said. Santa Barbara County health officials have shut down Refugio State Beach, the central site of the spill, though many had abandoned the site already because of the foul smell. That smell brought county firefighters to the beach earlier in the day to discover the spill. “They found about a half-mile slick of dark, black crude oil in the...

Offshore driller Transocean has idled three more deep water rigs, bringing its number of out-of-work units to 15, it said Monday, as the oil slump continued to hammer the drilling market. The Swiss rig contractor with corporate offices in Houston has idled 10 rigs and stacked five others, and it has said it plans to sell 19 units for scrap. Idle rigs are between contracts; stacked machines are shut down for longer periods, and scrapped rigs are torn apart for their steel hides. Transocean owns or has a stake in 65 offshore rigs around the world. The three Transocean rigs...

For project developers seeking the next big petro-play, some key news this week. With lawmakers in America moving to open one of the biggest swaths of new acreage in the history of the industry. On Tuesday, the U.S. senate introduced three bills to expand areas accessible for oil and gas drilling -- targeting the eastern Gulf of Mexico, Atlantic Ocean, and the Arctic. The Gulf of Mexico acreage would be the nearest play at hand. With this week's bill contemplating allowing drilling in this area as early as 2017.

According to US federal records reviewed by the Associated Press, Louisiana-based LLOG Exploration Offshore plans to engage in deepwater drilling in the Macondo reservoir. The AP says Harper's Magazine first reported the drilling plans late Tuesday. The BSEE green-lighted LLOG's permit to drill a new well near the Macondo site on April 13. Last October, the company's exploration plan was approved after the conclusion of an environmental review conducted by the BOEM. Referring to the 2010 Macondo incident which occurred in the same reservoir, LLOG's vice president for deepwater projects, Rick Fowler, told the AP, "Our commitment is not to...

...Shell acquired the lease for just over $2 billion in 2008, and, absent a very good reason, the government felt obliged to approve it. Shell will be bound by safeguards that did not exist seven years ago. Several factors — including lawsuits and vigorous lobbying by environmental groups, widespread public dismay caused by the 2010 BP oil spill, and Shell’s ineptitude in earlier trial runs — have led the government to devise rules that are likely to make this project safer than it would have been. Shell is seeking to drill up to six exploratory wells in the Chukchi Sea...

ConocoPhillips CEO Ryan Lance said Tuesday that the Obama administration’s decision to allow a competitor’s Arctic drilling program to move forward has provided some, but not all, of the clarifications they were looking in their own projects in the region. The U.S. government on Monday gave Shell’s $6 billion plan to explore for crude oil in the northern Chukchi Sea a preliminary OK, reviving exploration plans that have faced significant political, engineering and cost challenges. Lance said that the go-ahead given to Shell’s program has not resolved all of ConocoPhillips’ Arctic questions. “A lot of the [regulations] are still subject...

Cuba unveiled new data on Wednesday it said confirmed there were billions of barrels of oil beneath its Gulf of Mexico waters but admitted there was little interest in new exploration even with the thaw in U.S. relations. The United States and Cuba have vowed to restore diplomatic relations after more than 50 years of animosity, but the comprehensive U.S. trade embargo remains in place. While U.S. tourism, transportation and agriculture companies position themselves for Cuban business, oil companies have proven less eager since three exploratory wells came up dry in 2012. Low oil prices and new opportunities in Mexico's...

HOUSTON — Offshore platforms have a lot of hard-to-reach places, and a first-time exhibitor at the Offshore Technology Conference wants to use flying robots to make those tough corners more accessible. U.K.-based Sky-Futures has built a business using drones to inspect areas such as the underbelly of offshore platforms and burning flare stacks. The company’s co-founder and CEO James Harrison — who spent years working with information-gathering drones in Iraq and Afghanistan — said using the robots to do the inspection work makes it more efficient and safer. Historically, crews of workers inspecting those spots have had to dangle from...

A ruling by the city of Seattle may throw a wrench into Shell’s Arctic drilling plans, but it won’t delay the company’s plans to bore two new wells in the Chukchi Sea this summer, a top executive vowed Tuesday. Although “it’s not my preferred approach . . . we have backup plans,” said Ann Pickard, Royal Dutch Shell’s executive vice president for the Arctic. “I don’t think this will delay the program.” At issue is Seattle Mayor Ed Murray’s ruling this week that the city port must obtain a new land-use permit to serve as a home base for Shell’s...

An accident on an oil well-maintenance platform killed two workers and injured 10 off Mexico’s coast on Tuesday, company officials reported, blaming the incident on the collapse of one of the rig’s legs. State oil company Petroleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, said the Troll Solution rig was maneuvering to perform offshore maintenance at the time of the accident in the Bay of Campeche, in the Gulf of Mexico. Pemex blamed a structural failure in the leg. The rig was “listing” but had not sunk, the company said via Twitter.

HOUSTON – High-horsepower pumps and big hydraulic fracturing trucks, the primary tools used to bust open U.S. shale rock, have carved out parking spaces of their own at the Offshore Technology Conference. They’re an attraction for foreign onlookers interested in the technology that brought a rush of American oil to market. But more and more, they’re a jumping off point for oil producers looking to break open hard sandstone reservoirs found in deeper offshore fields, like at Chevron’s Jack/St. Malo project in the Gulf of Mexico. Offshore producers have fractured conventional wells for decades, but advances in the landlocked U.S....

Folks, there is exactly one way you're going to put a stop to this sort of nonsense: At the end of October, IT employees at Walt Disney Parks and Resorts were called, one-by-one, into conference rooms to receive notice of their layoffs. Multiple conference rooms had been set aside for this purpose, and in each room an executive read from a script informing the worker that their last day would be Jan. 30, 2015. Some workers left the rooms crying; others appeared shocked. This went on all day. As each employee received a call to go to a conference room,...

Like cars, some microbes use oil as fuel. Such microorganisms are a big reason why BP's 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was not far worse. "The microbes did a spectacular job of eating a lot of the natural gas," says biogeochemist Chris Reddy of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The relatively small hydrocarbon molecules in natural gas are the easiest for microorganisms to eat. "The rate and capacity is a mind-boggling testament to microbes," he adds. As Reddy suggests, the microbes got help from the nature of the oil spilled—so-called Louisiana light, sweet crude mixed with natural...

As a response to lower oil prices, E&P companies have guided considerable cuts in their 2015 investment budgets. Preliminary budgets indicate a ~20% drop in global E&P investments this year, with shale declining the most. Observing historical trends, Figure 1 shows global investments for offshore and shale oil and gas. During the past decade, offshore investments have increased from ~ US$150 billion in 2005 to ~ US$360 billion in 2014. The growth in offshore investments is a combination of higher activity and higher unit costs (i.e., rig rates). Also over the last 10 years, shale activity accelerated as horizontal hydraulic...

NEW ORLEANS — As oil gushed from BP’s ruptured well five years ago and public outrage built by the day, the Obama administration issued a six-month moratorium on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. When the well was finally capped after nearly three months, political and industry pressure mounted on the White House to lift the ban, which it did about a month earlier than planned. Since then, oil and gas drilling Gulf has bounced back strongly and the number of deep-water drilling rigs has actually increased from 35 to about 48. Drillers are pushing into even deeper water and...

The Obama administration is eyeing an auction of offshore oil drilling leases along the East Coast in 2021, but that’s not enough to keep the United States competitive with other Atlantic nations, a Shell executive told Congress on Wednesday. “The Gulf of Mexico has kept the United States globally competitive for decades,” Mark Shuster, Shell’s executive vice president of upstream Americas exploration, told a House Natural Resources subcommittee. “The U.S. stands to lose a lot if we don’t make new acreage available.” At issue is the Interior Department’s draft plan for selling oil and gas leases on the U.S. outer...

Access to images perhaps similar to those that captivated viewers in real time around the world during the Deepwater Horizon disaster would be standard procedure under a new set of proposed federal offshore guidelines. These include the live monitoring of deepwater and high-temperature/high pressure drilling activities, similar to what is currently used onshore. “The real-time monitoring requirement ensures that the operator has access to onshore technical expertise if needed and that there is ‘another set of eyes’ available during critical operations,” according to the statement. Houston personal injury lawyer Charles Herd, a partner at The Lanier Law Firm, which represented...

Wednesday morning, social network users reported a fire on the dwelling platform Abkatun Alfa located in Mexico's oil-rich Bay of Campeche. According to local media reports, the Abkatun Alpha is a dwelling platform purposed for housing personnel working offshore in the Bay of Campeche. Early reports also indicate it is owned by a private firm subcontracted by Pemex. Preliminary information indicates a failure in operation processes caused the fire. The incident prompted the evacuation of the platform. Some injuries were also reported. The injured were transported via helicopter from the rig to hospitals in Ciudad del Carmen. One death, 48...

Exxon Mobil Corp. said Monday it had begun producing from its Hadrian South Gulf of Mexico project. Total production of the project is expected to reach about 300 million cubic feet of gas and 3,000 barrels of liquids per day from two wells. The well is located about 230 miles offshore and in about 7,650 feet of water. First production comes after a discovery well was drilled in 2008 and an appraisal well was completed in 2009. Exxon operates the Hadrian South project with a 46.7 percent interest while Brazil’s Petrobras and Italy’s Eni hold a 23.3 percent and 30...

Not so long ago, advanced drillships costing more than half a billion dollars each and capable of operating in ever-deeper waters practically guaranteed big profits for oil-rig operators. Now, with oil prices down by half since June, many have become a burden on their owners as drilling activity slows. Drillship operators face a more brutal hit to margins than they did after the oil-price crash of 2008 because of the huge cost of maintaining the more than $10 billion worth of state-of-the-art vessels that have been idled at sea, analysts say. Noble Corp Plc, Ensco Plc and Transocean Ltd are...