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ConocoPhillips officials say the company will stop searching for oil and gas in deep-water fields by 2017, and it plans to sell the offshore leases it doesn’t intend to drill. Its exit from deep-water exploration would free up roughly $800 million in capital, the amount it has budgeted for exploration next year. Plus, it will save on costs on that side of the business, Matt Fox, ConocoPhillips' executive vice president of exploration and production, told investors on Thursday. “It’s a strategic decision to exit deep-water exploration,” Fox said. It is part of the company’s plan to sell $1 billion to...

Offshore engineering company McDermott International’s stock shot up by more than 30 percent Wednesday after the company said it had landed a $1.5 billion-plus contract with Saudi Aramco. McDermott CEO David Dickson called the contract an important step in a turnaround for the Houston-based company, which as recently as 2013 had been struggling to build offshore platforms and support structures profitably. Investors sent the company’s shares up $1.03 to $4.49 in midday trading Thursday. “We had a tough time through the end of 2013; 2014 was a real turnaround,” Dickson said in an interview with FuelFix. He joined McDermott in...

Activists trying to stop Shell’s offshore oil drilling in the U.S.’s Arctic Ocean region invoke the interests of native Alaskans. “These communities depend on this environment for food and resources and have stewarded it for centuries,” Greenpeace says, as part of its “The People vs. Shell” campaign—what the group describes as possibly “the most important fight in environmental history.” A lot of native Alaskans, including many who live along the state’s North Slope, would prefer that Greenpeace mind its own business.

The developer of the nation’s first commercial-scale offshore wind farm installed the first steel foundation for the project off Rhode Island’s coast. The Sunday installation of Deepwater Wind Block Island Wind Farm came just in time for a Monday tour of the site that will include Obama administration officials, lawmakers and Rhode Island’s governor, among others. ADVERTISEMENT “It was a very big moment,” Jeffrey Grybowski, Chief Executive Officer of Deepwater Wind, told the Providence Journal shortly after watching the first foundation’s installation from a boat. The company had hoped to install the foundation on Thursday, but the weather did not...

Ridgewood Energy is not letting $50 oil shift its aim. The energy company focused on the deep-water Gulf of Mexico closed a nearly $2 billion private equity fund that it contends will still prove profitable. Houston- and New Jersey-based Ridgewood said its new $1.94 billion, Ridgewood Energy Oil & Gas Fund III is its biggest yet and exceeded its initial $1.5 billion target. As other companies slow down their expensive deep-water Gulf investments, Ridgewood says it can find and develop oil there for $20 a barrel or less, although the break even is closer to $35 a barrel with other...

The Obama administration delivered a major blow to Shell’s Arctic drilling plans on Tuesday, by ruling that wildlife protections bar the company from simultaneously boring two wells into the Chukchi Sea this summer. The decision will force Shell to scale back its hopes of completing two exploratory oil wells in waters north of Alaska this summer and is another setback for the firm that has spent seven years and $7 billion trying to find crude in the Arctic Ocean. At issue is the Fish and Wildlife Service’s decision to allow sound from Shell’s planned drilling to disturb walruses, polar bears...

Alaska's crude oil production has declined from 1.8 million barrels per day (MMb/d) in 1991 to 0.5 MMb/d in 2014, and it is expected to continue declining through 2040. Almost 75% of Alaska's crude oil production from 1990 to 2012 was from the Prudhoe Bay and Kuparuk River fields in the central North Slope, which respectively produced 4.9 billion and 1.7 billion barrels of crude oil over this period. Crude oil production in Alaska is sensitive to the challenging environment—including variable ice conditions and limited time without ice coverage—as well as pipeline economics. However, recent conditional approval granted to Royal...

Mexican state oil company Pemex announced five new shallow­water discoveries in the Gulf of Mexico in what it said was its biggest exploration success in five years. Emilio Lozoya, Pemex chief, made the announcement at the inauguration of a national oil and gas conference one month before Mexico’s historic first oil and gas tender. The July 15 auction, of 14 shallow­water exploration blocks in the same area as the new discoveries, is expected to signal the start of billions of dollars in private investment flowing into the sector. “The certain prospect of 200,000 extra barrels of production is very good...

In the largest expansion of national marine sanctuaries in California in 23 years, the Obama administration on Tuesday more than doubled the size of two Northern California marine sanctuaries, extending them by 50 miles up the rugged Sonoma and Mendocino coasts. Under the dramatic move by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the boundaries of the Gulf of the Farallones and Cordell Bank national marine sanctuaries expand from Bodega Bay to Point Arena, permanently banning offshore oil drilling along that stretch of coast. "These waters represent an extraordinary marine ecosystem, one of the richest on our planet," said Maria Brown,...

North Coast state Sen. Mike McGuire’s bill to permanently ban new oil drilling in state waters along the 840-mile California coast was approved by the Senate Wednesday and now moves to the Assembly. Calling the coast a “worldwide wonder,” McGuire, D-Healdsburg, said his bill will protect the natural beauty of the coast, which draws 150 million visitors a year and contributes $40 billion to the state economy. The bill closes a loophole in a 1994 law that banned oil and gas development in state waters, which extend out three miles from shore, but permitted exceptions in cases where state oil...

Plains All American Pipeline, the company which owns the pipeline at the centre of an oil spill off the coast of California, on Monday downgraded the amount of oil it says spilled in a worst-case scenario. The company said the estimate of the worst-case volume of oil released was up to 101,000 gallons – about 4,200 gallons less than previously believed. Plains All American is still cleaning up the spill along the Santa Barbara County coastline and recovering oil from the pipeline, so the calculations are not final.

NEW ORLEANS – A committee of lawyers representing businesses and individuals claiming damages from the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill announced a $211 million settlement Wednesday with Transocean Ltd., owner of the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon drilling rig.

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...