THE long-running saga around holidays for offshore workers appears finally to have been brought to a close, with the decision of the Supreme Court handed down on December 7 in Russell and others v Transocean International Resources Limited (Scotland).
FOR many, the turning of the year is a time of reflection; especially what we could have and perhaps should have done better during the old year and laying grand plans for the new one . . . personal if not corporate.
AT LEAST Ofgem delivered on one promise - that it would publish the findings of its catchily-named TransmiT exercise before Christmas and indeed it came as a gift-wrapped package for the onshore wind industry.
SOME people used to call me Dr Gloom because of my economic forecasts for the Scottish economy. I felt that was unfair because I have actually had an accurate forecasting record over the last decade and rarely been more pessimistic than the actual outcomes.
I WONDER if it's too late for me to become a physicist because I find the hunt for the Higgs Boson utterly fascinating.
LAST month, a FTSE100 company announced plans to spend $4.5billion on developing its interests in various US gas fields. Nothing unusual in that you say; however, but the business in question is not an oil & gas company, but a miner.
LAST month you may have noticed more men than usual sporting a newly-grown moustache.
TRADITIONALLY, so-called "agreements to agree" were considered unenforceable under English and Scots law because they lacked the necessary certainty.
ERNST & Young's Global Capital Confidence Barometer is a regular survey of senior executives from large companies around the world conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU).
I ENJOY visiting Shetland; I spent a lot of time there in the 1970s when the Sullom Voe oil terminal was being built and have been back many times since.
WHENEVER I see the words "jobs joy" in a headline, I skip the first six paragraphs in order to search for the nitty-gritty. Does the project exist or is it proposed? Therein sits a crucial world of difference.
I'VE just been in Norway; Bergen to be precise. The objective was to visit a number of key companies with a heavy commitment to subsea, including the biggest purchaser of technologies and services on the Norwegian Continental Shelf . . . Statoil itself.
I SOMETIMES wonder whether those in government actually have their brains wired up differently to the rest of us.
Hooray ... at last ... a UK company, Scottish to boot, has made a bold step into meaningful manufacturing of components for large wind turbines by buying Finnish company Moventas for £85million.
So, the platforms for the Nexen-operated Golden Eagle project have gone to the Middle East, or more correctly the UAE-domiciled but London-listed group Lamprell.
The oil and gas industry has had much to celebrate lately; we have seen major projects coming on stream and there is a robust pipeline of new work.
THE safety and environmental impact of the offshore oil and gas industry has, in past year or so, seen unprecedented scrutiny by the press and regulators.
THE level of global upstream oil and gas assets merger & acquisition activity was a little bit flat through early 2011.
THE world's most-populous country, China, is also the second-largest consumer of oil; moreover, this huge country's rapidly rising demand and imports have made it a significant player in global energy markets.
WHEN we at Oil & Gas UK recently published our 2011 Economic Report, we highlighted some pretty positive findings: increasing investment, a flourishing supply chain, a massive economic contribution and a bright future ahead with considerable reserves remaining to be extracted.
IN JANUARY 2009, Heritage Oil, in partnership with Tullow Oil, announced that exploration on concessions in the Lake Albert Basin in Uganda held over 2billion barrels in reserves, far exceeding the commercial viability threshold.
OH DEAR, the meddlers at the European Commission are at it again . . . planning a raft of new rules and regulations without taking proper account of what is already in place.
LONGANNET is dead. Long live carbon capture and storage. The two statements are by no means incompatible, as some of the obituary notices for the ScottishPower project in Fife have suggested.
THE latest UKCS oil and production statistics from the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) show big falls. June's output averaged 946,982 barrels per day, which was down 12.4% on June 2010. Gas averaged 4,004million (4billion) cu.ft, down 26.5% year on year.
THE announcement by BP of its intention to invest £4.5billion in the Clair Ridge development West of Shetland has quite rightly attracted a lot of interest, not least from PM David Cameron.