A senior official working for Iraq’s North Oil Company (NOC) has been shot dead – just a month after his predecessor at the state-run firm was killed. The chief engineer, Saad Ali Hussain, had been driving to his office in the city of Kirkuk when he was attacked.
Energy giant Total has been fined £1.4million after a worker was killed in an oil refinery explosion. Contractor Robert Greenacre, 24, was working under a distillation column containing hot crude oil, which was released and caught alight at the huge plant in North Killingholme, North Lincolnshire five years ago. A colleague was able to escape with minor burns but Mr Greenacre died at the scene.
Nominations are now open for the sixth annual Opito Safety and Competency Awards.
Italy’s Foreign Minister said “prudence and discretion” were essential as the country attempts to bring four kidnapped oil workers home from Libya. The families of four men have been in an anxious wait for news after they were taken near to an industrial complex owned by energy company Eni in the western city of Mellitah. Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni said: "Prudence and discretion....are needed to bring home our four countrymen.
An offshore worker has been airlifted to hospital after injuring himself on a vessel near BP’s Schiehallion oil field, west of Shetland. The man was working on the North Sea Atlantic supply ship, run by Technip UK, when the incident took place at around 3.15pm.
Four Italian workers have been kidnapped in Libya. The incident happened near an industrial complex owned by energy company Eni in the western city of Mellitah. The Italian Foreign Ministry said the employees had been kidnapped on Sunday.
An investigation is underway after Nexen Energy had to shutdown a pipeline which leaked more than 30,000 barrels of emulsion. The company, a subsidiary of CNOOC, said the incident happened at its Long Lake oil sands facility. The pipeline and connecting pad site have since been isolated in a bid to stop the leak.
Petrofac has been issued an improvement notice after a gas leak went undetected on a North Sea platform. The incident is understood to have happened in March on the Kittiwake platform, which is located 160km from Aberdeen. It is understood a worker alerted staff to the leak 84 minutes after it had first begun and production was immediately halted.
A Plains All American pipeline has spilled an estimated 4,200 gallons of crude oil near St Louis in the US. The incident it’s the second leak for the company in around two months. In May, a leak in Santa Barbara County, California, created an oil spill nine miles long. The company said the flow of oil from the pipeline near St Louis has since been stopped and an emergency response plan was implemented to contain the release, which happened on July 10.
Twelve people died and three were injured in an explosion during repair work at an Eni SpA crude oil pipeline in Nigeria. The victims worked on a maintenance team for a local service company, Rome-based Eni said in a statement Friday. The Tebidaba-Clough Creek pipeline in the Niger delta was previously “damaged by acts of sabotage.” The company said it is still investigating the cause of Thursday’s blast.
Aberdeen safety consultancy Optimus Seventh Generation has been acquired by Dekra Insight.
An investigation has been launched after an incident at a Brazilian oil terminal operated by state-owned Petrobas caused two fatalities. Two workers were killed after scaffolding erected on a construction project at the site collapsed at the end of a pier operated by Transpetro, which is the company’s pipeline and shipping unit. It is understood the workers, who had been wearing security belts, drowned during the incident.
A rig will have to undergo months of repairs and maintenance after one of its jack-up legs collapsed – causing it to keel into waters offshore Qatar. The incident happened in the Maersk Oil operated field Al Shaheen on the Rumailah rig, which is owned by GIS (Gulf International Services). Both companies said all personnel were evacuated safely and no injuries had been reported.
A number of business leaders will gather in Aberdeen today to discuss the challenges and importance of maintaining a healthy workforce in the current economic climate. A round table event is being held by RGU:Wellness, a unique occupational health service for workplace absence management, to address the increasing challenge of ensuring that employee health and wellbeing remains a strategic priority.
A judge has granted a bid by Scotland's senior law officer to get access to black box data from a crashed helicopter which claimed the lives of four offshore workers. The Lord Advocate, Frank Mulholland QC, had sought court authority to make the combined voice and flight data recorder (CVFDR) available to him in a move opposed by the pilots' union, BALPA.
An audit by the PSA (Petroleum Safety Authority) Norway has criticised Statoil over an alleged failure to monitor the condition of safety-critical blowout preventer equipment on a pair of North Sea platforms. Between October 2014 and January 2015 the PSA conducted the audits at Oseberg B and Gullfaks C. The authority said the findings were applied primarily to the BOP (Blowout Preventer) system which had been chosen as a particular object of verification during the audit.
A worker has been injured following a light hydrocarbon release at oil major Shell's refinery in Ontario, Canada. According to reports, the worker sustained burns and was in a stable condition. The incident comes after the family of a worker killed in an explosion were given an estimated $5million as part of a settlement deal.
Nigeria’s Red Cross says a runaway oil tanker truck exploded in a crowded bus station in the south of the country, igniting 11 other vehicles and burning 69 people to death. Red Cross chairman Peter Emeka Kathy said Monday that about 30 other victims have been taken to hospital with severe burns.
Oil major Chevron has reached a settlement with the family of a worker who was burned to death in a gas well fire in the US. Ian McKee died aged 27-years-old when he had gone to investigate the hissing sound of gas which was escaping under high pressure at the Chevron Lanco 7H well in Greene County, Pennslyvania.
A tornado in Texas has left three people injured after hitting a natural gas drilling rig in Texas. According to reports, one victim suffered minor injuries, another had non-life threatening injuries to his face and a third had suffered an injury to their abdomen.
Northern Alberta firefighters are battling a wildfire that has moved within 5 kilometers of Cenovus Energy Inc’s oil sands operations. The Cold Lake Air Weapons Range blaze is spreading in the direction of oil and gas operations and threatens plants run by Cenovus and Canadian Natural Resources Ltd., Scott Long, an executive director at the Alberta Emergency Management Agency, said in a press conference Wednesday. Firefighters put in containment and protection guards to keep it from getting closer, he said. Wildfires have prompted the shutdown of 230,000 barrels a day of oil-sands output, about 10 percent of Canada’s production.
Hundreds of workers have been evacuated from three oil sands projects in Alberta as wildfires affect the region. Statoil, MEG Energy and Cenovus Energy made the move as fires coarsed through the area. Projects have also been shutdown by Cenovus and Canadian Natural Resources, though none have been affected by the fires.
Workers have been safely evacuated after the Foster Creek oil sands and Athabasca natural gas operation after a forest fire on the Cold Lake Air Weapons Range in northeastern Alberta. The fire has been burning about 25kilometres south of Cenovus's Foster Creek facility. The company said the decision to send staff home and shut down production was made because of the fire's proximity to the only access road to the facilities.
Safety officials have warned owners of the oil pipeline which ruptured last week that numerous measures must be taken before the line can be restarted. Work needed includes an in-depth analysis of the factors which may have contributed to the spill. The corrective action order was issued just a few days after the incident by the US Transportation Department's Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Administration.
A platform gathering oil in the Gulf of Mexico shut in about 2,200 barrels a day of output after a compressor caught fire. The Texas Petroleum Investment Co. platform in Breton Sound Block 21, near the southeastern Louisiana coast, evacuated 28 workers without injury after the compressor fire, according to a US Coast Guard statement. A Coast Guard boat crew was fighting the blaze, and a 1.4-mile rainbow sheen was “drifting southwest of the platform.”