BRAZIL'S Petrobras has booked 22 years' worth of work with Transocean that will soak up four of the US group's rigs and bring in revenues estimated at some $3billion. And it has won a further $1billion of work in the US Gulf of Mexico. Rigs to go on long-term hire to Petrobras are the Sedco 707, Sedco 710, Deepwater Navigator and Transocean Driller.
The deepwater rig construction boom seems unstoppable, with another crop of orders placed over the past few weeks in Singapore and with Norwegian names once again to the fore as clients, notably Sevan Marine, which has ordered another pair of Sevan 650 drilling units from COSCO of Singapore.
During the holiday season in 2007, there was no let-up in drilling activity. But what a difference a year makes as, this July, only three wells were spudded - all appraisals. That's substantially below the count in 2007.
IF TRAVEL really broadens the mind, the president of the Scomi Group's oilfield services division, Chris Pianca, should be on Mastermind every week.
ABERDEEN Art Gallery was the setting for the 20th anniversary party of oil&gas consultant Genesis, whose worldwide empire includes main bases in London, Paris, Perth, Western Australia, and Aberdeen.
EXHIBITING at Offshore Northern Seas? Or perhaps you're planning a bit of hospitality but have failed to do anything about it.
Norwegian drilling company Awilco has fallen prey to COSL, China's largest offshore oil services group, in a deal worth $2.5billion.
LUNDIN Petroleum's Caspian Sea Morskaya-1 discovery well in the Russian sector has been successfully tested at a combined flowrate of 2,500 barrels per day of 32 deg API oil.
A CONSORTIUM comprising BW Offshore units Advanced Production & Loading (APL) and SBM Offshore have secured a contract with Total for the engineering, procurement, supply, construction and installation (EPSCI) of the oil loading system on the Pazflor project offshore Angola in deepwater block 17. The contract is worth about $100million and the project is due for delivery early-2011.
BP IS at last poised to start development of its Liberty field offshore Alaska, three years after making the decision to press ahead and 11 years following discovery in 1997.
WEST Africa: Liberia's ministry of land, mines, and energy has launched a new licensing round in which five offshore blocks are to be offered to the highest bidder.
NOF Energy has signed what it calls a global partner agreement with the South Africa Oil & Gas Alliance (SAOGA).
ROCKSOURCE is to carry out a controlled source electromagnetic (CSEM) survey over the Cyclops prospect straddling blocks 17/6 and 17/9 in the Norwegian sector of the North Sea.Cyclops is located just north of the Bream and Brisling oil discoveries and is part of the same Middle Jurassic play. The prospect is estimated to contain 100million barrels of recoverable oil.
THE International Marine Contractors Association (IMCA) has called on the offshore industry to report all incidents involving dynamic positioning (DP) station-keeping as part of a wider drive to enhance ship-related safety.
Norwegian company DOF Subsea has taken delivery of its latest construction vessel from Aker Yards and immediately deployed it on an eight-year charter with subsea group Acergy.
THE Faroese ministry of fishery and natural resources has launched its third licensing round with a call for interested companies to apply for exploration licences offshore.
WITH the current record high oil prices and the continuing boom in the offshore industry, staffing issues are seen as one of the most challenging problems facing the industry. A number of recent reports highlight the shortage of qualified and experienced staff required in many areas of engineering and there continue to be high staff turnover rates in many areas.
Driven partly by the European Union's renewable energy targets for 2010 and 2020, most member countries have set themselves ambitious wind energy targets.
There is a journalistic ritual of placing the words, "the influential", in front of the name of any parliamentary committee in order to add a bit of weight and significance to whatever subject it is reporting on. In fact, most parliamentary committees and their reports are pretty non-influential, even if they grab a few headlines.
It was really quite remarkable. I nearly fell off my chair when I heard that, at the recent G8 meeting, Gordon Brown was effectively trying to dictate technology policy by saying that all British motorists will be driving electric or hybrid cars by 2020. Eh?
It's great news that expansion in offshore wind could create up to 30,000 new jobs in manufacturing and bring £3billion of investment to the north-east of England - or as BERR parochially puts it, the north-east, forgetting that there is also the north-east of Scotland.
INTEREST offshore Kenya is set to revive thanks to Origin Energy finding evidence of natural oil seepage from the sea floor which lines up with "very large" structures identified from seismic surveys.
Red Spider has moved to a new purpose-completed headquarters eight times bigger than its first home and four times larger than the last premises at Westhill, outside Aberdeen.
People are both a major asset and cost of business. In today's climate, the oil&gas industry is facing a skills shortage, making recruitment one of the biggest challenges to overcome.
IRELAND has decided to extend the area to be opened for licensing in the 2009 Rockall Round to include the north-western margin of the Rockall Basin.