Recently in Drilling Category

The Black Sea is moving. Ukraine is expected to issue tenders for two new prospects in the next couple of months while companies in Romania are preparing to build on recent discoveries with a new round of drilling next year.

It's quite a turnaround. It's less than two years since the giant Leiv Eiriksson drillship headed back out through the Bosporus after a $200 million failure for Petrobras to strike commercial oil and gas off the Turkish coast.

In the kids' movie "Despicable Me," a geeky supervillain wields an arsenal of sleek, white, high-tech spy toys against an old-school supervillain and his fleet of oil-burning clunky steel machines.

The oil and gas industry appears to be waging this same battle internally, judging from comments over the four-day course of the OTC that wrapped up May 3.

At a small gathering of Houston professionals last Tuesday to talk about the state of the energy industry, the mood seemed optimistic. Oil economist Philip Verleger said companies will keep producing natural gas despite rock-bottom prices and that this cheap feedstock will then fuel a US economic boom. Nobody laughed him out of the room.

At what is set to be a very large trade show gathering of more than 70,000 attendees expected at the Offshore Technology Conference in Houston Monday through Thursday, will that same mood prevail? 

While some in the natural gas industry may think they have gone the extra mile in making public information about the chemicals used in fracking fluids, the fact is many people don't think the industry has come close to meeting their concerns.

More than just a playground for winter-weary northerners, The Bahamas serves as a key distribution center for the world's oil.

It's home to Buckeye's Borco and Statoil's South Riding Point terminals that, with a combined 29 million barrels of storage -- and growing -- makes the island nation the region's largest transshipment poin of other countries' oil.

In case anyone hadn't noticed, January 10 is the 111st anniversary not only of the Texas "awl bidness" (that's Texan for oil business, to all you non-Lone Stars) but also of Big Oil.

On that day in 1901, the Lucas well at Spindletop, a salt dome oil field sited south of what is now the city of Beaumont, Texas came in and was soon producing more than 100,000 b/d of oil.

Just a couple of years ago, this prediction for US oil production would have sounded preposterous. But Tudor Pickering Holt's chief energy strategist now thinks the number could grow from the current level of 5.7 million b/d to more than 7 million b/d in the near future.  He actually said it out loud recently in an interview with Platts Oilgram News.

When US natural gas prices are obstinately hovering around a relatively low $3.50/Mcf and yet you have a lot of acreage in major gas fields, what do you do?  Logic would tell you to cut back. Yet production has been rising in two of the country's biggest gas fields.  

In the gas shale plays of the Barnett in North Texas and the Haynesville in East Texas and Lousiana, production continues to climb even as rig counts have dropped.