Recently in Gulf of Mexico Category

In his much-hyped State of the Union address this past week, President Barack Obama gave a rhetorical bearhug to US energy development, even stealing a line from Republicans and pronouncing the need for an "all-out, all-of-the-above strategy" on increasing energy production.

Almost ten.

That's the estimate of total US liquids production by 2016 that the International Energy Agency foresees, in millions of b/d, out of the US by 2016. The IEA, in its latest monthly report, was downright ebullient in its forecast of what the US, and to a lesser degree, other non-OPEC countries were going to be producing over the next few years.

Despite the buildup of more than a year and a half of anticipation, it was still difficult to get a read on the likely bidding behavior of oil companies as the time came for Western Gulf of Mexico Lease Sale 218 this week.

Imagine a parachute on a high-performance jet. The pilot wears it but hopes to never use it. And he's not in the clear even if he does. Offshore oil and gas drillers should have the same attitude about blowout preventers.

Another version of that metaphor has been invoked since BP's Macondo oil spill, but the head of a National Academy of Engineering committee used it particularly well today in explaining the group's findings on the disaster.

Donald Winter, an engineering professor at the University of Michigan and former US Navy secretary, said offshore operators put "misplaced confidence" in blowout preventers before Macondo. They wrongly considered them insurance policies.

"They are safety measures, but the principle way of accommodating or providing safety is not to just sit back and depend upon your parachute, in this case the blowout preventer," he told reporters after the NAS panel released its Macondo findings.

A billion barrels here. A billion barrels there. Pretty soon you're talking about a lot of oil. 

When it comes to ExxonMobil's Julia discovery in the Gulf of Mexico, however, the only projection the company actually has ever provided is one vague word: "significant."

But that didn't stop industry analysts and journalists from freaking out recently at the language used by ExxonMobil lawyers in a lawsuit against the US government contesting rejection of an extension on the company's lease at that prospect. More specifically, in the first paragraph of their pleadings, the legal team charged the rejection is "depriving ExxonMobil of the right to produce a reservoir believed to hold billions of barrels of oil."

In this week's Platts Oilgram News column, Washington editor Gary Gentile writes in "Regulation & The Environment" that one post-Macondo perspective is that nothing is significantly different in the wake of the spill.

Platts director of news John Kingston appeared on Fox Business today to discuss the good news/bad news scenario for ExxonMobil: it found a lot of oil in the Gulf of Mexico, but it may not get the chance to develop it. You can see it here.

More than a year after BP's Macondo gusher shut down the Gulf of Mexico, 32 deepwater wells have been approved for oil and gas drilling.

They form a crescent off the coasts of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.

US regulators late Friday issued their 25th deepwater drilling permit since the Macondo disaster, giving Statoil permission to drill an exploratory well in the Walker Ridge area of the Gulf of Mexico.

After regulators signed off on the industry's oil spill containment systems in late February, it took the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement six weeks to issue 10 permits, an average of 1.7 each week. The rate has slowed slightly over the summer to 25 permits in 22 weeks, or 1.1 each week.

A rather steep decline in natural gas production from US Gulf of Mexico is being overshadowed by the rise of shale gas from onshore plays in several states, a fact made more stark by the first tropical storm this year -- Don -- that impacted output.