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Risky business: Big Oil’s billion-dollar juggling act
David Greising, Chicago Tribune
DEADHORSE, Alaska — First of two parts
Painful reminders of the fallout from the cheap-oil era of a decade ago are never far from Robert Malone, the top North American executive of oil giant BP.
In March, he traveled 250 miles north of the Arctic Circle to look in on BP’s efforts to rebuild the pipeline system that leaked 200,000 gallons of oil last spring onto Alaska’s North Slope. But before donning an arctic parka to head into the 52-degrees-below-zero wind chill, Malone had to interrupt a meeting with workers to mark a solemn occasion: the moment, precisely two years earlier, when an explosion at the oil giant’s Texas City refinery killed 15 people. ..
And now, an inability to tackle daunting technological challenges has forced BP to delay pumping from one of its brightest prospects for the future: BP’s massive Thunder Horse platform in the Gulf of Mexico. A nearly 3-year delay in the startup of the world’s largest floating oil platform, which covers an area the size of three football fields, is setting back the arrival of enough oil to boost total U.S. production by nearly 5 percent.
Rarely has one company faced such grave trouble at so many places in such a thin slice of time. The breakdowns form a composite of the challenges an oil giant faces at a time when fields like Prudhoe Bay are running short of oil, the refinery infrastructure in places like Texas City is out of date and overtaxed, and the prospects for success in exploration are dicier than ever. ..
(27 May 2007)
Gusher of job openings expected in oil industry
Kate Stevens, Seattle Times
The great crew change is coming.
And executives in the oil and natural-gas industry can only hope they’re ready for the departure of thousands of aging employees who will retire over the next decade after years working onshore and aboard offshore rigs.
To prepare for this exodus, energy corporations have begun recruiting college graduates and experienced workers to replace their departing laborers.
“The work force of the industry, in large part, are the folks that were hired back in the late ’70s and early to mid-’80s, and many are approaching retirement eligibility,” said Tom Broom, operations learning and development manager at the Shell Robert Training & Conference Center. ..
(27 May 2007)
NZ may still have ’10b barrels of oil’
AAP, The Age
Up to 10 billion barrels of oil could be recovered from future significant discoveries around New Zealand, an expert in oil exploration says.
“New Zealand is surrounded by sedimentary basins … and the probability of significant oil … 10 billion barrels,” said David Darby, a “new business” manager for GNS Science.
“The deepwater frontiers of New Zealand beckon,” he told a media briefing at GNS Science’s Wellington head office.
“The best potential for New Zealand exploration is in our deepwater basins.
“Discoveries in our remote areas – if they are big – will have enormous implications for New Zealand.
…Dr Darby said existing data suggested New Zealand’s peak oil production was in 1997 and its peak gas flows were in 2000.
But even the Taranaki fields, which have produced about eight billion barrels of oil – and gas from the big Maui field, which underpinned NZ’s economy for nearly 30 years – were still capable of producing surprises, he said.
(28 May 2007)
