We just hit the three-year mark on the Macondo anniversary. In this week’s Regulation & Environment column from Oilgram News, Gary Gentile reviews the industry’s record on safety, and efforts to prevent another Macondo, since that time.
Posts Tagged ‘oil spills’
Regulation and Environment: Reviewing the safety record three years after Macondo
By News Desk | April 22, 2013 03:56 AM Comments (0)
‘Bolt jolt’ may have raised drilling industry concerns, but Wall Street eyebrows? Barely.
By Starr Spencer | February 13, 2013 02:28 PM Comments (0)
The lowly bolt is rarely considered an exciting or controversial subject. We largely ignore them in the assumption they will do their job of fastening together two pieces of wood, steel, ceramic or other materials in our cars, homes and equipment.
So when reports began to widely circulate last week that the US Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, and separately also General Electric Oil & Gas, had asked drillers to inspect and replace any defective bolts used on GE-manufactured H-4 connectors, it seemed like potentially a Big Deal. After all, we’re less than three years out from the US’ biggest marine oil spill which erupted from the BP-operated Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010, and ensuring safe rigs and equipment has become the top priority of all operators there.
Petrodollars: the Salazar legacy in fixing the dysfunctional MMS
By News Desk | January 28, 2013 12:02 AM Comments (0)
With Ken Salazar leaving the US Department of the Interior, it’s time to look over his efforts to fix the problems in the former Minerals Management Service. In this week’s Oilgram News column, Petrodollars, Gary Gentile reviews the record.
Offshore Technology Conference 2012: A running blog
By News Desk | May 1, 2012 12:23 PM Comments (0)
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?
Before there was an oil spill, what was later called Macondo had a rich past
By Starr Spencer | April 20, 2012 11:32 AM Comments (0)
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Naked City, a popular, gritty TV police drama series set against a backdrop of New York City, would end its weekly episodes with a solemn voice-over narration: “There are eight million stories in the Naked City. This has been one of them.”
In the Gulf of Mexico, there are nearly 6,000 active leases, each one with a “story” duly recorded in government documents. Mississippi Canyon Block 252 is only one of them, but it is arguably the most famous. It’s the tract containing the Macondo deepwater well which blew out two years ago and became the worst marine oil spill in US history.
Is it better in the Bahamas? Drilling for oil in a place known mostly for storing it
By Robert Mayer | January 12, 2012 05:10 AM Comments (0)
Macondo investigators warn offshore drillers: fail-safes fail
By Meghan Gordon | December 14, 2011 03:55 PM Comments (0)
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.
Keystone XL: first reactions on the State Dept. move
By John Kingston | November 10, 2011 06:31 PM Comments (0)
Some immediate thoughts on the delay of the White House/State Department acting on the Keystone XL pipeline.
New Frontiers: while oil tankers line up at the Bosporus, talks drag on about a solution
By News Desk | October 24, 2011 09:50 AM Comments (0)
Everybody has long known that the backup of tankers trying to get through Turkey’s Bosporus is an oil spill waiting to happen, and just plain inefficient. Yet fixes to this problem have been difficult to agree upon. Stuart Elliott discusses the quandry in this week’s Platts Oilgram News column, “New Frontiers.”
Regulation & the Environment: Offshore drilling regulator goes after contractors; industry says insurance at stake
By News Desk | July 25, 2011 09:34 AM Comments (0)
Platts’ Meghan Gordon wrote a blog entry about Michael Bromwich just the other day, and now there’s more. In this week’s Platts Oilgram News column, Regulation & The Environment, Meg discusses the fact that Bromwich has his fair share of critics in Washington. She looks at what they’re saying about the head of the BOEM.