Woodside and BHP have agreed that the Perth-headquartered independent will be operator of the Scarborough gas field. The deal comes in the wake of Woodside securing a 75% stake in the offshore field, located northwest Australia, when it acquired ExxonMobil’s 50% interest in WA-1-R and the Scarborough Joint Venture Agreement. Completion of the transaction has been targeted for the end of March. In a market update to the ASX, Woodside said BHP had waived its pre-emption rights and given consent to the US$744million transaction between Woodside and BHP.
Dale
Stalled oil and gas exploration is a major economic risk
The latest Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) exploration data confirms that the slump in petroleum exploration in Australia continues.
“Yesterday, the ABS released data for 2017, confirming that exploration in Australia is stalled. Exploration expenditure is well below trend, especially in offshore basins, said APPEA Chief Executive Dr Malcolm Roberts.
“Falling exploration activity has been evident for many years but the latest offshore expenditure numbers are alarming,” he said.
“Offshore activity has fallen to its lowest level since 2004. Other sources show that only five exploration and appraisal wells were drilled offshore in 2017.
“This situation is happening despite deep cost-cutting by the industry.
Revolutionary ‘Offset Installation Equipment’ for well-capping officially launched in Italy
Oil Spill Response Limited’s (OSRL) latest development in subsea well capping technology, Offset Installation Equipment (OIE), was officially launched today from the equipment’s new home base in Trieste, Italy. The well-attended event, which featured key figures from across the offshore industry, represented the culmination of six years’ work between members of the Subsea Well Response Project (SWRP), OSRL and leading oil and gas engineering specialists, Saipem.
Sercel Sells a Sentinel HR High-Resolution Streamer System to German AWI Research Institute
CGG announced today that Sercel has sold one of its new Sentinel HR high-resolution solid streamers to the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI), a German research foundation specializing in polar and marine research in the Arctic and Antarctic. AWI will use the Sentinel HR on research projects it is conducting to record critical data about the relationship between geological activity and ecosystems in order to gain a better understanding of the Earth’s system. CGG said that Sentinel HR, launched in 2017, was the latest member of Sercel’s Sentinel solid streamer family. "With a close channel separation of 3.
Bass swimming in onshore oil in Indonesia
Australia’s Bass Oil Limited has announced a major upgrade to the prospectivity of its producing Tangai-Sukananti KSO, located in onshore Sumatra, Indonesia. Highlights of the upgrade, resulting from an independent review of the company’s stake in the KSO located in the prolific oil production province in southern Sumatra, include an additional 1.6 million barrels (0.893 million barrels net to Bass) of low-cost, unrisked, prospective oil resources, in two new near-field targets. As a result of the study’s findings, Bass immediately added these new targets to its planned 2018/2019 drilling program.
Record breaking licence awards reflect the potential of Norway’s mature basins
Record breaking licence awards reflect the potential of Norway’s mature basins GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company, says the record breaking number of licences awarded in Norway’s latest award round illustrates the potential of the country’s mature basins. Analysis of Norway’s upstream oil and gas industry shows that the country currently has 887 licensed blocks, of which 529 blocks are in the shallow water terrain and 358 are in deepwater terrain, according to GlobalData.
It’s official – wholesale gas prices fell in 2017
In fact, as the latest report to the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) confirmed just two weeks ago, wholesale gas prices fell by six per cent in 2017.
“The report found that wholesale prices fell in all eastern states in 2017,” said APPEA Chief Executive Dr Malcolm Roberts.
“A newspaper article published (recently) confuses the wholesale gas market with the tiny daily spot market. Less than 0.1 per cent of east coast gas is traded through the spot market, meaning that spot prices are not a reliable guide to the prices paid by customers.
“The article admits as much when it notes that ‘most Australian gas is sold at contract prices’. The
H2Oil & Gas delivers produced water treatment package for plant in Malaysia
H2Oil & Gas, an Aquarion Group company, has completed a contract to design and supply equipment for a produced water treatment plant in Malaysia. The high pressure (117 bar) system reduces the oil in water content from 3000ppm down to <20ppm with an optimized process design that uses the existing gas in the system, eliminating the use of additional fuel gas used on standard Compact Flotation Units. This design, together with a carefully developed layout, produced a low weight compact skid for use on an offshore module that was at a critical weight limit.
CGG GeoConsulting and Petroleum Corporation of Jamaica Announce First Reported Discovery of Live Oil Onshore Jamaica
CGG GeoConsulting and the Petroleum Corporation of Jamaica (PCJ) have announced the discovery of two independent live oil seeps from different parts of the island of Jamaica. This significant find marks the first documented occurrence of ‘live’, or flowing, oil from onshore Jamaica and will be of particular interest to oil explorationists focused on Central America and the Caribbean. The oil seeps were found during fieldwork for a recently completed multi-client Robertson Study (Red Book) of the petroleum potential of on- and offshore Jamaica entitled ‘Petroleum Geological Evaluation of Jamaica’ made jointly by CGG GeoConsulting and PCJ.
Investment of $97bn on top ten offshore oil projects to add over 1.6 million barrels per day by 2025, says GlobalData
Over $151.5bn in capital expenditure will be spent over the lifetime of the top ten offshore oil projects to produce 14.3 billion barrels of crude, according to GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company. These ten projects, selected from 236 upcoming offshore projects globally, will contribute incremental capacity of 1,613,319 barrels of oil per day to global supply by 2025. Johan Sverdrup in shallow water Norway is the largest with anticipated peak production at 600,512 barrels of oil per day in 2024 at an estimated cost of $25.4bn.