Commentary, 9/10 2011Oct 10, 2011 Safety Visionary
It’s been not quite a year and a half since we hear the horrific news about the Transocean Deepwater Horizon disaster on April 22, 2010, followed by months of work to stop the flow from 1,500 metres below the ocean surface and clean-up of resulting environmental tragedy.
From the Editor... 9/10 2011Oct 10, 2011 Safe, Secure
Although a day shorter this year, the Offshore Europe Conference and Exhibition that took place in early September managed to pack four days worth of information and excitement into three. And it took quite some time to digest it all. Of course, we have a quick look back at Offshore Europe.
Gas Leaks – Would That be Platform or Subsea?Oct 10, 2011 Our fears were assuaged after Macondo – Norway was adhering to “nearly all” of the very best wellcontrol strictures. The Petroleum Safety Authority hurriedly wrote in summer 2010 that the US Interior Department’s initial post-disaster recommendations were mostly in place here. We wrote that Macondo shouldn’t happen here, just as gas leaks at Statoil’s Gullfaks B and Gullfaks C were being diagnosed. So, we wrote about subsea issues at Gullfaks C and left Gullfaks B’s platform mishap alone despite it being harder to get the goods on subsea gas leaks? Though well-control events are well-documented, the full picture of subsea gas leaks is murky. How much do people know?
Keep on TractoringOct 10, 2011 Finding out just what is happening deep inside a producing oil and gas well has never been easy. But now Aker Solutions’ well service business has developed a novel solution that is providing much more reliable data to oil companies when they log production wells – in real time, while the well is flowing.
By Alex Markland.
Media: It Was 20 Years Ago Today...Oct 10, 2011 As I write this, CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research) has just published a staggering report from their particle lab indicating that they have observed neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light, which has long been thought impossible. CERN is home to some of the most advanced research in the world, especially in nuclear physics, but the most groundbreaking invention to spring out of this community doesn’t come from physics. This is where the World Wide Web was born. The first recorded Web site and server, http://info.cern.ch, was registered on August 6, 1991. The first document, and Web page address was http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html, which contained information about the WWW project.
By Erlend Gram Simonsen.
