Oil And Gas Production Platform News

Crew fatigue led to an offshore supply vessel striking an oil and gas production platform in the Gulf of Mexico in 2021, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said Thursday.The offshore supply vessel (OSV) Elliot Cheramie was on its normal route between Port Fourchon, La. and the oil and gas production platform VR-397A in the Gulf of Mexico on June 25, 2021, with a crew of four and five offshore workers. While transiting, the Elliot Cheramie struck the oil and gas production platform EI-259A.

On January 7, 2021, the dry bulk carrier Ocean Princess struck the uncrewed/out-of-service oil and gas production platform SP-83A while operating 24 miles south of Pilottown, Louisiana. Now, some 19 months later,  the National Transportation Safety Board has released an investigation report which showed that poor bridge resource management and a charting error led to the bulk carrier striking the oil and gas production platform.The 24-person crew of the Ocean Princess was drifting overnight in the Gulf of Mexico before going to New Orleans to load a cargo of grain. The master planned to drift throughout the night with the engine on 15-minute standby, keeping clear of traffic and platforms, NTSB said.Area where the Ocean Princess contacted platform SP-83A, as indicated by a red X.

Oil companies evacuate workers as storm takes aim at Texas. Royal Dutch Shell, Anadarko Petroleum and Exxon Mobil announced they were curbing some oil and gas output on Wednesday at facilities in the Gulf of Mexico ahead of a storm expected to hit the Texas coast later this week. The U.S. National Hurricane Center (NHC) issued a hurricane watch Wednesday for much of the Texas coast, calling for slow-moving Tropical Depression Harvey to intensify as it nears landfall. Shell said it was evacuating all personnel from the roughly 100,000 barrel-per-day (bpd) Perdido oil and gas production platform as a precaution. Anadarko said it had shut in production and was evacuating workers from its Boomvang, Gunnison, Lucius and Nansen platforms in the Gulf of Mexico.

Under a settlement agreement with the United States, ATP Infrastructure Partners, LP (ATP-IP) will pay a $1 million civil penalty and perform corrective measures to resolve claims by the U.S. under the Clean Water Act and the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA) of unauthorized discharges of oil and chemicals from an oil platform into the Gulf of Mexico, announced the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Department of Justice, and the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE). This is the first joint judicial enforcement action involving EPA and BSEE claims in response to alleged violations of both the Clean Water Act and OCSLA. The United States’ complaint, which was filed in February 2013, in the U.S.

GE Oil & Gas was awarded a contract to provide Korean shipbuilding firm Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering (DSME) with turbomachinery equipment and services for a new oil and gas production platform being built to support the production activities of Statoil Petroleum AS and its partners Total S.A. and Det Norske in the Gina Krog field in the Norwegian North Sea. Gina Krog (previously known as Dagny) is located 30 kilometers (km) northwest of the Sleipner field and approximately 250 km southwest of Stavanger, Norway. The development of Gina Krog will be among Statoil's major new developments with an estimated 225 million barrels of oil and gas. For the project, GE is supplying DSME with an integrated topside turbomachinery solution featuring products from several GE businesses.

Arctech Helsinki Shipyard, joint-venture, that is 50/50 owned by STX Finland and United Shipbuilding Corporation, is building two identical offshore icebreaking supply vessels for Russias largest shipping group Sovcomflot (SCF Group), the leading company in the world specializing in ice-management and shipping in harsh environments. The vessels will supply Exxon Neftegas Limited's platform in Arkutun-Dagi oil and gas field in Sakhalin area, Far East Russia. The development of the field is proceeding at good pace, why also the icebreaking offshore supply vessels are needed in the area. The main task of the Arctic offshore vessels is to supply the oil and gas production platform and to protect it from the ice. Both vessels measure 99.9 m in length and 21.7 m in breadth.

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE) today confirmed that agency personnel responded on August 16 to a report of a fatality at Energy Resource Technology's High Island (HI) Block A557 Platform A. This is an oil and gas production platform approximately 75 miles offshore Texas, in about 224 feet of water. According to the operator's report, an incident occurred early on the morning of August 16 during a crane lift in which a large piece of equipment was being loaded from the platform to a workboat. An apparent failure of the boom hoist cable led to a collapse of the crane, which set off a series of events in which the crane's harness struck and fatally wounded an employee. There was no production ongoing at the time of the accident.

According to a September 10 report from Bloomberg, an environmental watchdog group said in a lawsuit that BP Plc’s Atlantis oil and gas production platform in the Gulf of Mexico should be shut until the company can prove it meets U.S. safety and engineering standards. Food & Water Watch sued BP in federal court in Houston on Sept. 10. The group revised a lawsuit that it filed against U.S. regulators in May, accusing them of failing to investigate Atlantis after a whistleblower warned that the platform lacks critical safety documentation. The group withdrew the initial lawsuit in June, after London-based BP won court permission to intervene in the case. (Source: Bloomberg)

Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEM) Director Michael R. Bromwich announced that BOEM has launched a full investigation into the September 2, 2010, incident on Mariner Energy Resources’s Vermilion 380 platform. Per a Memorandum of Agreement from March 27, 2009, on BOEM-U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) cooperation, USCG will support BOEM's investigation of this incident. "We are all relieved that the 13 personnel on the platform were rescued safely. We are continuing to closely monitor this situation, which will be investigated fully. We will use all available resources to ensure that we find out what happened, how it happened, and what enforcement action should be taken if any laws or regulations were violated," said Director Bromwich.

The U.S. Coast Guard Marine Safety Detachment in Kenai is investigating a minor crude oil spill that occurred this morning on the Dillon oil and gas production platform located in Cook Inlet. The source of the spill on the platform was a cracked fitting on the discharge side of a high-pressure pump used to re-inject crude oil into the well. The exact size of the spill is unknown, but reports from Unocal officials indicate that the maximum size of the spill was 2,310 gallons. Most of the spilled product did not enter the waters of Cook Inlet, but was contained on the platform. It is not known how much crude oil entered the water. Unocal, in conjunction with CISPRI, conducted over flights of the area and also dispatched the spill response vessel Sea Bulk Montana to the spill location.

Hyundai Heavy Industries Co., Ltd. (HHI) signed a contract with Elf Petroleum Nigeria Ltd. (EPNL), a Nigerian subsidiary of French oil company Total S.A., to build an oil and gas production platform worth US $520 m. The platform will be completed by 2010 and will be able to produce 105,000 barrels of oil and 3 million cubic meters of natural gas a day. It will be located in the Ofon field, which is in water 40 meters deep, 40 km southeast of Nigeria. The platform will be operated by a joint venture between EPNL and the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation. HHI will carry out all phases of the project on a turnkey basis, from the engineering, procurement, and installation to the test runs and commissioning work.