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Saudi Arabia and OPEC may have dropped oil prices to stifle production in the U.S. and other competing nations, but they didn’t drop it enough to stifle the U.S. oil and gas boom from fracking, a senior expert with McKinsey and Company said in Chicago. “If the Saudis think they’re going to put U.S. shale players out of business, they’re probably not, although there will be less drilling,” Joe Quoyeser told about 125 people, mostly graduate students, at Northwestern University’s Kellogg Energy Conference on Wednesday. ”But there are other elements of oil supply that are needed to balance the market...

Transocean Offshore Deepwater Drilling Inc.has filed a motion for summary judgment in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana requesting the court to compel BP to honor its contractual obligation to defend, indemnify and hold harmless Transocean for damages associated with BP's failure to contain flow from its Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. The contract between BP and Transocean for the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig contains industry-standard reciprocal indemnity provisions that apportion risk and quantify liabilities between the two companies. In the contract, which was signed in 1998 and extended several times...

The Gulf Oil Spill saga is not over yet. The disaster started on April 20 this year at the Macondo site, 44 miles off the coast of S.E. Louisiana, when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig blew up and sank. The explosion killed 11 people, rupturing the well that was being drilled, 5,000 feet below the surface, and sending millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. On July 15, after placing an experimental cap onto the leaking well, BP announced that for the first time in 87 days, no oil was leaking into the ocean. Governor Bobby Jindal...

Disturbing evidence is mounting that something frightening is happening deep under the waters of the Gulf of Mexico—something far worse than the BP oil gusher. Warnings were raised as long as a year before the Deepwater Horizon disaster that the area of seabed chosen by the BP geologists might be unstable, or worse, inherently dangerous. What makes the location that Transocean chose potentially far riskier than other potential oil deposits located at other regions of the Gulf? It can be summed up with two words: methane gas.

It goes without saying that most people no longer believe what British Petroleum is saying publicly about the amount of oil leaking into the Gulf and the condition of the well structure. The reality is much more frightening... In a few crevices in Cyberspace, experts in the industry are whispering what they think is really going on..."OK let's get real about the Gulf of Mexico oil flow. There doesn't really seem to be much info on TOD [The Oil Drum - an online site where oil industry people congregate] that furthers more complete understanding of what's really happening in...

(CNN) -- The morning the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, a BP executive and a Transocean official argued over how to proceed with the drilling, rig survivors told CNN's Anderson Cooper in an exclusive interview. The survivors' account paints perhaps the most detailed picture yet of what happened on the deepwater rig -- and the possible causes of the April 20 explosion. The BP official wanted workers to replace heavy mud, used to keep the well's pressure down, with lighter seawater to help speed a process that was costing an estimated $750,000 a day and was already running five weeks...

NEW ORLEANS — Over six days in May, far from the familiar choreography of Washington hearings, federal investigators grilled workers involved in the Deepwater Horizon disaster in a chilly, sterile conference room at a hotel near the airport here. The six-member panel of Coast Guard and Minerals Management Service officials pressed for answers about what occurred on the rig on April 20 before it exploded. They pushed for more insight into an argument on the rig that day between a manager for BP, the well’s owner, and one for Transocean, the rig’s owner, and asked Curt R. Kuchta, the rig’s...

Powerful puffs of natural gas, called kicks, are a normal occurrence in many deep-ocean drilling operations. But one intense kick of natural gas caused the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig to be shut down because of the fear of an explosion just weeks before a similar release succeeded in destroying and sinking the platform and sent millions of gallons of oil on a collision course with Louisiana and the rest of the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Shortly before the accident, engineers argued about whether to remove heavy drilling mud that acted as a last defense against such catastrophic...

BP, Transocean and Halliburton pointed fingers over who bears responsibility for the oil-rig explosion. At hearings Tuesday, Halliburton is expected to describe a failure to place a cement plug within the well before withdrawal of drilling "mud" that kept gas from escaping. Two rig workers corroborated this account.

A novel but risky attempt to use a 100-ton steel-and-concrete box to cover a deepwater oil well gushing toxic crude into the Gulf of Mexico was aborted Saturday after ice crystals encased it, an ominous development as thick blobs of tar began washing up on Alabama's white sand beaches. The setback left the mission to cap the ruptured well in doubt. It had taken about two weeks to build the box and three days to cart it 50 miles out then slowly lower it to the well a mile below the surface, but the frozen depths were too much for...

Though his agency was charged with coordinating the federal response to the major oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Department of the Interior chief of staff Tom Strickland was in the Grand Canyon with his wife last week participating in activities that included white-water rafting, ABC News has learned. Other leaders of the Interior Department were focused on the Gulf, joined by other agencies and literally thousands of other employees. But Strickland’s participation in a trip that administration officials insisted was “work-focused” raised eyebrows among other Obama administration officials and even within even his own department, sources told ABC...

Fooled by Randomness Rigzone CEO, David W. Kent 5/4/2010www.rigzone.com/news/article.asp?a_id=92780 Even when random circumstances or events contribute to a catastrophe we search for and assign non-random causes. Sometimes a catastrophic event spirals downward to a disastrous outcome. Other times, lady luck steps into the breach and disaster is narrowly averted. We almost always focus on the former. Most airline disasters occur just after take off or just before landing. US Air Flight 1549 suffered a double bird strike immediately following take-off. By random selection, pure luck, the plane was under the command of one of the airlines' most senior pilots, an...

A call-in interview to WBAP from "James", Dallas, TX, who was a roughneck on the Deepwater Horizon and one of the survivors. A very detailed and technicaql explanation from a pro. The interview was posted on "Drilling Ahead: A Social Network of Gas and Oil Professionals."

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more. Here's another update on the disaster that befell Transocean Ltd. (RIG: NYSE) and BP (BP: NYSE) last week in the Gulf of Mexico. (Thanks to OI reader Steve, in Texas, for sending some of the photos in today’s alert.) As you know by now, the drilling vessel Deepwater Horizon exploded, burned and sank last week, with the loss of 11 workers and injuries to many more. What happened? What's happening now? What's going to happen? I've spent the weekend working to piece things together. An Ill-fated Discovery According to news accounts,...

Energy: The administration has banned new offshore drilling until the Gulf oil spill is investigated. Was its heart in it anyway? It seems environmental concerns apply only to certain forms of energy. No one pays much attention to the aquatic "dead zones" that have appeared off our shores at the mouths of our rivers due to agricultural runoff created by mandates for corn-based ethanol. Ethanol is green energy, good energy — never mind that such biofuels drive up food prices, increase hunger around the world and damage the environment in their own way. The explosion that blew apart an oil...

Delay Will Cause Major Environmental Damage, Administration Engaged in Their Own Damage ControlIn a calculated political gamble designed to ensure maximum advantage of a crisis, Barack Obama ensured the worst environmental disaster on US territory since the Exxon Valdez. When the TransOcean rig caught fire on 20 April and exploded three hours later, the Obama Administration should have been in response mode. Instead, it wasn’t until 30 April that anyone arrived in Southern Louisiana and then it was only because the political gamble threatened a lot more coastline than originally thought. The second phase of the political gamble has already...

An army of workers conducted frantic combat on Thursday with booms, chemicals and even fire to limit the damage from a massive oil spill invading the Mississippi River delta. Pushed by swift southeasterly winds, the arrival of the oil slick opened a new chapter in the Deepwater Horizon disaster saga, both environmentally and politically as lawmakers in Washington raised the heat on the offshore energy industry. Federal regulators sent a SWAT team of inspectors into the Gulf of Mexico area to ensure compliance with safety rules on deep water drilling rigs. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal declared a state of emergency...

Emergency crews in the Gulf of Mexico are deploying containment booms along the U.S. coastline as a massive oil slick from a damaged deepwater well approaches land. Experts say the slick might reach Mississippi River delta portions of the state of Louisiana by late Thursday. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, says the sandy shores of the Louisiana delta lie directly in the path of the expanding oil slick as it moves west. Meteorologists say winds have been constant for several days, pushing the slick from the site of the damaged Horizon Deepwater oil rig. The rig exploded...

NEW ORLEANS – No oil appeared to be leaking after a drilling rig exploded and sank in the Gulf of Mexico, the Coast Guard said Friday, though officials were trying to contain what spilled from the blast and prevent any threat to the coast's fragile ecosystem.