Insight: What's happening to Exploration?
Explorers should be deeply troubled by recent events, namely: 1. The general lack of success, especially in Frontier plays, and the evident lack of New Ideas and instead the re-cycling and re-hashing of old ones. 2. Exponentiating costs , especially for deep water drilling.
22 Apr 2014

Insight: How can companies develop and retain Petro-technical professionals?
What should oil & gas companies do to develop, train, motivate and thereby retain Petro-technical Professionals? How can they turn 'raw material', recent recruits whether graduates or folk with a few years experience in an oil field service company, into exploration, reservoir and operations leaders?
16 Apr 2014

Insight: Current demographics, and the current issue, in the oil & gas industry
What impact has almost 30 years of RIF -ing had on our industry? What can we say about the current demographics? What is the current big issue?
14 Apr 2014

Insight: A brief history of RIF-ing
Once again, there is a lot of excited chatter about cost cutting in our industry. Oftentimes in the past, this has meant cutting great swathes of people (also known in better times as ‘our most valuable resource’) out of the team. Now I see it’s happening again – RIF s are in progress at, for example, BG and Weatherford to highlight just two. Here’s something to think about: perhaps the only person you can trust to manage your career to your expectations is yourself, unless companies change their behaviour significantly!
11 Apr 2014

Insight: a small black cloud?
What should we make of this, a recent article discussing the forward projections of a number of seismic companies? They (TGS, PGS, Spectrum, CGG etc) all seem very nervous suddenly: the article points to reducing capex and improving margins but I wonder of oil & gas companies are getting nervous about big, expensive dry holes in deep water?
03 Jan 2014

Insight: Give Us a Break!
Yes, maybe we need a tax break for the UK North Sea but we also need service companies to charge less.
29 Dec 2013

Insight: Costs are killing the North Sea!
I'm not sure I should take issue with a knight of the realm but I do believe Sir Ian Wood's interim review of Maximising Economic Recovery in the UKCS is insufficiently focused on COSTS .
20 Dec 2013

Insight: 'The nine most terrifying words in the English language?'
…are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” And we in the oil & gas industry seem to be being promised a lot of “help”! Between our own UK government and the European Commission (EC), we face a trinity of regulators.
16 Dec 2013

Insight: An explorer's career development and training
In my experience, there is an absolute link between an explorer's career development, their acquisition of key skills, and training. I review a few ideas in this article.
04 Dec 2013

Insight: The Wrong AIM!
Is it possible to spot AIM oil & gas companies that are never, ever, going to get anywhere?
31 Oct 2013

Insight: 2014 oil and gas industry planning cycle - Getting it right
Energy executives will consider macroeconomic issues, industry trends and tactical specifics as they plan their budgets for the coming year.
12 Oct 2013

Insight: Innovative technology available to help maintain North Sea production.
There is renewed commitment by the government and industry to the extraction of oil and gas from the UK Continental Shelf. (Webb, 2013). New tax allowances have encouraged investment such that it is expected to total an all-time record of £13.5 billion in 2013, almost 3 times that of 2009. However, this investment is to a background of decline in production of oil and gas from the UKCS of ~31% from 2010 to 2012 with a further decline of ~22% projected for 2013, principally due to unplanned shut-downs. The UKCS has so far produced just over 41 billion boe, representing an average recovery factor of 40%. Increasing recovery factors further is a challenge, but the prize is ~1 billion barrels per 1% increase across the UKCS.
29 Sep 2013