Saturday, June 11, 2011

Drips and discharges - 11 June 2011

Oil industry news.

Transocean raps USCG Report. Wait until you see the actual Transocean report before you believe anything that Transocean says about the USCG report, but I will say this: all of these separate investigations is a GOOD thing.

NTSB Report on PHI Helo crash
I remember this crash in S. Louisiana a couple of years ago. Turns out it was a bird strike w/unrated_ non-OEM window


Louisiana a giant petro-state? State-level regulators in the pocket of lobbyists

Unions moving offshore? Also includes a little history about the last time unions did a big push offshore.

Leviathan Brine Blowout? Lots of different types of blowouts (crude oil, like Macondo, Fracking fluid, like the recent one in PA, and now brine). A blowout is simply a severe underbalance between mudweight and reservoir pressure.

BOEMRE Drilling Checklist. Used for approval process of new drilling permits. A remarkable amount of cooperation and communication between regulators and industry.

gCaptain commentary on USCG Deepwater Horizon Report . I don't agree with some of the gCaptain comments, but it's interesting reading.

When does "Stop Work Authority" actually get used? Focuses on Oil industry. Good example of "human factors engineering."

The Forgotten 11 . The Deepwater Horizon dead.

Tanker Mogul at center of oil picefixing investigation . I'm not sure about this one. Speculators DEFINITELY manipulate the market in the SHORT TERM, but in the long term, the conventional wisdom is they make the market more efficient.
BP Survivor wants all rigs reflagged as US Ships . One of those "why didn't we do that years ago"-ideas.

2 comments:

jeffrey said...

Speculators DEFINITELY manipulate the market in the SHORT TERM, but in the long term, the conventional wisdom is they make the market more efficient.

Except when they're allowed to hold to heavy a position in the market and/or fraudulently conceal that information. Which is what has been happening on a massive scale for some time now.

Clay said...

Sorry, but I don't buy it. That article talked about how there's "millions of barrels a day of capacity in OPEC, they just won't pump it."

Eh, read the Oil Drum:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/8007

Hard to pump what you don't have. Even Bush knew that.

All of Wall Street is, to some degree, a pyramid scheme/shell game/(insert "financial engineering" term here), but, compared to most other markets, Oil OVER THE LONG TERM is pretty close to reality. You at least eventually have to have physical deliver of one asset to another entity, which is a lot more than you can say about Derivatives.