OffshoreNews

Total’s Pangea III Supercomputer Brought Online

By MarEx 2019-06-18 03:54:22

Total has brought on line its new Pangea III supercomputer, multiplying the Group’s computing power by almost 5 to 31.7 petaflops (equivalent to 170,000 laptops combined) and tripling its storage capacity to 76 petabytes (equivalent to about 50 million HD movies). A petaflop is a quadrillion (thousand trillion) floating point operations ("flops") per second. A petabyte is a million gigabytes of data Pangea III’s capacity adds to its predecessors (Pangea I and II) and is now ranked the number one...

BP Rig U-Turns After Greenpeace Ship Overtakes

By MarEx 2019-06-17 19:17:27

The Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise overtook a BP rig near the drill site of a major new oil well in the North Sea on Sunday, causing the rig to make a u-turn. The incident took place approximately 20 miles short of the drill site off Scotland. The standoff between climate activists and BP has been on-going for over a week as activists continue to stop BP’s plans to drill a new well in the Vorlich oil field, containing an estimated 30...

Eleven Million People Employed in Renewable Energy in 2018

By MarEx 2019-06-15 20:16:24

11 million people were employed in renewable energy worldwide in 2018 according to the latest analysis by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA). This compares with 10.3 million in 2017. As more and more countries manufacture, trade and install renewable energy technologies, the latest Renewable Energy and Jobs – Annual Review finds that renewables jobs grew to their highest level despite slower growth in key renewable energy markets including China. Until now, renewable energy industries have remained relatively concentrated in...

Cyprus Confirms Arrest Warrant for Turkish Drillship Crew

By MarEx 2019-06-14 17:48:42

The government of Cyprus has confirmed that it has issued arrest warrants for crewmembers of the Fatih, a Turkish drillship that is currently operating within Cyprus' EEZ area. Turkey disputes the maritime boundary and claims that it is operating on its own continental shelf area. A Cypriot official told Reuters that "a double digit number" of Turkish mariners aboard the Fatih are wanted by Cyprus law enforcement for their involvement in the venture. Turkey's Foreign Ministry has denounced the warrants...

Mapped Area of Ocean Floor Doubles

By MarEx 2019-06-14 00:38:05

Following the efforts of The Nippon Foundation-GEBCO Seabed 2030 Project, coverage of the world’s ocean floor has now increased from six percent to 15 percent. This is equivalent to around 32 million square kilometers of new bathymetric data, an area greater than the landmass of the entire African continent. Industry is now making significant contributions to the Seabed 2030 mission to map the entirety of the world’s ocean floor: around 570,000 square kilometers of data – roughly the size of...

U.S. Regional Offshore Wind Leasing Strategy Announced

By MarEx 2019-06-12 20:49:05

The U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) has published a new regional offshore wind leasing strategy, saying the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) provides a world-class wind resource on both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. BOEM has 15 active commercial leases for offshore wind development that could support more than 21 gigawatts of generating capacity. The first commercial scale offshore wind facility on the OCS could be under construction as early as this year. However, BOEM notes the...

Equinor to Disclose Offshore Carbon Storage Data

By MarEx 2019-06-12 03:33:14

Equinor and its partners will disclose a dataset from the Sleipner field; the world's first offshore carbon capture and storage (CCS) plant, with the aim of advancing innovation and development of the technology. The Sleipner field has been used as a facility for carbon capture and storage since 1996. CO2 is removed from the natural gas and sent 1000 metres under the platform, all the way down to the Utsira formation where it is permanently stored in small pores in...

Carbon Trust Offshore Wind Accelerator Launches Competition

By MarEx 2019-06-11 23:16:52

The Carbon Trust’s Offshore Wind Accelerator (OWA) has launched a competition to accelerate the development of technologies with the potential to reduce vessel emissions and fuel consumption. Up to £100,000 ($127,000) in funding will be awarded to the winning technologies, from a total funding pot of £300,000 ($382,000), to support technology development or demonstration. The OWA Low Emission Vessels competition will focus on innovations for crew transfer vessels. Designs submitted to the competition will be assessed for overall cost, operations,...

Brazil: Total Launches Phase 2 on the Giant Mero Field

By MarEx 2019-06-11 20:59:42

Total and its partners have taken the investment decision for the second phase of the Mero project (Libra block), located deep offshore, 180 kilometers off the coast of Rio de Janeiro, in the prolific pre-salt area of the Santos Basin in Brazil. The Mero 2 FPSO will have a liquid treatment capacity of 180,000 barrels per day and is expected to start up by 2022. “The decision to launch Mero 2 comes as a new milestone in this large-scale project...

Suit Filed Over Well Control Rule Repeal

By MarEx 2019-06-11 19:04:39

A group of 10 environmental organizations have filed a lawsuit challenging the U.S. Department of Interior's rollbacks of safety measures put in place by the Obama administration after the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The lawsuit filed was filed on Tuesday in a federal district court in California, and it alleges that the Department disregarded the evidence and expert findings that underpinned the 2016 Well Control and Blowout Preventer Rule and that it was not transparent when drafting the...