A press release this week from Rystad Energy made me go all nostalgic for the good old days when doing things subsea was still new and exciting and Subsea Engineering News was the publication to go to when folks in the industry wanted more than the few crumbs from that […]

In the classic late 1960’s film The Graduate, a friend of the father of the eponymous hero, played by Dustin Hoffman, tells him if he has one word of advice for him it is ‘plastics’. ‘There is a great future in plastics’, Benjamin Braddock is told, a line said with […]

I don’t always believe everything that appears in oilfield rags, but Upstream is one of the mostly reliable ones. So the item that appeared last week about Chevron planning to sell off its remaining UK North Sea assets and exit the sector, made some sense, but also made me go […]

Here is a proposition that most of you would not consider unless asked after multiples drinks/pints in the pub: who would be a politician nowadays? Now I have no time for the current UK government. The best thing one can say about Rishi Sunak is that he is not Boris […]

The Global Underwater Hub (GUH), the organisation formerly known as Subsea UK, is in a bit of a quandary. GUH, an industry facilitator and promoter, wants to be all things to all people. It wants to promote the energy transition and the move towards offshore wind and hydrogen production as […]

The trouble with getting going again is that I am like the Energizer Bunny – wind me up and I don’t stop. Following on my point yesterday about ExxonMobil ‘spiking’, ie killing, its research teams’ work on hydrocarbon production and consumption in the late 1970’s, it has been revealed that […]

Hello – again. Sorry to have been away so long. Health issues in the last year have kept my usually loud voice silent. All is mostly better now and I am back at my keyboard. I hope this is a good thing for you. Tell me and I will (may) […]

It is 35 years now since the Piper Alpha accident took the lives of 167 men who had been working on the platform operated by Occidental. I don’t think that I can ever forget the numbers who died or the events prior to or after that dreadful event. It was […]

No one has ever accused Judith Patten of being a shy retiring flower. Having done a charity ‘wingwalk’ last year in aid of the Anthony Nolan Trust, the former president of the Society for Underwater Technology (SUT) took advantage of a discount – do another wingwalk within a year! – […]

Back in January, I was cc’d into an exchange of emails that was begun by Brian Skeels, former FMC subsea hardware guru whose career with the production system supplier goes way back before the merger with Technip. He is now a TFMC ‘technology fellow’ which I presume means he is […]

Back in the day, that is several decades ago before the Enron scandal of 2000, oil companies liked to tell the world what they were doing, ie finding and developing oil and gas reserves, how they were doing it and generally informing the public how clever they were at keeping […]

The lead up to Subsea Expo, this coming week in Aberdeen, always seem like an appropriate time to say something formative about our favourite technology. While much of the conversation these days is about the energy transition away from hydrocarbons, there is little doubt that the world will still be […]

Firstly, happy new year to you all. We are all hoping that the chaos that engulfed the world – and the UK in particular – last year will have come to an end, for all our sakes. Towards the end of last year, when I was only paying attention with […]

Anyone who has been involved in the development of new technology for the subsea sector knows that it is a long slog. There was a study done in the 1990’s by a major independent business consultancy that showed that the oil and gas industry then – and not much has […]

If there is a truism about the oil business, it is that oil companies – not contractors, not suppliers nor service companies – always make money. Any time an oil company announces a loss, it is rarely a real loss, only a bit of paper shuffling, asset write-down or expenditure […]

When I was offered my first job writing about the energy market way back more than 40 years ago, I had to consider the implications of leaving the world of general journalism to take up a specialist area. (Of course, at that time I never would have dreamed that I […]

During my 30 plus years as editor of Subsea Engineering News, the only subject I enjoyed writing about as much as new technology was the business of business. There have been so many buyouts, mergers, takeovers, reshuffles and the like that they would assuredly fill a book or two. The […]

This week’s announcement during ONS of a new joint venture between Schlumberger, Aker Solutions and Subsea 7 is a bit more than it appears. Firstly, it replaces the existing Subsea Integration Alliance venture between Schlumberger and S7 and secondly, it contracts the market for subsea hardware supplies, so that some […]

When I was first offered a job covering the oil and gas industry back in 1981, I had to stop and think – did I want to move out of mainstream journalism into so-called ‘trade’ reporting? After some consideration – actually, quite a short deliberation as I needed the job […]

I have to admit that since I stopped publishing SEN fortnightly seven years ago, I am not quite on top of all of the technical issues as I formerly was. But as I often suggested in the past, the oil and gas industry is never the quickest off the mark […]

For those of you who used to be readers of Subsea Engineering News, you might be surprised to realise that it is now seven years since I hung up my editor’s eyeshade. SEN continued after I sold it and finished my two year ‘golden handcuffs’ period, but within a year […]

Contributions to the Anthony Nolan Cancer Trust can be made at https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/judith-gunton1.

I will lay my cards on the table as I have always done. I have never had any time for Oil & Gas UK nor now for its successor Offshore Energies UK. It is just a mouthpiece for the oil companies with hardly ever any suggestion of how the industry […]

The oil and gas industry, like most distinct parts of the world, is filled with memorable people. I could not even begin to list all those I have encountered over the years unless I wanted to write a book and who wants to read a tome about oilfield folk at […]

It is not easy to be a commentator in a time of war if your chosen subject is not normally world politics. Sure it would be a doddle to write about oil – or maybe more relevantly gas – prices at the moment or maybe about more aggressive moves in […]

THERE HAS ALWAYS BEEN profiteering from war. Don’t forget it was a Republican (!) president (Ike) in the 1950’s who coined the phrase ‘military industrial complex’. But we are not talking about arms now, we are talking oil and gas. It was 50 years ago that OPEC finally realised that […]