scholarly journals Lithium industry in the behavior of the mergers and acquisitions in the US oil and gas industry

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (9-10) ◽  
pp. 392-403
Author(s):  
Manuel Monge ◽  
Luis A. Gil-Alana
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ning Lou ◽  
Ezra Wari ◽  
James Curry ◽  
Kevin McSweeney ◽  
Rick Curtis ◽  
...  

This research identifies key factors, or safety culture categories, that can be used to help describe the safety culture for the offshore oil and gas industry and develop a comprehensive offshore safety culture assessment toolkit for use by the US Gulf of Mexico (GoM) owners and operators. Detailed questionnaires from selected safety culture frameworks of different industries were collected and analyzed to identify important safety culture factors and key questions for assessment. Safety frameworks from different associations were investigated, including the Center for Offshore Safety (COS), Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE), and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). The safety culture factors of each of these frameworks were generalized and analyzed. The frequency of the safety culture factors in each framework was analyzed to explore commonality. The literature review and analysis identified a list of common factors among safety culture frameworks.


2020 ◽  
Vol 72 (12) ◽  
pp. 34-37
Author(s):  
Demetra V. Collia ◽  
Roland L. Moreau

Introduction In the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the oil and gas industry, regulators, and other stakeholders recognized the need for increased collaboration and data sharing to augment their ability to better identify safety risks and address them before an accident occurs. The SafeOCS program is one such collaboration between industry and government. It is a voluntary confidential reporting program that collects and analyzes data to advance safety in oil and gas operations on the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS). The US Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) established the program with input from industry and then entered into an agreement with the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) to develop, implement, and operate the program. As a principal statistical agency, BTS has considerable data-collection-and-analysis expertise with near-miss reporting systems for other industries and the statutory authority to protect the confidentiality of the reported information and the reporter’s identify. Source data submitted to BTS are not subject to subpoena, legal discovery, or Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. Solving for the Gap Across industries, companies have long realized the benefits of collecting and analyzing data around safety and environmental events to identify risks and take actions to prevent reoccurrence. These activities are aided by industry associations that collect and share event information and develop recommended practices to improve performance. In high-reliability industries such as aviation and nuclear, it is common practice to report and share events among companies and for the regulators to identify hidden trends and create or update existing recommended practices, regulations, or other controls. The challenge for the offshore oil and gas industry is that industry associations and the regulator are typically limited to collecting data on agency-reportable incidents. With this limitation, other high-learning-value events or observed conditions could go unnoticed as a trend until a major event occurs. This lack of timely data represented an opportunity for the industry and the offshore regulator (BSEE) to collaborate on a means of gathering safety-event data that would allow for analysis and identification of trends, thereby enabling appropriate interventions to prevent major incidents and foster continuous improvement. The SafeOCS Industry Safety Data (ISD) program provides an effective process for capturing these trends by looking across a wider spectrum of events, including those with no consequences.


2020 ◽  
Vol 52 (37) ◽  
pp. 4112-4134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hung Quang Do ◽  
M. Ishaq Bhatti ◽  
Muhammad Shahbaz

Author(s):  
Ashish Khera ◽  
Rajesh Uprety ◽  
Bidyut B. Baniah

The responsibility for managing an asset safely, efficiently and to optimize productivity lies solely with the pipeline operators. To achieve these objectives, operators are implementing comprehensive pipeline integrity management programs. These programs may be driven by a country’s pipeline regulator or in many cases may be “self-directed” by the pipeline operator especially in countries where pipeline regulators do not exist. A critical aspect of an operator’s Integrity Management Plan (IMP) is to evaluate the history, limitations and the key threats for each pipeline and accordingly select the most appropriate integrity tool. The guidelines for assessing piggable lines has been well documented but until recently there was not much awareness for assessment of non-piggable pipelines. A lot of these non-piggable pipelines transverse through high consequence areas and usually minimal historic records are available for these lines. To add to the risk factor, usually these lines also lack any baseline assessment. The US regulators, that is Office of Pipeline Safety had recognized the need for establishment of codes and standards for integrity assessment of all pipelines more than a decade ago. This led to comprehensive mandatory rules, standards and codes for the US pipeline operators to follow regardless of the line being piggable or non-piggable. In India the story has been a bit different. In the past few years, our governing body for development of self-regulatory standards for the Indian oil and gas industry that is Oil Industry Safety Directorate (OISD) recognized a need for development of a standard specifically for integrity assessment of non-piggable pipelines. The standard was formalized and accepted by the Indian Ministry of Petroleum in September 2013 as OISD 233. OISD 233 standard is based on assessing the time dependent threats of External Corrosion (EC) and Internal Corrosion (IC) through applying the non-intrusive techniques of “Direct Assessment”. The four-step, iterative DA (ECDA, ICDA and SCCDA) process requires the integration of data from available line histories, multiple indirect field surveys, direct examination and the subsequent post assessment of the documented results. This paper presents the case study where the Indian pipeline operators took a self-initiative and implemented DA programs for prioritizing the integrity assessment of their most critical non-piggable pipelines even before the OISD 233 standard was established. The paper also looks into the relevance of the standard to the events and other case studies following the release of OISD 233.


Author(s):  
Christopher Klarmann

ABSTRACT Cyber threats to the oil and gas industry have been existent in one form or another for as long as computing and networking systems have utilized to increase the efficiency of production and transportation operations. The number of systems that are utilizing internet-connected technology to aid the industry has risen dramatically over the past 20 years, seeing use on exploration, management of production systems, Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA), and supply chain management. As the number of available exploits and attacks against these systems increases over time, it is more necessary than ever to ensure that cybersecurity is in facility and vessel plans. Incorporating cybersecurity measures into the existing security framework will be critical to ensuring that malicious actors do not impact communities and the environment through destructive attacks upon production and transportation. This paper will provide a look at the impact cyberattacks may have on the safe production, storage, and transportation of oil, as well as provide insight as to what industry standards and legal proposals exist to ensure that industry partners are operating securely throughout the US.


2019 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 546
Author(s):  
Peter Cox

Project delivery technology is changing and developing at a rapid rate, and Australia’s oil and gas industry could do a better job of embracing change and getting to the forefront of advanced digital technology applied to developing onshore gas resources – particularly to our vast undeveloped shale reserves. Our shale deposits are in remote parts of our country, so present significant challenges, especially in relation to geographical distance away from local and international markets. This paper will focus on the use of automation and standardisation in the engineering design process combined with project execution strategies to significantly reduce both schedule and cost in delivering surface infrastructure required to get our gas shale reserves to both domestic demand centres and export facilities. The traditional project delivery models that have served us well in the past need to be challenged and a new paradigm adopted. Standardisation of the compression and dehydration facilities in the US market has been developed over many years, resulting in efficient project delivery, and enabling reserves to be brought to market on a fast track basis. This paper will work through practices in the US and how they can be applied to Australia. Australian standards and industry practice defines how we design our gathering and pipeline networks. This paper will present a combination of construction strategies and automation of engineering design to optimise life cycle cost in remote regions where construction mobilisation and logistics is a significant factor combined with changing priorities as further reservoir data is obtained from exploration wells.


2021 ◽  
Vol 73 (07) ◽  
pp. 26-29
Author(s):  
Blake Wright

The oil and gas business has become as much about bytes as barrels in recent years. Artificial intelligence, the internet of things (IoT), big data, and the ongoing digitization of the industry have not only made it a more-efficient machine but also a target to unscrupulous sorts looking to confound, cash in, and move on. As more information comes forward regarding the May 2021 ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline, it appears to have been a cash grab with the knock-on effect of physically crippling the company’s flow of fuel to East Coast states. The outage was never the goal, but what it if had been? That question, or one similar, was part of what got the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) involved and the subsequent announcement of a Security Directive that will require critical-pipeline owners and operators to report confirmed and potential cybersecurity incidents to the DHS Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and to designate a cybersecurity coordinator, to be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It will also require critical-pipeline owners and operators to review their current practices as well as to identify any gaps and related remediation measures to address cyber-related risks and report the results to the Transportation Security Administration and CISA within 30 days. The bad guys made off with over $4 million in the Colonial attack; however, the US Department of Justice was able to recover about $2.3 million in the cryptocurrency paid by the pipeline operator. But the Colonial breach wasn’t a first for the oil and gas industry, and it certainly won’t be the last. As more of the oil field comes online, it creates additional access points for would-be villains to pounce. What makes the cybersecurity threat unique compared to other obstacles in the industry is that it is likely unsolvable, only manageable. “This will likely be a forever problem,” said Donald Paul, research professor of engineering at the University of Southern California and former CTO at Chevron. “It’s not like you can do something and fix it all, because ultimately, as the technology changes, as you add more digital systems, more vulnerabilities show up, and then the bad guys figure out how to crack them. It’s an ongoing process.”


Author(s):  
Aaron L. Brundage

Hexanitrostilbene (HNS) is a secondary, granular explosive with a wide usage in commercial and governmental sectors. For example, HNS is used in the aerospace industry as boosters in rockets, in the oil and gas industry in linear shaped charge designs in wellbore perforating guns, and in a number of applications in the US Department of Energy (DOE) and Department of Defense (DoD). In many of these applications, neat granules of HNS are pressed without binder and device performance is achieved with shock initiation of the powdered bed. Previous studies have demonstrated that powdered explosives do not transmit sharp shocks, but produce dispersive compaction waves. These compaction waves can induce combustion in the material, leading to a phenomenon termed Deflagration-to-Detonation Transition (DDT). The Baer-Nunziato (B-N) multiphase model was developed to predict compressive reaction in granular energetic materials due to shock and non-shock inputs using non-equilibrium multiphase mixture theory. The B-N model was fit to historical data of HNS, and this model was used to predict recent impact experiments where samples pressed to approximately 60% of theoretical maximum density (TMD) were shock loaded by high-velocity flyers [1]. Shock wave computations were performed using CTH, an Eulerian, multimaterial, multidimensional, finite-volume shock physics code developed at Sandia National Laboratories [2]. Predicted interface velocities using the B-N model were shown to be in good agreement with the measurements. Furthermore, an uncertainty quantification study was performed and the computational results are presented with best estimates of uncertainty.


2011 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 668
Author(s):  
Leanne McClurg

Disasters such as the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig and the consequential pollution in the Gulf of Mexico have heightened awareness surrounding liability for such events. It is an opportune time for all companies—whether owners, operators or contractors—to closely examine their contracting regimes to ensure their interests are protected to the maximum extent possible. It is commercial reality in all industries that parties negotiating contracts seek to limit their liability. Unique to the oil and gas industry, contracts for services usually contain reciprocal indemnities, often referred to as knock for knock clauses, where each party is responsible for loss or damage to its own people and property, regardless of the cause. Such clauses have the effect of altering the common law position where liability is usually based on the cause of any loss or damage. In this session the speaker discusses some tips and traps for drafting reciprocal indemnity clauses, and looks at how they have been interpreted by the courts. Consideration is given to how an incident like Deepwater Horizon would be treated if it occurred in Australia and an update on the US Senate Committee’s inquiry into the disaster is provided.


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