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Vol. 225 No. 1 |
Hydrasun Group opened a new extrusion plant in Aberdeen as part of its expansion and business development program. The 20,000-sq-ft facility will produce specialist polyurethane-coated hydraulic and electro-hydraulic umbilical assemblies for the oil and gas industry.
Paragon Marketing Services International Ltd. opened its first offshore contact center in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, West Indies. Trinidad is a major industrial and petroleum force in the Caribbean basin. The contact center will offer clients the latest technology, including digital recording, in a fully predictive environment with state-of-the-art inbound contact management capabilities.
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Sea trials of the Autonomous Light Intervention Vehicle (ALIVE) built by Cybernétix have been successful in real conditions offshore the French Riviera. ALIVE docked on a subsea ROV-panel autonomously and carried out pre-programmed operations, opening and closing valves with its hydraulic manipulating arm. Target approach, docking and manipulation are controlled by onboard video and sonar image-processing, matched with a CAD image of the environment. ALIVE is designed for light intervention work on offshore fields in water depths to 3,000 m and can be operated without long and heavy umbilicals or dedicated surface support vessels. The project is supported by the European Commission. Cybernétix is coordinator, with cooperation from Ifremer (France), Hitec Framnaes (Norway), Ocean Systems Laboratory of Edinburgh University (UK) and the European Joint Research Center (Italy).
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Mannesmann Line Pipe and Stupp Corp. have agreed in principle to form Stupp & Mannesmann Line Pipe LLC, a joint sales and marketing company to be headquartered in Houston, Texas. They will provide North American customers with a single source for ERW/HFI line pipe from 85/8 through 24-in. diameters, up to 0.812-in. wall thicknesses and grades up to X80.
Tenaris and Socotherm formed a strategic alliance to provide pre-coated pipes and pipe coating services. Under the alliance, which has an initial term of five years, the companies will market their services in an extensive partnership, with Socotherm as Tenaris' exclusive supplier of pipe coating.
Wood Group has established its Rapid Response Team, which is dedicated to fast recovery of stuck drill pipe from wells in Gulf of Mexico, Texas and Louisiana. Based at eight locations throughout the region, the primary offshore load-out point is at Port Fourchon, Louisiana, within a 40-mile radius of more than 600 offshore oil platforms. The Rapid Response Team has successfully recovered pipe from wells with deviations greater than 70° from vertical, temperatures over 420°F, hydrostatic pressures over 20,000 psi and 22,000-ft depths.
TGS-NOPEC Geophysical Company L.P. and Divestco Inc., a Canadian corporation, have signed a letter of intent whereby TGS-NOPEC will acquire all shares of Divestco's subsidiary, Riley Electric Log Inc., as well as a license to the software and about 1.2 million depth-calibrated images of Canadian well logs for approximately US$9 million. TGS-NOPEC will then merge Riley Electric Log and the other acquired assets into its subsidiary, A2D Technologies Inc. In the last 55 years, Riley Electric Log has built the most extensive collection of hard-copy well logs in the U.S., numbered at over 3 million.
Petrofac Facilities Management has taken over management of Tullow Oil UK Ltd's Hewett facility in the southern North Sea and its Bacton Gas Terminal in Norfolk. The agreement marks the first time that a facilities management company has assumed management of an onshore gas terminal in the UK. Petrofac will also manage the six gas-producing installations in the Hewett Field, 25 miles east of Great Yarmouth.
READ Well Services commissioned a major new piece of test equipment at their Bridge of Don facility. The 27-ft pipe load-tester, weighing over 8 tons, can perform automated compression and tension loading of casing and tubular connections, cycling from 500 tons of compression up to 350 tons of pull to casing sections up to 30 ft in diameter hundreds or thousands of times to check performance.
Schlumberger Information Solutions (SIS) acquired Trondheim, Norway-based VoxelVision. The visualization engine and seismic functionality developed by VoxelVision are designed to manage, visualize and interpret massive 3D volumes in a PC environment, leveraging a Linux cluster in a cost-effective way. It provides an order of magnitude increase in speed and efficiency for exploration or production interpretation. It allows applications to run concurrent, multi-level dynamic parallel tasks, and the engine is fully scaleable.
OPS Group Ltd, a provider of specialist personnel to the international oil and gas industry, will acquire Coiltec (Well Service Support) Ltd, an oil, gas and pipeline recruitment consultancy based in Great Yarmouth, England. Coiltec specializes in supplying experienced contract personnel for short and long-term projects across a broad range of disciplines, including process and pipeline services, well test and wireline services, well intervention and pumping services.
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