Issue: April 2025
SPECIAL FOCUS: Offshore Technology
Managing custom HPUs efficiently is key to reducing downtime and ensuring safety in offshore drilling. Learn how comprehensive support can keep your operations competitive and reliable.
Technology is creating opportunities to optimize operations and improve maintenance, to extend the operational window of aging drillships. The American Bureau of Shipping (ABS) knows a thing or two about drillships, having a dominant position in the market of providing classification services to two-thirds of the global fleet.
Time is money—in the case of oil production, even a lot of money. Therefore, the migration of automation systems takes place within a narrow time window. When updating the safety systems at Germany's largest oil producer, Harbour Energy, meticulous preparation paid off.
FEATURES
The energy sector is undergoing a digital transformation, driven by B2B eCommerce, cloud computing, blockchain, and AI, which aim to enhance efficiency and reduce costs. However, regional disparities in digital adoption create a fragmented landscape, leaving many suppliers—especially smaller, rural ones—struggling to keep pace. Bridging this gap is crucial to ensuring a more inclusive, efficient supply chain.
Buffeted by an array of external factors and rising operational challenges, the Permian basin stands at a crossroads in 2025. Can the world’s busiest and most prodigious onshore oil and gas region remain the major driver of U.S. energy security into the future, or will an increasingly unfavorable set of market conditions—combined with the global reordering of tariffs and trade relations being invoked by President Donald Trump—force an end to the long period of sustained growth seen in the region since the advent of the Shale Revolution?
Part 2: This article provides a vision of upstream operations in a Net Zero emissions (NZE) future and reviews state-of-the-art technologies and future concepts that will enable the NZE scenario for the upstream sector.
Big changes may be headed for hydrocarbon projects
MANAGEMENT ISSUES
As a component in the upstream value chain, production seemingly has been the last sector to see its problems solved through encompassing solutions, but that reality is changing.
Upstream oil and gas activity in the part of the U.S. residing in U.S. Federal Reserve District 11 increased slightly during first-quarter 2025, even as crude prices averaged below $70/bbl. Natural gas prices were up noticeably, compared to fourth-quarter 2024 levels.
COLUMNS
Everything and anything that ensures the oil and gas industry’s focus on health safety standards offshore remains laser-sharp is well worth doing. We’re all only too aware of the tragic consequences that can occur when complacency creeps in, and distractions cloud judgement.
As we go into the last week of April, and this issue goes out the door, the upstream industry has nearly four months (one-third) of 2025 in the books already. So, what do we have to show for drilling activity in the first third of the year? Well, nothing spectacular.
