Susan Green, deputy regional supervisor for field operations at the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE), will deliver a keynote address at the 2015 Decommissioning & Abandonment Summit, 17-19 March in Houston.
Green will provide a crucial update on the regulator’s priorities at a time when, despite the fall in oil prices, production is expanding in deepwater and ultra-deepwater.
BSEE has said that it needs to keep pace with technology developments that are helping to drive deepwater oil and gas development. In February it requested $204.7m for its fiscal year 2016 budget, broadly in line with last year’s budget request.
“Funds will be used to recruit expert engineers, scientists, inspectors and oil spill prevention specialists to support the development of risk-based approaches to oversight and compliance on the Outer Continental Shelf,” BSEE Director Brian Salerno said in announcing the budget request on 2 February.
Phil Chadney, project director for Summit organizer, DecomWorld, said the chance to hear the regulator’s vision and priorities would be welcomed by the industry.
“In recent years the regulator has adopted new approaches to risk reduction and the promotion of a safety culture, and this comes at a time when offshore production is actually expanding,” he said. “At the end of last year there were 69 deepwater rigs and non-rig units working in the Gulf of Mexico, up from 40 at the start of the year. Offshore production is projected to keep growing through to 2040. Understanding how BSEE is gearing up to meet this challenge will be critical in planning decommissioning strategies and approaches.”
More than 20 operators including Shell, Chevron, Exxon and BP will be attending the Summit, plus international operators such as Shell E&P Nigeria and Petrobras.
A number of new workshops will be held at the Summit to tackle emerging industry issues, including how new drilling and completion technologies may deliver a new lease of life for old platforms by enabling the economic drilling of wells at or close to the pore pressure.
Also new this year at the seventh annual summit, taking place over 17-19 March, is a full day ‘closed door’ deepwater P&A workshop with exclusive case study insights presented by BHP Billiton and Anadarko on their latest projects.
More than 700 offshore, decommissioning, abandonment and late life executives and more than 60 leading exhibitors from across the world will be attending what the organizer describes ast the sector’s biggest networking and business development event.
Source:http://www.offshoreenergytoday.com