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The Caspian Sea is the setting for some of the world’s oldest offshore oil developments. These date to the late 1940s in Azerbaijan, when the Pirallahi, Gurgany Deniz, and Chilov Adasy fields were brought onstream. Azerbaijan remained a prominent offshore producer through the 1950s and, for a while, the Neft Dashlary field took on the mantle of the world’s biggest offshore project.

Determined to corner the lucrative banana trade, Louisiana Gov. Jimmie Davis on July 7, 1960, put his signature to Act 222 that created the Greater Lafourche Port Commission, and with it, Port Fourchon.

A waterway that some contend is as vital to the offshore as its more popularized overland counterpart received a major boost late last year with the long-awaited opening of a lock engineered to keep rig-bound cargo moving.

Add a few hurricanes to the intrinsic nature of the deepwater and you have the ideal scenario for companies specializing in checking the integrity of topsides and downhole paraphernalia.

When Hornbeck Offshore Services Inc. introduced its 370-ft (113-m) HOS Centerline last year, it not only gave the Gulf of Mexico the world’s largest support vessel, but also one designed to transport everything from drilling fluid to crude oil. With a more than 8,000-dwt (7,258-metric ton) capacity, the Centerline brings multi-purpose support vessels to an entirely new dimension. Not only is the triple-certified newbuild designed to transport supplies for drilling and production, it can be “flipped over” in two to three days and work as a crude oil tanker, says Todd M. Hornbeck, chairman, president and CEO of the Covington, Louisiana-based company that also operates the HOS Port in Port Fourchon. What’s more, Hornbeck says the newest entry to the company’s global fleet also is fully certified to haul hazardous wastes.

It may come as a surprise, but for some Port Fourchon companies one of the hottest markets in the Gulf of Mexico these days has nothing to do with drilling or production. Quite the contrary, actually.

The business side of offshore geology and geophysics in 2009 remained in tune with the generally weak year for the entire E&P industry. The survey which follows shows that the vessel count was 156, down by 17 from last year’s report. Two company names are missing from this year’s survey – Scan Geophysical and Wavefield. Scan closed its operation in mid-2009. Wavefield and CGGVeritas were in the process of merging at this time last year and that is complete. The vessels list for each also merged, as you might expect. One new company, NAUTIC Offshore out of Oslo, Norway, joins the list for the first time.

Worldwide Seismic Vessel Survey

As the development of offshore hydrocarbon reserves extends into greater water and well depths, riser system design and supply becomes a critical industry challenge. One such example is the drilling of pre-salt wells in water depths approaching 3,000 m (10,000 ft). This is a complex undertaking, and can require extensive initial well construction work as well as regular intervention throughout production life. For these reasons, and considering recent day rates for a mobile offshore drilling unit, operators are considering drilling these wells using a dry tree floating production system with surface BOP.

This is an overview of the subsea separation, boosting, and compression progress and development in the offshore oil and gas industry during 2009. Recent awards and start-ups indicate several new projects in the developmental stages plus new world records for installed systems. Subsea separation and boosting technology is now operational in 2,438 m (7,999 ft) water depth in Shell’s Perdido field.

Technip is shifting its subsea R&D focus increasingly towards the coming generation of ultra deepwater projects. Management outlined some of the solutions and associated investments at a recent presentation at the company’s flexible risers/flowlines plant in Le Trait, northern France.

Gas is increasingly important in a historically oil-driven world economy. Its increased value is a driver of pipeline technology developments. To meet the demand for gas transportation through more onerous environments, there are factors the pipe and plate makers need to consider to ensure the finished product meets the standards required especially for sour service and deepwater applications.

Syntactic foam from Trelleborg Offshore is helping to protect saturation divers from the cold during offshore inspection, repair, and maintenance tasks.

Kohlswa Gjuteri will supply a total of 54 mooring shackles for Total’s Usan development off Nigeria. The order has been placed by Ramnäs Bruk, a regular user of Kohlswa’s cast-steel products, which is providing mooring chain to the Hyundai yard in Korea where the Usan FPSO is under construction.

SKF has strengthened its offshore presence with two wide-ranging contracts for operations in the northern hemisphere.

Shell’s Perdido development is a record-setting venture. The list of world firsts includes the deepest ever installation of a spar, 2,384 m (7,820 ft) of water depth; the deepest installation of permanent suction piles, 2,630 m (8,630 ft) of water; the deepest ever flowlines and pipeline end structure, 2,984 m (9,790 ft) of water; and an integrated topsides installation that set a new record for lift weight in the Gulf of Mexico (GoM) at 8,866 metric tons (9,773 tons). Heerema Marine Contractors (HMC) met the challenges of this technically difficult, ultra deepwater installation in a remote location with the threat of hurricanes ever present.

Real-time, accurate downhole monitoring data is crucial to understanding and controlling wellbore and reservoir performance while maximizing oil and gas extraction. An increasingly used method to get this data is permanently installed downhole monitoring sensors in production and injection wells. Of growing importance in this trend is fiber optic distributed temperature sensing (DTS).

The industry is looking for fast, easy-to-use, powerful reservoir management solutions to improve performance and production, and reservoir modeling is moving into this crucial phase of drilling developments in well correlation, well planning, local model updates, and the ability to incorporate real-time drilling data.

Extracting oil is becoming more technically and financial challenging as operators face increasingly complex and deeper wells. The lifespan of a well is dictated by production volume versus economic viability. This has led to technologies for enhanced oil recovery (EOR) to increase volumes extracted from a well, thereby improving its profitability.