Steve Sasanow

Equinor, in a comment piece that accompanied its Capital Markets Day presentation this week, repeated an oft spoken ditty – the days of big offshore finds is over. I find this a disingenuous view that simply supports big companies’ positions and makes what they do now seem to be clever […]

I noted last week that a few folks from Helix Energy Solutions were making mention – and joyfully as well – that the MSV Seawell, after a major maintenance project in a yard in Swansea, was still operational after nearly 40 years of service. I have to say that I […]

When I first began covering the energy scene back in the early 1980’s, it was assuredly a man’s world. If you ever encountered a female, it was normally someone in public relations or a secretary. There were women in other positions, quite often HR (human resources), but it was rare […]

There are always items popping up on the net that bring back interesting memories. A recent item was no exception. Several folks made note of the fact that OneSubsea had just delivered its 1,500th subsea control module (scm). Now why is this of some significance to the industry at large […]

I did a day’s work last week – shock horror! I may be about to hit 75, but my brain is still working – mostly. I spent last Tuesday at Global Underwater Hub’s (GUH) Bristol office, covering the Celtic Sea floating offshore wind (FLOW) conference for North Sea Reporter, the […]

I cried yesterday. I don’t cry very often. I didn’t cry when my mother died, even though I loved her dearly. She was 93 and waited until she saw me and my oldest son one last time and then moved on. I cried yesterday, unexpectedly, while watching the new three-part […]

(NB: Hi folks – I have to offer my apologies for having been away so long. It has been a combination of ill health, ennui and other distractions. But feeling more like myself now, so I am back in the saddle, so to speak. Yee ha!) For those who have […]

In the dim and distant past, bidding on projects, or even on frame agreements, was a busy business. There were maybe up to six or more players in most categories – ie floaters, production equipment, risers, umbilicals, pipelaying, IRM, et al. All of the participants had to throw significant resources […]

A press release this week from Rystad Energy made me go all nostalgic for the good old days when doing things subsea was still new and exciting and Subsea Engineering News was the publication to go to when folks in the industry wanted more than the few crumbs from that […]

In the classic late 1960’s film The Graduate, a friend of the father of the eponymous hero, played by Dustin Hoffman, tells him if he has one word of advice for him it is ‘plastics’. ‘There is a great future in plastics’, Benjamin Braddock is told, a line said with […]

I don’t always believe everything that appears in oilfield rags, but Upstream is one of the mostly reliable ones. So the item that appeared last week about Chevron planning to sell off its remaining UK North Sea assets and exit the sector, made some sense, but also made me go […]

Here is a proposition that most of you would not consider unless asked after multiples drinks/pints in the pub: who would be a politician nowadays? Now I have no time for the current UK government. The best thing one can say about Rishi Sunak is that he is not Boris […]

The Global Underwater Hub (GUH), the organisation formerly known as Subsea UK, is in a bit of a quandary. GUH, an industry facilitator and promoter, wants to be all things to all people. It wants to promote the energy transition and the move towards offshore wind and hydrogen production as […]

It is 35 years now since the Piper Alpha accident took the lives of 167 men who had been working on the platform operated by Occidental. I don’t think that I can ever forget the numbers who died or the events prior to or after that dreadful event. It was […]

No one has ever accused Judith Patten of being a shy retiring flower. Having done a charity ‘wingwalk’ last year in aid of the Anthony Nolan Trust, the former president of the Society for Underwater Technology (SUT) took advantage of a discount – do another wingwalk within a year! – […]

Back in January, I was cc’d into an exchange of emails that was begun by Brian Skeels, former FMC subsea hardware guru whose career with the production system supplier goes way back before the merger with Technip. He is now a TFMC ‘technology fellow’ which I presume means he is […]

Back in the day, that is several decades ago before the Enron scandal of 2000, oil companies liked to tell the world what they were doing, ie finding and developing oil and gas reserves, how they were doing it and generally informing the public how clever they were at keeping […]

The lead up to Subsea Expo, this coming week in Aberdeen, always seem like an appropriate time to say something formative about our favourite technology. While much of the conversation these days is about the energy transition away from hydrocarbons, there is little doubt that the world will still be […]

Firstly, happy new year to you all. We are all hoping that the chaos that engulfed the world – and the UK in particular – last year will have come to an end, for all our sakes. Towards the end of last year, when I was only paying attention with […]

Anyone who has been involved in the development of new technology for the subsea sector knows that it is a long slog. There was a study done in the 1990’s by a major independent business consultancy that showed that the oil and gas industry then – and not much has […]

If there is a truism about the oil business, it is that oil companies – not contractors, not suppliers nor service companies – always make money. Any time an oil company announces a loss, it is rarely a real loss, only a bit of paper shuffling, asset write-down or expenditure […]

When I was offered my first job writing about the energy market way back more than 40 years ago, I had to consider the implications of leaving the world of general journalism to take up a specialist area. (Of course, at that time I never would have dreamed that I […]

During my 30 plus years as editor of Subsea Engineering News, the only subject I enjoyed writing about as much as new technology was the business of business. There have been so many buyouts, mergers, takeovers, reshuffles and the like that they would assuredly fill a book or two. The […]

This week’s announcement during ONS of a new joint venture between Schlumberger, Aker Solutions and Subsea 7 is a bit more than it appears. Firstly, it replaces the existing Subsea Integration Alliance venture between Schlumberger and S7 and secondly, it contracts the market for subsea hardware supplies, so that some […]