Looking at the new landscape for OCS 12/26/2010
New regulations for offshore drilling have come into effect as BOEMRE continues to re-organize itself after Gulf of Mexico disaster
As 2010, the year that saw the worst ever oil spill in the United States, draws to a close, the oil industry is still assessing the impact of the changing regulatory environment in the wake of the exp...

Confusion reigns over Arctic moratorium 12/12/2010
Court testimony presents contradictory views of whether or not DOI imposed an Arctic OCS drilling moratorium after Deepwater Horizon
The war of words over whether or not the U.S. Department of the Interior imposed a drilling moratorium on the Arctic outer continental shelf earlier this year is continuing in the United States Court...

The Explorers 2010: Lower Cook Inlet risk, potential 11/14/2010
The lower Cook Inlet basin contains as much as 36,000 feet of marine Mesozoic strata. But in this area the Tertiary sequence that contains the oil and gas reservoirs in the upper Cook Inlet becomes ve...

The Explorers 2010: Alaska Peninsula and North Aleutian basin 11/14/2010
The North Aleutian basin, also known as the Bristol Bay basin, extends more than 200 miles along the north side of the Alaska Peninsula and out into the southern Bering Sea shelf. The southeastern por...

The Explorers 2010: Alaska: A brave new world for explorers, producers 11/14/2010
A review of federal policy assaults on Alaska's economy and ramifications for oil and gas exploration and production
Shakespeare coined a phrase for Miranda in Act V of "The Tempest," when he wrote of a brave new world filled with good people. By Aldus Huxley's time other authors had used the term-mostly in positiv...

DOI still revising OCS lease program 10/24/2010
The U.S. Department of the Interior is still preparing its revised 2007-12 outer continental shelf lease sale program, in preparation for submitting the program to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Di...

DOI appeals District Court Chukchi ruling 10/10/2010
In a court case filed Oct. 1 in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, the U.S. Department of the Interior has appealed a July 21 decision by the U.S. District Court for Alaska, in which the D...

Going for the Beaufort; Shell applies for Sivulliq well in '11 10/10/2010
In an opening gambit for planned drilling on the Alaska outer continental shelf in 2011, Shell announced Oct. 6 that it has applied to the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Regulation and Enfo...