Daily Archives: September 29, 2010

Wanted: a teleporter for wind farms

September 29, 2010 2:00 pm by Kiran Stacey

Want £100,000? All you have to do is come up with a way of getting engineers and equipment out to the wind farms of the future.

Except it’s not quite as simple as that. While wind farms today are located typically less than 20km from the shore, the next generation of farms could be as far out as 300km, where waves can reach three metres high.

In conditions such as those, transporting workers and equipment out to the farms themselves is pretty difficult, and we’re not just talking about the seasickness that traditionally accompanies such trips.

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Too early to turn the page at BP

September 29, 2010 12:29 pm by Kiran Stacey

There is something of a clean up (if you’ll forgive the pun) going on at BP.

Yesterday the company sold $3.5bn worth of bonds, with demand high and the 5-year tranche being priced at a respectable (if sector-lagging) 195 bps over US Treasuries. The renewed confidence from the credit markets has helped the cost of default protection on its debt fall to 191bps from a high of 614bps in June.

Then today, Robert Dudley made his first personnel change before becoming CEO on Friday, putting Mark Bly, the UK head of safety, in charge of a new souped-up safety and risk division, and announcing plans to split the exploration business into three. The company said that change would lead to the departure of Andy Inglis, the head of exploration, by the end of the year.

Continue reading: “Too early to turn the page at BP”

Tags: Andy Inglis, BP, Deepwater Horizon, Gulf oil spill, Macondo, Mark Bly, Robert Dudley
Posted in Corporate news, Oil | Permalink

From beyondbrics September 28, 2010

China drives a hard bargain for Russian gas

Dmitry Medvedev, the president of Russia, is in China this week for talks aimed at cementing a new partnership between the world’s biggest energy producer and consumer.