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Seabox AS Acquired by NOV
National Oilwell Varco (NOV) has acquired 97% of the shares in Seabox for an undisclosed amount from a group of shareholders led by HitecVision.
Seabox is a Norwegian subsea technology company founded around the patented SWIT technology (Subsea Water Intake & Treatment). The technology enables treatment of raw seawater on the seabed (as opposed to on a platform) for injection into oil & gas wells for pressure support and increased oil recovery.
The company was established in 2004, and has, through a series of Joint Industry Projects backed by the Norwegian Research Council and by potential end-users such as ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, Shell, Total, Statoil, GDF Suez and others, developed the technology to a level where it is now ready for commercialization. Seabox has 12 employees.
Helge Lunde, CEO of Seabox comments: “We are very excited to team up with NOV’s global organization, which will significantly increase our reach and chances of succeeding in commercializing our technology. We are both proud and happy for their recognition of our efforts and technical solutions, and their commitment to backing us through the coming growth phase. We are convinced that our growth will be faster and stronger together with NOV.”
Michael Hjorth, President of Flexibles and Subsea Production Systems, comments: “NOV has a strong history and presence in Norway, where some of our key technologies for drilling, turret mooring and deck cranes have been developed, and to a large degree also manufactured. When it comes to subsea, which is an area where NOV wants to develop and expand, Norway is pretty much the “Silicon Valley” of the industry, so it is natural for us to search for new technologies and ideas here. In Seabox we have found what we deem to be innovative yet robust technical solutions, which offer more cost effective solutions but more importantly will offer the oil & gas companies greater flexibility in optimizing their reservoir drainage and field profitability. This is a huge market, with some 250 million barrels of seawater injected daily world-wide, which is almost three times the daily oil production. We are excited to explore these market opportunities together with Seabox.”
Image: Seabox
Ebola Czar :: President Obama Already Has An Ebola Czar. Where Is She?
As the Ebola situation in West Africa continues to deteriorate, some U.S. officials are claiming that they would have been able to better deal with the public health threat if only they had more money.
Dr. Francis Collins, who heads the National Institutes of Health (NIH), told The Huffington Post, “Frankly, if we had not gone through our 10-year slide in research support, we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this that would’ve gone through clinical trials and would have been ready.” Hillary Clinton also claimed that funding restrictions were to blame for inability to combat Ebola.
Conservative critics have pointed out that the federal government has spent billions upon billions of dollars on unnecessary programs promoting a political agenda rather than targeting those funds to the fight against health threats.
Other limited government types point to the Progressive utopian foolishness seen in opposing political factions, both sides of which seem to agree humanity could somehow escape calamity if only we had a properly functioning government. People who don’t want an all-powerful government shouldn’t blame it for not having competence when crisis strikes.
What’s particularly interesting about this discussion, then, is that nobody has even discussed the fact that the federal government not ten years ago created and funded a brand new office in the Health and Human Services Department specifically to coordinate preparation for and response to public health threats like Ebola. The woman who heads that office, and reports directly to the HHS secretary, has been mysteriously invisible from the public handling of this threat. And she’s still on the job even though three years ago she was embroiled in a huge scandal of funneling a major stream of funding to a company with ties to a Democratic donor—and away from a company that was developing a treatment now being used on Ebola patients.
Before the media swallow implausible claims of funding problems, perhaps they could be more skeptical of the idea that government is responsible for solving all of humanity’s problems. Barring that, perhaps the media could at least look at the roles that waste, fraud, mismanagement, and general incompetence play in the repeated failures to solve the problems the feds unrealistically claim they will address. In a world where a $12.5 billion slush fund at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is used to fight the privatization of liquor stores, perhaps we should complain more about mission creep and Progressive faith in the habitually unrealized magic of increased government funding.
Lay of the Land
Collins’ NIH is part of the Health and Human Services Department. Real spending at that agency has increased nine-fold since 1970 and now tops $900 billion. Oh, if we could all endure such “funding slides,” eh?
Whether or not Dr. Collins’ effort to get more funding for NIH will be successful—if the past is prologue, we’ll throw more money at him—the fact is that Congress passed legislation with billions of dollars in funding specifically to coordinate preparation for public health threats like Ebola not 10 years ago. And yet the results of such funding have been hard to evaluate.
See, in 2004, Congress passed The Project Bioshield Act. The text of that legislation authorized up to $5,593,000,000 in new spending by NIH for the purpose of purchasing vaccines that would be used in the event of a bioterrorist attack. A major part of the plan was to allow stockpiling and distribution of vaccines.
Just two years later, Congress passed the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act, which created a new assistant secretary for preparedness and response to oversee medical efforts and called for a National Health Security Strategy. The Act established Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority as the focal point within HHS for medical efforts to protect the American civilian population against naturally occurring threats to public health. It specifically says this authority was established to give “an integrated, systematic approach to the development and purchase of the necessary vaccines, drugs, therapies, and diagnostic tools for public health medical emergencies.”
Last year, Congress passed the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Reauthorization Act of 2013 which keep the programs in effect for another five years.
If you look at any of the information about these pieces of legislation or the office and authorities that were created, this brand new expansion of the federal government was sold to us specifically as a means to fight public health threats like Ebola. That was the entire point of why the office and authorities were created.
In fact, when Sen. Bob Casey was asked if he agreed the U.S. needed an Ebola czar, which some legislators are demanding, he responded: “I don’t, because under the bill we have such a person in HHS already.”
The Invisible Dr. Lurie
So, we have an office for public health threat preparedness and response. And one of HHS’ eight assistant secretaries is the assistant secretary for preparedness and response, whose job it is to “lead the nation in preventing, responding to and recovering from the adverse health effects of public health emergencies and disasters, ranging from hurricanes to bioterrorism.”
In the video below, the woman who heads that office, Dr. Nicole Lurie, explains that the responsibilities of her office are “to help our country prepare for, respond to and recover from public health threats.” She says her major priority is to help the country prepare for emergencies and to “have the countermeasures—the medicines or vaccines that people might need to use in a public health emergency. So a large part of my office also is responsible for developing those countermeasures.”
Or, as National Journal rather glowingly puts it, “Lurie’s job is to plan for the unthinkable. A global flu pandemic? She has a plan. A bioterror attack? She’s on it. Massive earthquake? Yep. Her responsibilities as assistant secretary span public health, global health, and homeland security.” A profile of Lurie quoted her as saying, “I have responsibility for getting the nation prepared for public health emergencies—whether naturally occurring disasters or man-made, as well as for helping it respond and recover. It’s a pretty significant undertaking.” Still another refers to her as “the highest-ranking federal official in charge of preparing the nation to face such health crises as earthquakes, hurricanes, terrorist attacks, and pandemic influenza.”
Now, you might be wondering why the person in charge of all this is a name you’re not familiar with. Apart from a discussion of Casey’s comments on how we don’t need an Ebola czar because we already have one, a Google News search for Lurie’s name at the time of writing brings up nothing in the last hour, the last 24 hours, not even the last week! You have to get back to mid-September for a few brief mentions of her name in minor publications. Not a single one of those links is confidence building.
So why has the top official for public health threats been sidelined in the midst of the Ebola crisis? Only the not-known-for-transparency Obama administration knows for sure. But maybe taxpayers and voters should force Congress to do a better job with its oversight rather than get away with the far easier passing of legislation that grants additional funds before finding out what we got for all that money we allocated to this task over the last decade. And then maybe taxpayers should begin to puzzle out whether their really bad return on tax investment dollars is related to some sort of inherent problem with the administrative state.
The Ron Perelman Scandal
There are a few interesting things about the scandal Lurie was embroiled in years ago. You can—and should—read all about it in the Los Angeles Times‘ excellent front-page expose from November 2011, headlined: “Cost, need questioned in $433-million smallpox drug deal: A company controlled by a longtime political donor gets a no-bid contract to supply an experimental remedy for a threat that may not exist.” This Forbes piece is also interesting.
The donor is billionaire Ron Perelman, who was controlling shareholder of Siga. He’s a huge Democratic donor but he also gets Republicans to play for his team, of course. Siga was under scrutiny even back in October 2010 when The Huffington Post reported that it had named labor leader Andy Stern to its board and “compensated him with stock options that would become dramatically more valuable if the company managed to win the contract it sought with HHS—an agency where Stern has deep connections, having helped lead the year-plus fight for health care reform as then head of the Service Employees International Union.”
The award was controversial from almost every angle—including disputes about need, efficacy, and extremely high costs. There were also complaints about awarding a company of its size and structure a small business award as well as the negotiations involved in granting the award. It was so controversial that even Democrats in tight election races were calling for investigations.
Last month, Siga filed for bankruptcy after it was found liable for breaching a licensing contract. The drug it’s been trying to develop, which was projected to have limited utility, has not really panned out—yet the feds have continued to give valuable funds to the company even though the law would permit them to recoup some of their costs or to simply stop any further funding.
The Los Angeles Times revealed that, during the fight over the grant, Lurie wrote to Siga’s chief executive, Dr. Eric A. Rose, to tell him that someone new would be taking over the negotiations with the company. She wrote, “I trust this will be satisfactory to you.” Later she denied that she’d had any contact with Rose regarding the contract, saying such contact would have been inappropriate.
The company that most fought the peculiar sole-source contract award to Siga was Chimerix, which argued that its drug had far more promise than Siga’s. And, in fact, Chimerix’s Brincidofovir is an antiviral medication being developed for treatment of smallpox but also Ebola and adenovirus. In animal trials, it’s shown some success against adenoviruses, smallpox, and herpes—and preliminary tests show some promise against Ebola. On Oct. 6, the FDA authorized its use for some Ebola patients.
It was given to Ebola patient Thomas Eric Duncan, who died, and Ashoka Mukpo, who doctors said had improved. Mukpo even tweeted that he was on the road to recovery.
Back to that Budget
Consider again how The Huffington Post parroted Collins’ claims:
Money, or rather the lack of it, is a big part of the problem. NIH’s purchasing power is down 23 percent from what it was a decade ago, and its budget has remained almost static. In fiscal year 2004, the agency’s budget was $28.03 billion. In FY 2013, it was $29.31 billion—barely a change, even before adjusting for inflation.
Of course, between the fiscal years 2000 and 2004, NIH’s budget jumped a whopping 58 percent. HHS’s 70,000 workers will spend a total of $958 billion this year, or about $7,789 for every U.S. household. A 2012 report on federal spending including the following nuggets about how NIH spends its supposedly tight funds:
- a $702,558 grant for the study of the impact of televisions and gas generators on villages in Vietnam.
- $175,587 to the University of Kentucky to study the impact of cocaine on the sex drive of Japanese quail.
- $55,382 to study hookah smoking in Jordan.
- $592,527 to study why chimpanzees throw objects.
Last year there were news reports about a $509,840 grant from NIH to pay for a study that will send text messages in “gay lingo” to meth-heads. There are many other shake-your-head examples of misguided spending that are easy to find.
And we’re not even getting into the problems at the CDC or the confusing mixed messages on Ebola from the administration. CDC director Tom Frieden noted: more here
Indeed. The Progressive belief that a powerful government can stop all calamity is misguided. In the last 10 years we passed multiple pieces of legislation to create funding streams, offices, and management authorities precisely for this moment. That we have nothing to show for it is not good reason to put even more faith in government without learning anything from our repeated mistakes. Responding to the missing Ebola Czar and her office’s corruption by throwing still more money, more management changes, and more bureaucratic complexity in her general direction is madness.
Gulf of Mexico :: EMAS AMC Bags $300 Mln Subsea Gig from Noble Energy
Ezra Holdings Limited’s Subsea Services division, EMAS AMC, has finalised three contracts with Noble Energy valued collectively at over US$300 million.
The scope of work includes engineering, procurement, construction and installation of subsea tie-backs for the Big Bend, Dantzler and Gunflint field developments in the US Gulf of Mexico.
The project management, engineering and procurement are already well underway from EMAS AMC’s Houston office with fabrication of the 16 subsea structures, and stalking and spooling of over 160 miles (258 km) of line pipe, in progress at the recently upgraded EMAS Marine Spool Base facility in Ingleside, Texas.
Offshore execution is scheduled for 2015, utilizing five EMAS AMC offshore construction vessels including the new build, ultra-high tension, deepwater reel lay and heavy lift vessel, the Lewek Constellation.
“Following the successful completion of the Tamar project, I am particularly grateful for the continued trust and confidence that the Noble Energy team has shown in our people and our capabilities. It is a testament of our ability in delivering operational excellence and results,” said Mr Lionel Lee, Ezra’s Group CEO and Managing Director.
“With our flagship vessel Lewek Constellation, we are helming the future of the subsea industry, and with her in operation, we will continue to drive our growth as a premier global subsea tie-back contractor.”
BP E&P extends Subsea 7 contract in GoM
Subsea 7 S.A. has announced the award of a three-year $160 million contract extension by BP Exploration & Production Inc. for light subsea construction, inspection, repair and maintenance services in the US Gulf of Mexico.
The contract will run from the second quarter 2014 to the third quarter 2017. The scope covers the provision of two vessels, including a dedicated vessel on a full-time basis, associated project management and engineering support, ROV-based inspection and intervention, and light construction work.
One of the vessels to be utilized in the contract is a new-build offshore subsea construction vessel while the other is a light construction vessel. Both vessels will be chartered on a long- term basis.
John Evans, Subsea 7′s Chief Operating Officer, said: “We are very pleased to have been awarded this important contract extension and to be able to continue growing our valued relationship with BP. This award highlights our proven track record for safely delivering successful Life-of-Field operations.”
Press Release, May 01, 2014
MacGregor Provides Subsea Crane for ‘Island Intervention’
MacGregor, part of Cargotec, has won a contract to deliver a 250-tonne SWL active heave-compensated (AHC) subsea crane for the 120m construction vessel, Island Intervention. The crane was ordered by Marine Procurement Ltd, part of the US company Edison Chouest Offshore.
An existing vessel operated by the US/Norwegian partnership between Edison Chouest Offshore and Island Offshore requires greater lifting capability; a MacGregor 250-tonne SWL AHC subsea crane fulfils the upgrade requirements. Island Intervention is currently operating in the North Sea for the US/Norwegian partnership between Edison Chouest Offshore and Island Offshore. The vessel works in the offshore construction market and was delivered by Norwegian yard Ulstein Verft in 2011; its current lifting capacity is 140 tonnes.
“The vessel simply needs a bigger crane for the jobs that it undertakes,” says Frode Grøvan, Director, Sales and Marketing for Advanced Load Handling. “The order confirms the trend that we see of subsea modules getting larger and heavier, therefore requiring operators to equip their vessels with ever more capable cranes.”
“At MacGregor, we have the expertise necessary to ensure that retrofit projects like this run smoothly and successfully, with downtime kept to a minimum.”
Related articles
- Huisman to Deliver Well Intervention System for Helix’s Q7000 (mb50.wordpress.com)
Gulf of Mexico: DOF Subsea Nets Multiple Subsea Contracts in USA
DOF Subsea Group has been awarded multiple subsea projects for DPII Multipurpose Construction Vessel, the Harvey Deep-Sea, in the Gulf of Mexico.
The recently delivered Harvey Deep-sea successfully completed commissioning mid-September, and is currently mobilizing for the first project in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico.
The awarded projects will secure utilization of the vessel for approximately 60 days in the period from today and until end November.
To remind, DOF Subsea USA entered into a long-term charter agreement with Harvey Gulf International Marine for the Harvey Deep-Sea. The four year charter agreement began in June 2013.
Hornbeck Orders MacGregor AHC Subsea Cranes for Its MPS Vessel
Cargotec’s MacGregor has received EUR 37 million order from Hornbeck Offshore Services Inc. to deliver four 250-tonne active heave-compensated (AHC) subsea cranes for four multi-purpose supply vessels (MPSV). The cranes will be delivered between fourth quarter 2014 and third quarter 2015. The order is booked in the second quarter 2013 order intake.
“MPSVs are specialized vessels that are principally used to support complex deepwater subsea construction, installation, maintenance, repair and other sophisticated operations,” says Frode Grøvan, Sales and Marketing Director for MacGregor Advanced Load Handling. “We are pleased that Hornbeck Offshore opted MacGregor’s advanced 250-tonne AHC subsea cranes with operational capability at depths of 3700m suitable for ultra-deepwater operations.”
Cargotec, May 14, 2013
Gulf of Mexico: Shell Invests in GoM Stones Project
Royal Dutch Shell plc (Shell) today announces a final investment decision in the Stones ultra-deepwater project, a Gulf of Mexico oil and gas development expected to host the deepest production facility in the world.
This decision sets in motion the construction and fabrication of a floating production, storage, and offloading (FPSO) vessel and subsea infrastructure. The development will start with two subsea production wells tied back to the FPSO vessel, followed later by six additional production wells. This first phase of development is expected to have annual peak production of 50,000 boe/d from more than 250 million boe of recoverable resources. The Stones field has significant upside potential and is estimated to contain over 2 billion boe of oil in place.
“This important investment demonstrates our ongoing commitment to usher in the next generation of deepwater developments, which will deliver more production growth in the Americas,” said John Hollowell, Executive Vice President for Deepwater, Shell Upstream Americas. “We will continue our leadership in safe, innovative deepwater operations to help meet the growing demand for energy in the US.”
The Stones field is located in 9,500 feet (2,896 meters) of water, approximately 200 miles (320 kilometers) southwest of New Orleans, Louisiana, and was discovered in 2005. The project encompasses eight US Federal Outer Continental Shelf lease blocks in the Gulf of Mexico’s Lower Tertiary geologic trend. Shell has been one of the pioneers in the Lower Tertiary, establishing first production in the play from its Perdido Development.
An FPSO design was selected to safely develop and produce this ultra-deepwater discovery, while addressing the relative lack of infrastructure, seabed complexity, and unique reservoir properties. With an FPSO, tankers will transport oil from the Stones FPSO to US refineries, and gas will be transported by pipeline.
The launch of the Stones development is a key milestone as Shell continues to grow deepwater exploration and development in the Gulf of Mexico, having made significant progress recently on the Mars-B development project with the arrival of the Olympus tension leg platform. Shell is also in the concept selection phase for the Appomattox and Vito discoveries in the Gulf of Mexico.
Shell holds 100% interest and will operate the Stones development.
Continents of the World
Mb50's "Liquid Mud" Rant 