2009.10.08

Houston Chronicle: ConocoPhillips moves to slash its debt.

"ConocoPhillips' word that it will drop spending to $11 billion in 2010, after cutting it 37 percent to $12.5 billion in 2009, suggests continued headwinds for the industry into next year.

"‘There is no question in my mind that capital spending will continue to decline across the board,’ said Fadel Gheit, industry analyst with Oppenheimer & Co. in New York. That could be bad news for oil field services companies like Schlumberger, Halliburton and Baker Hughes, all major employers in Houston."

Bnet: Conoco To Unload $10B in Assets, What Will Go First?

"Perhaps, Conoco already provided a really big hint when it sold its 40 percent share in a natural gas field offshore Venezuela back to the state-run Pdvsa, or Petroleos de Venezuela."

2009.10.02

About a month ago, ION rolled out a very professional blog named Seis Matters. It has an attractive appearance, interesting content, and it gets updated a lot more often than this page.

Houston Chronicle: UH professor making waves in deepwater drilling.

"Weglein, however, will be the first to admit there are plenty of naysayers about his current theory, which he will present at a conference in Egypt in November and hopes to field test next year. ‘What we're aiming to do is to get the target located and delineated without needing to know anything above it,’ he said. By contrast, traditional seismic imaging methods require an estimate of the speed of a sound wave as it travels from the water's surface, into the earth, bounces off a target, and returns to the surface."

> I attended Arthur's consortium meeting in Coronado, California, last May. Really cool mathematics, really cool science, really cool people.