Is This Platform the Future for Offshore Oil and Gas?
As Deepwater Horizon and Piper Alpha have shown, trying to get offshore oil and gas wells working properly can be a hazardous business.
I was converted to the idea and the economics of reuseable platforms many years ago, when I did the calculations for Balaena Structures in Cambridge.
A few days ago I was watching BBC Breakfast, when they had an item about F3-FA, which is a reuseable gas platform. It may have cost £200million, but it is intended to drain up to four or five smaller gas fields during ts working life.
The article says this about the costs of the design.
“Most platforms are permanently installed on the seabed, they are used for a number of years, after which they are decommissioned and brought back onshore,” he says.
“This platform is self-installing, which means it comes out on a barge, you put the legs down to the sea bed, you exploit the oil and gas out of the field and when the field is finished you do it in reverse and take it to the next field.
Just seven or eight people are needed to run the 9,000-tonnes facility“And you do that three or four times, thus reducing the cost.”
Note that statement about the platform needing a small crew. It must surely have safety and accommodation implications as well as cost.
Incidentally, it is very different to the Balaena I worked on. One day, I’ll put the details of that on this blog.
The New Waitrose Credit Card Machines
They obviously weren’t designed by someone with a gammy hand. The old one where you just pushed the card into the slot worked well for me, but I can’t slide my card through the reader with the left.
I bet the system wasn’t designed by someone with a brain.
Incidentally, the script on many card machines says “Do not remove the card” and then changes it to “Remove the card”. If your eyesight isn’t good, like mine is at times, you can get a bit mixed-up and take the card out too early, as you see the word “Remove”.
Reasons To Be Hopeful
This was the headline across the front page of The Times today. They gave it three sub-titles :-
- Growth surprises City
- Advertising soars
- Strongest ewbound since the War
They also talked about how a new shopping centre at One New Change in the City of London, nicknamed the Stealth Bomber is virtually fully let to retailers.
Let’s hope that this is not a false dawn! But visiting Cambridge as I do regularly, I have a feeling that it is not!
Liverpool Fans are Making a Crisis Out of a Small Drama
They love crises in Liverpool and the drama over the ownership of Liverpool Football Club is typical of the city. They even wasted an hour or so, talking about this subject on Radio 5, yesterday morning.
Ipswich fans could complain about past messes that their club has got in, but to us, there are more inmportant things in life.
So perhaps Liverpool fans should get a life outside of football.
In truth these dramas will go on and on until the most successful clubs in the UK have some form of community ownership. I doubt it will be like that of Barcelona or Real Madrid, but then who’s to say what will happen?
Saucy Postcards Make a Comback
In a recession or time of adversity or austerity, humour always does well.
Even Bamforth’s saucy postcards have found a new champion to develop their totally British institution. It’s all in The Independent.
Winning a Queen’s Award
Metier Management Systems, the company behind Artemis, won two Queen’s Awards for Export Achievement. I think they were in 1981 and 1982. There is surprisingly little on the Internet and all I can find at present is this page from the London Gazette. There isn’t even a list in Wikipedia, which shows how much we celebrate success in the UK.
I don’t even have any photos of either the presentations or the parties at Buckingham Palace, where I met the Queen.
And Now The Good News!
BBC Breakfast yesterday carried the story that small businesses were starting up at an increased rate. The full story is here , under the unlikely title of “Explosion in Number of UK Entrepreneurs”. Here’s an extract.
The number of small business entrepreneurs in the UK has increased by 117% in the last five years, fuelling a 41% increase in the total number of firms in the UK.
Business data collected by global information services company, Experian, has found that one or two man band businesses have managed to maintain the lowest insolvency rate over the last five years compared to other types of businesses.
Charlotte Hogg, managing director of Experian UK & Ireland, said: “Our analysis reveals that the UK’s smallest businesses have been surprisingly resilient during the economic downturn and have also seen their population skyrocket in the last five years.”
Hogg explained that the recession would have been an underlying factor in the increase of micro businesses. She said many start-ups were the result of changed circumstances where people found themselves unemployed, and needed to look for alternatives.
There are so many gaps in the market and it would appear that people are rushing to fill them. As an example I’ve told many of my friends about Tommy Miah and his Raj Hotels. Some will try him and all the others said it is what is needed, as they are fed up with paying too much for inadequate hotel rooms in places miles from where they want.
The CEO’s E-Mail Address
It has been reported that the CEO of Nationwide has been forced to shut his e-mail address, because of protests, that they are charging for overseas cash withdrawals. Apparently, it has now been changed to something like ceo@nationwide.co.uk and you now get through to one of his assistants.
Apparently, there is a web site call ceoemail.com, which gives many of the e-mail addresses or those that run companies and organisations.
So if I was running a large company, how would I organise it?
The e-mail address would be obvious like ceo@megacorp.co.uk and this would then go through a strong spam filter to remove the real rubbish trying to sell me worthless fakes and then pass the rest to my assistant or one of a group of assistants, if the company was large enough or I was getting a lot of e-mail. The assistants would have software, which by just clicking a button would take action on the e-mails. Actions might include.
- Forward to Customer Services or other Departments. These would also go into an e-mail tracking system, so that it can be traced that e-mails have been acted on.
- Put on a block list as it’s abusive. The sender would be told and why!
- Reply with a simple and appropriate e-mail.
- Phone the sender and say something appropriate.
- Send them a nice postcard. I’ve always found that this is a good thing to do, as people won’t throw away a nice picture. But they may pin it to their notice board.
Obviously, you can think of a lot more responses you might use.
The important e-mails would be sent to me for personal action.
Now some companies manage to do this with letters and I can remember receiving a phone call from Sainsbury’s after I’d written in with a complaint to the CEO.
But one thing no company does is to analyse all of the messages and count the occurences of various issues. So to return to the Nationwide example, if the CEO was getting a lot of complaints about withdrawal fees, the CEO would know about it and could take action.
So in fact, if you get the system right, it’s a very powerful way to find out what your customers are thinking about and satisfy their needs!
Line-Up the Dinosaurs
It would appear that the TUC’s response to the country’s enormous deficit is to do nothing!
The dinosaurs are saying we need a few strikes to stop the cuts. If there is anything, that will put as back in recession, it’s that, as people won’t be able to get to work and will have difficulty living their lives.
On the other hand, strikes would probably be counter productive, as the general public seem to be very realistic about the need for austerity. I also think that a lot of Union leaders and members know this, so they would actually suggest cuts that are sensible and worthwhile, as it’s better to have a job rather than no job.
Do Blackburn Rovers Want This Man as an Owner?
The BBC has been doing some investigating into the prospective new owner of Blackburn Rovers Football Club.
This an except from the report.
Records show Ahsan Ali Syed has failed to pay a county court judgement of £61,500. Other debts include £7,800 in unpaid rent and nearly £1,000 in unpaid council tax.
Mr Ali is also listed as director of two UK companies which were dissolved for non-compliance.
We mustn’t let dodgy characters ruin our national game, by being able to buy clubs. I’m going to Portsmouth next week, where they know all about people who live on a different planet.
The Anonymous Widower 