Welcome to the Offshore Facilities feature of this month’s JPT. It was my pleasure to review 161 conference papers submitted in this field during the past year. As noted in the May JPT, our offshore industry began January 2020 with its third-best year on record. The break-even point (BEP) for deepwater projects pre-final-investment decision had fallen to approximately $50/bbl, and greenfield offshore development BEP was expected to reach below $40/bbl.
In mid-January 2020, I attended and enjoyed the first International Petroleum Technology Conference in Saudi Arabia and witnessed an optimism across our industry. But all excitement changed unexpectedly in April 2020, when COVID-19 became a global pandemic, oil was oversupplied, and markets crashed.
This low-oil-price situation is not the first in the history of our industry, and we again are going to see the challenges of reduction in demand; equipment; services, including financial support; asset and manpower excess reduction; and supply-change distraction.
