Angola's onshore oil gamble unlikely to pay off

Significance A BP project will deliver a temporary production boost when it comes onstream later this year, but Angola needs other foreign energy companies to sanction new greenfield developments if it is to avoid output falling below 1 million b/d by 2025. Impacts Declining oil revenues will weigh on debt sustainability, raising the risk of Angola defaulting when its debut Eurobond matures in 2025. Tourism will suffer fallout from government plans to allow drilling in national parks, delaying the sector's post-COVID-19 recovery. The oil sector's decline is an existential threat to the ruling People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA)'s political dominance.

Prehistoric and historic networks on the Atacama Desert coast (northern Chile)

Comparing the records of fishing communities made in the sixteenth to twentieth centuries to the archaeological evidence of the sixth millennium BP, the authors propose a sophisticated prehistoric network for the coastal people of northern Chile. Residential seashore settlements link both along the coast to temporary production sites for fish, and inland to oasis-based providers of products from the uplands and salt flats. Sharing values and kinsfolk, the coastal communities must have travelled extensively in boats which, like their modern counterparts, made use of floats of inflated sealskin.

Temporary production at Xijiang field with a DP FPSO

The paper describes the successful mobilization of the FPSO Munin on the Xijiang field, offshore China, to continue production in the interval that the field’s permanent FPSO was in dry dock for maintenance. The project is unique in that the FPSO Munin relies solely on its Dynamic Positioning (DP) system for station keeping. The paper describes the background to the project and goes into detail on the challenges overcome in order to make it a success. By using the original riser system and by utilizing the FPSO Munin’s DP capability a fast and cost efficient mobilization was achieved that made the project worthwhile for all parties involved. The qualification of the DP system, the offshore installation and the production operation on Xijiang are described in detail. Other applications for DP production are addressed in order to demonstrate the potential of such operations.