Offshore production "is actually pretty critical to keeping that line open, " said Patrick Burden, president of Northern Economics.
New regulations and drilling restrictions will raise the cost of offshore production which will drive up the cost of oil.
However, if new demand grows and prices rise, hurricane activity could once again be a threat to key offshore production.
FORBES: Damaging Hurricanes Could Impact Energy, Insurance Industries In 2012
She currently employs approximately 460 people who work offshore, and all of her revenue comes from servicing offshore production and drilling sites.
The natural gas industry has had a rather low-key attitude toward hurricane season threats on offshore production in the Gulf of Mexico.
FORBES: Damaging Hurricanes Could Impact Energy, Insurance Industries In 2012
With oil prices rising and offshore production looking unattractive, we turn our attention to the great frozen north where water is sparse and oil sand abounds.
BP's Forties pipeline from the North Sea, which comes ashore at Grangemouth, carries about 700, 000 barrels of crude oil a day between a quarter and a fifth of Britain's offshore production.
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Offshore production means any platform structure that is affixed temporarily or permanently to offshore submerged lands and that houses equipment to extract petroleum and natural gas from the ocean or lake floor.
An important geophysical and technical subtext in the data: growth in offshore production has come entirely from the technically challenging deep water fields, not the older and more numerous shallow water regions.
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Then again, GDP may not be the best measure for the impact on the economy, as much of the benefit from offshore production accrues to energy companies who take their profits outside Scotland.
Offshore production is increasingly moving back to rich countries not because Chinese wages are rising, but because companies now want to be closer to their customers so that they can respond more quickly to changes in demand.
But she does get sore about the subject of offshore film production.
Unlike offshore oil and gas production, offshore renewable energy projects often avoid thorny siting issues and enhance the bottom line.
By 2020, offshore oil production is expected to account for 34% of the global output opposed to 25% in 1990.
Offshore oil production could help refill the pipeline just when the flow from the North Slope is projected to reach critical lows.
Total U.S. offshore oil production amounts to 1.7 million barrels per day.
The only big offshore Arctic production site is the Snohvit gas field in the Norwegian Barents Sea, opened by Statoil in 2007.
Offshore energy production facilities are highly sensitive to external conditions and frequently have to stop operations when threatened by spills, storms or other unusual circumstances.
Shortly before the ExxonMobil-Rosneft deal was announced, Vladimir Putin, Russia's president, announced plans to make it much more attractive for foreigners to invest in Russian offshore energy production.
Total U.S. offshore oil production is 1.7 million barrels per day, almost all of it from the Gulf of Mexico, eerily close to the two million barrels per day of the historic correlation.
While the regulatory headwinds that are keeping offshore wind production at bay are easing, the bigger gusts involve getting the financing needed to go ahead, as well as to conquering some of the technical hurdles.
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Exporters are struggling and some are moving production offshore because of the currency issue.
It is a leader in offshore exploration and production, which has helped Petrobras keep production growing at nearly double-digit rates.
The remaining producers of machine tools have either shifted production to other machine tool lines, or have moved production offshore.
Companies have been able to move production offshore and to resist demands for wage increases from workers in their domestic market.
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One of the most cautious and conservative of the Japanese automakers, Toyota has nonetheless been moving production offshore at a steadily growing pace.
According to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, Gulf offshore natural gas production accounts for about 13% of overall U.S. natural gas supply.
FORBES: Damaging Hurricanes Could Impact Energy, Insurance Industries In 2012
In practice, it is predictable that the result of this policy will be that manufacturing jobs associated with presently controlled technologies will move offshore, where production can take place at lower cost.
For example, Italy and the Netherlands, which have had considerable domestic natural gas production over the years, have the majority of their production offshore, but fracing can only be conducted from an onshore site because it requires immense amounts of freshwater to be pumped down the well.
But that was long before Hanes began moving much of its production offshore, and before the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement (under which the tobacco companies agreed in 1998 to pay hundreds of billions of dollars in damages for harming people's health), the leveraged buy-out of RJR by a private-equity firm, the elimination of federal farm price support for tobacco and decades of anti-smoking advertising.
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