OTC 2010 was somber – the industry stunned by an accident nobody thought could happen.

A year later, the collective mood is staid but not subdued. Companies have faced the challenge of improving safety head on, and there has been remarkably rapid progress. Technology development targeting spill prevention and response was fast tracked, and the advances that resulted are changing the face of the industry. Readers who are interested to know more about the tangible results of the industry’s efforts can read about some of them in International Editor Mark Thomas’ Gulf of Mexico (GoM) regional report in this issue (page 106).

While everyone would like to put the Macondo incident behind them, it continues to impact business and will do so for quite some time. The accident, in fact, served as the impetus to many of the advances in deepwater technology that are addressed in this month’s cover story (page 32).

The moratorium and its lingering repercussions will be with the industry for years, and speculation will continue about the impact it will have on future E&P and US energy security.

Bobby Parker, chairman of Parker Drilling, shared some of his views recently at the Decisions Strategies Oilfield Breakfast Forum in Houston.

Gasoline prices are “the one single thing the US public judges the industry on,” Parker said, and given that domestic offshore E&P activity was practically non-existent for nearly a year, the US should expect prices to rise. In addition to limited production from the GoM, he said, instability in many countries that have large oil reserves does not bode well for prices. “We’re probably in for more and more negative publicity.”

Steve Thurston, vice president, deepwater and projects business unit at Chevron, who also spoke at the forum, agreed with Parker. “The Gulf of Mexico is important to the US,” he said. “We can and will develop the deepwater safely.” That means more permits need to be issued, but at present there is a huge backlog. Although a number of permits have been granted, the pace is “painfully slow,” Thurston said, and this has stalled the tremendous investment in the GoM. “We’ve got billions of dollars invested and at stake, and if we can’t put it to work in the Gulf of Mexico, we will have to go elsewhere.” With Chevron’s large acreage holdings in the GoM, it will be inconvenient at best to go somewhere else.

Thurston said the way forward will be paved by a highly competent US regulatory agency that will allow work in the deepwater GoM to resume at a much more rapid pace. This is critically important, he said, because the future remains in deep water.

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