It may be more than a year before US Gulf of Mexico oil exploration begins to ramp up in any noticeable way, but several new deepwater fields are adding to production and there seems to be sparks of interest in developing recent offshore finds. Platts Analytics Bentek Energy is forecasting a rise in US offshore production to 1.868 million b/d by year-end and to 2.296 million b/d by end-2022 from 1.669 million b/d at end-December 2016. The reason? Several new fields are slated to come online this year, including Barataria and South Santa Cruz, operated by small privately held Deep Gulf Energy, and Crown and Anchor by LLOG Exploration. Those will bring a combined 15,000 b/d of oil equivalent production. But the Tornado Field, at around 9,000 boe/d, came onstream in November and other large fields that came on in 2016 such as Anadarko Petroleum’s Heidelberg, Shell’s Stones, ExxonMobil’s […]