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Chevron adds Gulf of Mexico production with Ballymore subsea tieback startup
Chevron Corp. has started producing oil and natural gas from the Ballymore subsea tieback in the deepwater Mississippi Canyon area of the US Gulf of Mexico, the company said in a release Apr. 21. Chevron Corp. sanctioned the Ballymore project in 2018, four years after its discovery. The discovery well, drilled to a final depth of 8,898 m about 120 km offshore Louisiana in 2,000 m of water, encountered 205 m of net oil pay in a high-quality Jurassic Norphlet reservoir (OGJ Online, Jan. 31, 2018; May 12, 2022). Ballymore, the operator’s first in the Norphlet trend of the Gulf, has been developed as a three-mile subsea tieback to the existing Chevron-operated Blind Faith semisubmersible platform and is expected to produce up to 75,000 gross b/d of oil and 50 MMcfd of gas.

US BOEM begins process to replace current OCS lease sale plan
US Interior Secretary Doug Burgum directed the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) to start developing a plan for offshore oil and gas lease sales on the US Outer Continental Shelf (OCS), including likely sales in a newly established 27h OCS planning area offshore Alaska in the High Arctic. The 11th National OCS program will replace the current 10th Program (2024–29), which includes only three oil and gas lease sales over 5 years—all in the Gulf, Burgum said in a release Apr. 18. BOEM will work to complete those sales, while it begins to develop the new program, he said. Earlier this month, Burgum directed BOEM to move forward a lease sale in the Gulf, starting with publication in June 2025 of a notice of sale. BOEM will soon publish in the Federal Register a request for information and comments which starts a 45-day public comment period that serves as the initial step in the multi-year planning process that details lease sales BOEM will hold in the coming years. The Federal Register notice will also outline BOEM’s new jurisdiction over the High Arctic planning area offshore Alaska, as well as new boundaries for existing planning areas, Interior noted. The request for information will not propose a specific timeline for future lease sales or outline the potential sale areas. Instead, it invites stakeholders to provide recommendations for leasing opportunities and raise concerns about offshore leasing. BOEM manages 3.2 billion acres in the OCS, including 2,227 active oil and gas leases covering about 12.1 million acres in OCS regions. Of these, 469 leases are currently producing oil and gas. BOEM earlier in April increased its estimate of oil and gas reserves in the US Gulf’s OCS by 1.30 billion boe from its 2021 estimate, bringing the total reserve estimate to 7.04 billion

Valero to shutter at least one of its California refineries
Lengthening legislative shadow Valero’s proposal for the Benicia refinery follows Phillips 66 Co.’s October 2024 confirmation that it will permanently cease conventional crude oil processing operations its 138,700-b/d dual-sited refinery in Los Angeles by yearend 2025 amid the operator’s determination that market conditions will prevent the long-term viability and competitiveness of the manufacturing site (OGJ Online, Oct. 17, 2024). Announcement of the Los Angeles refinery closure came on the heels of California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Oct. 14, 2024, signing of legislation aimed at making the state’s oil refiners manage California’s gasoline supplies more responsibly to prevent price spikes at the pump. The legislation specifically provides the CEC more tools for requiring petroleum refiners to backfill supplies and plan for maintenance downtime as a means of helping prevent gasoline-price spikes that cost Californians upwards of $2 billion in 2023, Newsom’s office said. Introduced in early September 2024 in response to Newsom’s late-August proclamation convening the state’s legislature into special session “to take on Big Oil’s gas-price spikes,” the new legislation allows the state to require that refiners maintain a minimum inventory of fuel to avoid supply shortages that “create higher gasoline prices for consumers and higher profits for the industry,” the governor’s office said. While Valero did not reveal in its April 2025 statement any specific reasons for its decision on the Benicia refinery, in the wake of the market announcement, Brian W. Jones (R-Calif.) and Vince Fong (R-Calif.) both attributed the pending refinery closure to the legislation and policies heralded by Newsom and state regulatory departments. “Valero intends to shut down its Benicia refinery thanks to Newsom and radical Democrats’ extreme regulations and hostile business climate,” Jones said on Apr. 16, citing Phillips 66’s decision on the Los Angeles refinery and Chevron Corp.’s relocation of headquarters from San Ramon, Calif.,

Texas Oil, Gas Regulator Continues Digitization Drive
In a statement posted on its website recently, the Railroad Commission of Texas (RRC) revealed that its records digitization drive is “fast approaching 100 million files”. “The Railroad Commission of Texas continues to make great strides in digitizing oil and gas records as the agency improves both transparency and efficiency in its daily functions,” the RRC noted in the statement. “With more than 89.4 million records now digitized, up by more than six million since last October, the RRC is fast approaching 100 million records being added to its online digital archives by the end of this fiscal year,” it added. “The accomplishment saves RRC staff significant man hours and reduces the processing time for routine records requests, allowing them to focus on more complex tasks that require more time to fulfill,” the RRC continued. In the statement, the RRC highlighted that it has nearly a century’s worth of oil and gas records on file. It went on to state that the organization has been “tirelessly working to digitize and upload this vast trove of paper and microfilm information to make it more easily available to the public who can now access them online rather than having to travel in person to the RRC’s Central Records office in Austin or hire a consultant to search the records for them”. Documents that have been digitized range from oil and gas production and well completion records to hearing files, well status reports, and various types of permits, the RRC noted in its statement. It highlighted that these records are routinely used by researchers, landowners, royalty owners, energy companies, and public information requesters. “This milestone represents a major step forward for the Railroad Commission and for government transparency and efficiency,” RRC Chairman Christi Craddick said in the statement. “When I took office, the

Energy Secretary Aims to Reassure Oil Bosses Amid Trade War
Energy Secretary Chris Wright sought to reassure US oil companies during a visit to Oklahoma, saying turmoil from President Donald Trump’s trade war is apt to be fleeting and the administration fully supports more crude output. “The uncertainty you are seeing around tariffs — that’s a short term issue,” Wright said during an interview with Bloomberg Television at an energy conference in Oklahoma City. He later added: “We’re doing everything we can to encourage production.” Wright, who previously ran one of the world’s biggest fracking-service providers, said the uncertainty roiling the broader market is because the US in the midst of negotiating more favorable trade deals. He predicted it would only last “a few more weeks.” When it comes to oil production, Wright said the Trump administration is focused on tearing down barriers to make it cheaper and easier to pump crude and natural gas. Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum appeared at the event hosted by shale billionaire Harold Hamm as oil prices have plunged more than 10% this month in the wake of Trump’s trade war and a decision by OPEC to beef up a production increase scheduled for later this year. For 14 consecutive days, West Texas Intermediate futures have settled below $65 a barrel — the price many companies need to break even on new wells. Those lower prices coupled with the trade war have caused significant unease across the industry, threatening to undercut the president’s own goal to ramp up fossil-fuel production. Two of the largest oilfield service providers, Halliburton Co. and Baker Hughes Co., warned this week that tariffs were impacting their bottom line. Matador Resources Co., a Texas shale company, announced Wednesday it was dropping one of its nine drilling rigs. And last month, a host of oil bosses delivered scathing critiques of Trump’s policies

AI plus digital twins could be the pairing enterprises need
3. Link AI with transactional workflows The third point of cooperation is the linkage of AI with transactional workflows. Companies already have applications that take orders, ship goods, move component parts around, and so forth. It’s these applications that currently drive the commercial side of a business, but taking an order or scheduling shipment doesn’t load a truck or label a package. Digital twins have historically been linked to the real world via sensors that detect actual movement, work. How do they capture the commercial applications, the transactions? An open data framework like OpenUSD is a possible answer, and if AI also supports OpenUSD, then there’s a mechanism that not only lets AI “read” workflow data from existing applications, but also generate work to be introduced into those flows. All of this, in combination, makes AI and digital twins a partner in a business at both the transactional and real-world functional level. The new combination introduces a whole new kind of automation, automation of an entire business. Automation that can touch every process, every worker. Remember that our current IT spending is justified almost entirely by enhancing the productivity of the 60% of workers who are involved with the commercial/transactional side of things? That’s left 40% of the workforce out of the productivity picture, and their value of labor is actually a bit higher than that of the 60% of workers we’ve already reached. What kind of IT spending could reaching these workers justify? Digital twins, combined with AI, could totally remake IT, and totally remake networking. Why networking? The 40% of “functional” workers, the ones out there pushing boxes, driving, even fighting fires or protecting the population, will need their own data collections to be empowered successfully. We’ll need to know what’s going on in the real world at

Chevron adds Gulf of Mexico production with Ballymore subsea tieback startup
Chevron Corp. has started producing oil and natural gas from the Ballymore subsea tieback in the deepwater Mississippi Canyon area of the US Gulf of Mexico, the company said in a release Apr. 21. Chevron Corp. sanctioned the Ballymore project in 2018, four years after its discovery. The discovery well, drilled to a final depth of 8,898 m about 120 km offshore Louisiana in 2,000 m of water, encountered 205 m of net oil pay in a high-quality Jurassic Norphlet reservoir (OGJ Online, Jan. 31, 2018; May 12, 2022). Ballymore, the operator’s first in the Norphlet trend of the Gulf, has been developed as a three-mile subsea tieback to the existing Chevron-operated Blind Faith semisubmersible platform and is expected to produce up to 75,000 gross b/d of oil and 50 MMcfd of gas.

US BOEM begins process to replace current OCS lease sale plan
US Interior Secretary Doug Burgum directed the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) to start developing a plan for offshore oil and gas lease sales on the US Outer Continental Shelf (OCS), including likely sales in a newly established 27h OCS planning area offshore Alaska in the High Arctic. The 11th National OCS program will replace the current 10th Program (2024–29), which includes only three oil and gas lease sales over 5 years—all in the Gulf, Burgum said in a release Apr. 18. BOEM will work to complete those sales, while it begins to develop the new program, he said. Earlier this month, Burgum directed BOEM to move forward a lease sale in the Gulf, starting with publication in June 2025 of a notice of sale. BOEM will soon publish in the Federal Register a request for information and comments which starts a 45-day public comment period that serves as the initial step in the multi-year planning process that details lease sales BOEM will hold in the coming years. The Federal Register notice will also outline BOEM’s new jurisdiction over the High Arctic planning area offshore Alaska, as well as new boundaries for existing planning areas, Interior noted. The request for information will not propose a specific timeline for future lease sales or outline the potential sale areas. Instead, it invites stakeholders to provide recommendations for leasing opportunities and raise concerns about offshore leasing. BOEM manages 3.2 billion acres in the OCS, including 2,227 active oil and gas leases covering about 12.1 million acres in OCS regions. Of these, 469 leases are currently producing oil and gas. BOEM earlier in April increased its estimate of oil and gas reserves in the US Gulf’s OCS by 1.30 billion boe from its 2021 estimate, bringing the total reserve estimate to 7.04 billion

Valero to shutter at least one of its California refineries
Lengthening legislative shadow Valero’s proposal for the Benicia refinery follows Phillips 66 Co.’s October 2024 confirmation that it will permanently cease conventional crude oil processing operations its 138,700-b/d dual-sited refinery in Los Angeles by yearend 2025 amid the operator’s determination that market conditions will prevent the long-term viability and competitiveness of the manufacturing site (OGJ Online, Oct. 17, 2024). Announcement of the Los Angeles refinery closure came on the heels of California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Oct. 14, 2024, signing of legislation aimed at making the state’s oil refiners manage California’s gasoline supplies more responsibly to prevent price spikes at the pump. The legislation specifically provides the CEC more tools for requiring petroleum refiners to backfill supplies and plan for maintenance downtime as a means of helping prevent gasoline-price spikes that cost Californians upwards of $2 billion in 2023, Newsom’s office said. Introduced in early September 2024 in response to Newsom’s late-August proclamation convening the state’s legislature into special session “to take on Big Oil’s gas-price spikes,” the new legislation allows the state to require that refiners maintain a minimum inventory of fuel to avoid supply shortages that “create higher gasoline prices for consumers and higher profits for the industry,” the governor’s office said. While Valero did not reveal in its April 2025 statement any specific reasons for its decision on the Benicia refinery, in the wake of the market announcement, Brian W. Jones (R-Calif.) and Vince Fong (R-Calif.) both attributed the pending refinery closure to the legislation and policies heralded by Newsom and state regulatory departments. “Valero intends to shut down its Benicia refinery thanks to Newsom and radical Democrats’ extreme regulations and hostile business climate,” Jones said on Apr. 16, citing Phillips 66’s decision on the Los Angeles refinery and Chevron Corp.’s relocation of headquarters from San Ramon, Calif.,

Texas Oil, Gas Regulator Continues Digitization Drive
In a statement posted on its website recently, the Railroad Commission of Texas (RRC) revealed that its records digitization drive is “fast approaching 100 million files”. “The Railroad Commission of Texas continues to make great strides in digitizing oil and gas records as the agency improves both transparency and efficiency in its daily functions,” the RRC noted in the statement. “With more than 89.4 million records now digitized, up by more than six million since last October, the RRC is fast approaching 100 million records being added to its online digital archives by the end of this fiscal year,” it added. “The accomplishment saves RRC staff significant man hours and reduces the processing time for routine records requests, allowing them to focus on more complex tasks that require more time to fulfill,” the RRC continued. In the statement, the RRC highlighted that it has nearly a century’s worth of oil and gas records on file. It went on to state that the organization has been “tirelessly working to digitize and upload this vast trove of paper and microfilm information to make it more easily available to the public who can now access them online rather than having to travel in person to the RRC’s Central Records office in Austin or hire a consultant to search the records for them”. Documents that have been digitized range from oil and gas production and well completion records to hearing files, well status reports, and various types of permits, the RRC noted in its statement. It highlighted that these records are routinely used by researchers, landowners, royalty owners, energy companies, and public information requesters. “This milestone represents a major step forward for the Railroad Commission and for government transparency and efficiency,” RRC Chairman Christi Craddick said in the statement. “When I took office, the

Energy Secretary Aims to Reassure Oil Bosses Amid Trade War
Energy Secretary Chris Wright sought to reassure US oil companies during a visit to Oklahoma, saying turmoil from President Donald Trump’s trade war is apt to be fleeting and the administration fully supports more crude output. “The uncertainty you are seeing around tariffs — that’s a short term issue,” Wright said during an interview with Bloomberg Television at an energy conference in Oklahoma City. He later added: “We’re doing everything we can to encourage production.” Wright, who previously ran one of the world’s biggest fracking-service providers, said the uncertainty roiling the broader market is because the US in the midst of negotiating more favorable trade deals. He predicted it would only last “a few more weeks.” When it comes to oil production, Wright said the Trump administration is focused on tearing down barriers to make it cheaper and easier to pump crude and natural gas. Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum appeared at the event hosted by shale billionaire Harold Hamm as oil prices have plunged more than 10% this month in the wake of Trump’s trade war and a decision by OPEC to beef up a production increase scheduled for later this year. For 14 consecutive days, West Texas Intermediate futures have settled below $65 a barrel — the price many companies need to break even on new wells. Those lower prices coupled with the trade war have caused significant unease across the industry, threatening to undercut the president’s own goal to ramp up fossil-fuel production. Two of the largest oilfield service providers, Halliburton Co. and Baker Hughes Co., warned this week that tariffs were impacting their bottom line. Matador Resources Co., a Texas shale company, announced Wednesday it was dropping one of its nine drilling rigs. And last month, a host of oil bosses delivered scathing critiques of Trump’s policies

AI plus digital twins could be the pairing enterprises need
3. Link AI with transactional workflows The third point of cooperation is the linkage of AI with transactional workflows. Companies already have applications that take orders, ship goods, move component parts around, and so forth. It’s these applications that currently drive the commercial side of a business, but taking an order or scheduling shipment doesn’t load a truck or label a package. Digital twins have historically been linked to the real world via sensors that detect actual movement, work. How do they capture the commercial applications, the transactions? An open data framework like OpenUSD is a possible answer, and if AI also supports OpenUSD, then there’s a mechanism that not only lets AI “read” workflow data from existing applications, but also generate work to be introduced into those flows. All of this, in combination, makes AI and digital twins a partner in a business at both the transactional and real-world functional level. The new combination introduces a whole new kind of automation, automation of an entire business. Automation that can touch every process, every worker. Remember that our current IT spending is justified almost entirely by enhancing the productivity of the 60% of workers who are involved with the commercial/transactional side of things? That’s left 40% of the workforce out of the productivity picture, and their value of labor is actually a bit higher than that of the 60% of workers we’ve already reached. What kind of IT spending could reaching these workers justify? Digital twins, combined with AI, could totally remake IT, and totally remake networking. Why networking? The 40% of “functional” workers, the ones out there pushing boxes, driving, even fighting fires or protecting the population, will need their own data collections to be empowered successfully. We’ll need to know what’s going on in the real world at

AccuWeather Looks at Wildfire Risk for USA Oil, Gas in 2025
AccuWeather long-range experts are predicting wildfires to burn more land across the United States this year compared to the historical average, AccuWeather stated in a media advisory sent to Rigzone this week by the AccuWeather team. “We’ve seen fires reported across 20 states that have already burned nearly one million acres so far this year,” AccuWeather Lead Long-Range Expert Paul Pastelok said in the advisory. “AccuWeather is forecasting seven to nine million acres to burn across the country this year, which is more than the historical average,” he added. In the advisory, AccuWeather highlighted that nearly nine million acres burned in fires across the United States last year. It added that wildfire season in the U.S. typically peaks later in summer and through autumn but warned that springtime fires can pose a unique danger, especially in areas facing drought after winter. “Roughly half of the country is dealing with abnormally dry or drought conditions right now,” Pastelok said in the advisory. “Nearly nine percent of the nation is in an extreme or exceptional drought, significantly higher than at this time last year. This is a concerning situation,” he added. “The good news is, we’re chipping away at drought conditions across the northern mid-Atlantic states, so the fire risk is starting to decrease. It’s not completely over, because we still have cold fronts coming through this region,” he continued. AccuWeather noted in the advisory that shifting weather conditions from spring to summer will prime the environment for a surge in wildfire activity. “While the season may start slowly, there is strong potential for rapid escalation as drought conditions and heat set in,” Pastelok warned. “This is the time of year when grasses, brush, and other vegetation really start to dry out as trigger mechanisms kick in, like lightning and wind,” he

Saipem Sees 35 Percent YoY Increase in Q1 Profit
Saipem SpA has reported EUR 77 million ($87.45 million) in net income for the first quarter (Q1), up 35.1 percent from the same three-month period a year ago on the back of improvements in both its onshore and offshore engineering and construction segments. Revenue rose 15.5 percent year-on-year to EUR 3.52 billion. Operating profit climbed 27.6 percent to EUR 157 million. Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization increased 31 percent to EUR 351 million. “In addition to the positive change in adjusted operating profit of EUR 34 million, there was also the effect of the improvement in the balance of equity investments of EUR 7 million, partly offset by the worsening of the balance of financial and tax operations of EUR 21 million”, the Italian energy engineering company said in an online statement. Saipem did not have adjustments for extraordinary or nonrecurring items for the January-March 2025 period. Operating cash flow landed at EUR 395 million, while free cash flow came at EUR 387 million. Backlog, excluding contributions from nonconsolidated companies, stood at EUR32.67 billion, with EUR2.12 billion worth of contracts won in Q1 2025. Earlier the board upgraded Saipem’s shareholder remuneration policy to at least 40 percent of free cash flow post-repayment of lease liabilities. The board plans to propose a dividend of EUR 333 million for 2025 (on the 2024 results) and eyes a dividend of at least $300 million for 2026 (on the 2025 results), according to a company statement February 25. Saipem recently unveiled a four-year plan targeting EUR 15 billion in revenue for 2028 and at least EUR 2.2 billion in free cash flow cumulative over the four-year period. Under the plan Saipem also committed to maintaining at least EUR 1 billion in available cash. The plan also aims to cut debt by about EUR

Hydrocarbons Discovered at Offshore Namibia Well
In a statement posted on social media, Rhino Resources Ltd announced the discovery of hydrocarbons at the Capricornus 1-X well, which is situated in Petroleum Exploration License 85, in Block 2914, offshore the Orange Basin in Namibia. The well was spudded on February 17 using the Noble Venturer drillship and reached a total depth of 16,263 feet on April 2, the statement revealed, adding that the well found over 124 feet of net pay, “with the reservoir showing good petrophysical properties and no observed water contact”. Hydrocarbon samples and sidewall cores were collected through intensive wireline logging operations, Rhino noted in the statement. In addition to wireline acquisition, the well successfully completed a production test across the light oil-bearing reservoir, the company added. The well achieved a surface-constrained flow rate in excess of 11,000 stock tank barrels per day on a 40/64” choke, according to the statement, which noted that the light ~37° API oil exhibited limited associated gas with less than two percent CO2 and no hydrogen sulphide. Rhino said in the statement that laboratory studies will be conducted on fluid samples collected during the test. It noted that the well will now be temporarily plugged and abandoned and that the rig will be released. PEL 85 is operated by Rhino Resources with a working interest of 42.5 percent, Rhino highlighted in the statement. The company pointed out that its co-venturers are Azule Energy, with a 42.5 percent stake, NAMCOR, with a 10 percent stake, and Korres Investments, with a five percent stake. BP and Eni each hold a 50 percent interest in Azule Energy, Azule’s site shows. “Rhino, on behalf of the PEL85 JV, are delighted to announce the discovery of hydrocarbons at the Capricornus 1-X well,” Travis Smithard, Rhino Resources CEO, said in the statement. “The results of

Liverpool Bay CCS Project Moves to Construction Phase
Eni SpA and the United Kingdom government have reached financial close on the Liverpool Bay carbon capture and storage (CCS) project, allowing the project to proceed to construction, the Italian operator said Thursday. The project will provide the transport and storage infrastructure for the HyNet North West Industrial Decarbonization Cluster project, which spans North West England and North Wales. Planned to reach 4.5 million metric tons per annum (MMtpa) of carbon dioxide (CO2) storage capacity by 2030, HyNet will store captured emissions in depleted hydrocarbon fields in the Irish Sea. The HyNet consortium, led by Eni, plans to expand the capacity to 10 MMtpa after 2030. Eni has updated the expected startup date to 2028. “The strategic agreement with the UK Government paves the way for the industrial-scale development of CCS, a sector in which the United Kingdom reaffirms its leadership thanks to the promotion of a regulatory framework that aims to strengthen the development of CCS and make it fully competitive in the market”, Eni chief executive Claudio Descalzi said in an online statement Thursday. The government has put in place plans to establish 2 carbon capture, usage and storage (CCUS) clusters, as outlined in the “CCUS Net Zero Investment Roadmap” published April 2023. The roadmap identified 78 gigatons of potential CO2 storage capacity. “The UK is a first mover; we are aiming to support the establishment of two CCUS clusters by the mid-2020s and a further two by 2030, through which we aim to capture 20- 30MtCO2 per year”, the roadmap states. Descalzi added, “Eni has established itself as a leading operator in the UK thanks to its key role in CO2 transport and storage activities as the leader of the HyNet Consortium, which will become one of the first low-carbon clusters in the world”. “CCS will play a crucial role

ExxonMobil Secures Sixth CO2 Customer in Calpine
Exxon Mobil Corporation has signed a deal with Calpine Corporation to transport and permanently store up to 2 million metric tons per annum (MTA) of carbon dioxide (CO2) from Calpine’s Baytown Energy Center, a cogeneration facility near Houston. ExxonMobil said in a media release that the Baytown Energy Center is part of Calpine’s Baytown Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) project, which is designed to capture CO2 emissions and provide a constant supply of low-carbon electricity to Texas customers. This agreement makes Calpine the sixth CCS customer of ExxonMobil, bringing the latter’s total amount of CO2 under contract to about 16 MTA, ExxonMobil said. The CO2 from Calpine’s facility will tie into ExxonMobil’s CO2 pipeline system, the largest in the world, which is strategically located along the U.S. Gulf Coast and supports enhanced oil recovery as well as permanent CO2 sequestration, according to ExxonMobil. “This agreement underscores the growing confidence our customers across diverse sectors – including steel, fertilizer, industrial gases, natural gas processing, and now power generation – have in our unique end-to-end CCS system”, Barry Engle, President of ExxonMobil Low Carbon Solutions, said. Calpine’s Baytown CCS Project aims to generate approximately 500 megawatts of low-carbon electricity, sufficient to supply power to over 500,000 households and steam for industrial applications, ExxonMobil said. Engineering, permitting, and additional development efforts are in progress. “Calpine is excited to partner with ExxonMobil to achieve this important project milestone,” Caleb Stephenson, Calpine Executive Vice President, said. “As the largest U.S. generator of electricity from natural gas, we understand that the nation’s gas fleet will remain the backbone of the grid for decades to come. We believe CCS is an actionable and cost-effective way to meet customers’ demand for reliable power and alleviate concerns about the indisputable long-term need for gas-fired facilities. Low-cost natural gas along

Russia Oil Drilling at Fastest Pace in 5 Years as Curbs Ease
Russia’s oil producers have been drilling wells at a pace not seen in at least five years as the nation readies for both a loosening of OPEC+ output limits and the possibility of relief from some international sanctions over its invasion of Ukraine. The level of activity, which is also more than a third above the pre-war level, is the latest sign of the Russian oil industry’s resilience to Western sanctions, which were designed to cripple the country’s long-term ability to pump crude by restricting access to advanced technologies and equipment. The drilling activity means Russia’s total capacity for producing crude and a light oil called condensate is 11 million to 11.5 million barrels a day, virtually unchanged from 2016, said Ronald Smith from Emerging Markets Oil & Gas Consulting Partners LLC. “We can safely say that the Russian oilfield service industry has, for the most part, successfully adapted to the sanctions regime,” said Smith. “This does not mean that a perfect replacement has been found in all cases, but that suitable substitutes exist at a broader level.” Russia’s production drilling averaged more than 2,370 km (7.8 million feet) in January and February, according to the latest available data seen by Bloomberg. That’s higher than the seasonal average for the first three years of the Kremlin’s invasion in Ukraine, which triggered broad restrictions on the availability of western oilfield services in Russia, historical data show. Even as some major foreign providers left the country in the wake of the invasion, they sold Russian units to local managers, keeping the equipment and the expertise in the sanctioned nation, while other suppliers including SLB Plc and Weatherford International Plc have continued to operate, although on a smaller scale. Over the past three years, local service companies have also been able to find alternative equipment

West of Orkney developers helped support 24 charities last year
The developers of the 2GW West of Orkney wind farm paid out a total of £18,000 to 24 organisations from its small donations fund in 2024. The money went to projects across Caithness, Sutherland and Orkney, including a mental health initiative in Thurso and a scheme by Dunnet Community Forest to improve the quality of meadows through the use of traditional scythes. Established in 2022, the fund offers up to £1,000 per project towards programmes in the far north. In addition to the small donations fund, the West of Orkney developers intend to follow other wind farms by establishing a community benefit fund once the project is operational. West of Orkney wind farm project director Stuart McAuley said: “Our donations programme is just one small way in which we can support some of the many valuable initiatives in Caithness, Sutherland and Orkney. “In every case we have been immensely impressed by the passion and professionalism each organisation brings, whether their focus is on sport, the arts, social care, education or the environment, and we hope the funds we provide help them achieve their goals.” In addition to the local donations scheme, the wind farm developers have helped fund a £1 million research and development programme led by EMEC in Orkney and a £1.2m education initiative led by UHI. It also provided £50,000 to support the FutureSkills apprenticeship programme in Caithness, with funds going to employment and training costs to help tackle skill shortages in the North of Scotland. The West of Orkney wind farm is being developed by Corio Generation, TotalEnergies and Renewable Infrastructure Development Group (RIDG). The project is among the leaders of the ScotWind cohort, having been the first to submit its offshore consent documents in late 2023. In addition, the project’s onshore plans were approved by the

Biden bans US offshore oil and gas drilling ahead of Trump’s return
US President Joe Biden has announced a ban on offshore oil and gas drilling across vast swathes of the country’s coastal waters. The decision comes just weeks before his successor Donald Trump, who has vowed to increase US fossil fuel production, takes office. The drilling ban will affect 625 million acres of federal waters across America’s eastern and western coasts, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and Alaska’s Northern Bering Sea. The decision does not affect the western Gulf of Mexico, where much of American offshore oil and gas production occurs and is set to continue. In a statement, President Biden said he is taking action to protect the regions “from oil and natural gas drilling and the harm it can cause”. “My decision reflects what coastal communities, businesses, and beachgoers have known for a long time: that drilling off these coasts could cause irreversible damage to places we hold dear and is unnecessary to meet our nation’s energy needs,” Biden said. “It is not worth the risks. “As the climate crisis continues to threaten communities across the country and we are transitioning to a clean energy economy, now is the time to protect these coasts for our children and grandchildren.” Offshore drilling ban The White House said Biden used his authority under the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which allows presidents to withdraw areas from mineral leasing and drilling. However, the law does not give a president the right to unilaterally reverse a drilling ban without congressional approval. This means that Trump, who pledged to “unleash” US fossil fuel production during his re-election campaign, could find it difficult to overturn the ban after taking office. Sunset shot of the Shell Olympus platform in the foreground and the Shell Mars platform in the background in the Gulf of Mexico Trump
The Download: our 10 Breakthrough Technologies for 2025
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Introducing: MIT Technology Review’s 10 Breakthrough Technologies for 2025 Each year, we spend months researching and discussing which technologies will make the cut for our 10 Breakthrough Technologies list. We try to highlight a mix of items that reflect innovations happening in various fields. We look at consumer technologies, large industrial-scale projects, biomedical advances, changes in computing, climate solutions, the latest in AI, and more.We’ve been publishing this list every year since 2001 and, frankly, have a great track record of flagging things that are poised to hit a tipping point. It’s hard to think of another industry that has as much of a hype machine behind it as tech does, so the real secret of the TR10 is really what we choose to leave off the list.Check out the full list of our 10 Breakthrough Technologies for 2025, which is front and center in our latest print issue. It’s all about the exciting innovations happening in the world right now, and includes some fascinating stories, such as: + How digital twins of human organs are set to transform medical treatment and shake up how we trial new drugs.+ What will it take for us to fully trust robots? The answer is a complicated one.+ Wind is an underutilized resource that has the potential to steer the notoriously dirty shipping industry toward a greener future. Read the full story.+ After decades of frustration, machine-learning tools are helping ecologists to unlock a treasure trove of acoustic bird data—and to shed much-needed light on their migration habits. Read the full story.
+ How poop could help feed the planet—yes, really. Read the full story.
Roundtables: Unveiling the 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2025 Last week, Amy Nordrum, our executive editor, joined our news editor Charlotte Jee to unveil our 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2025 in an exclusive Roundtable discussion. Subscribers can watch their conversation back here. And, if you’re interested in previous discussions about topics ranging from mixed reality tech to gene editing to AI’s climate impact, check out some of the highlights from the past year’s events. This international surveillance project aims to protect wheat from deadly diseases For as long as there’s been domesticated wheat (about 8,000 years), there has been harvest-devastating rust. Breeding efforts in the mid-20th century led to rust-resistant wheat strains that boosted crop yields, and rust epidemics receded in much of the world.But now, after decades, rusts are considered a reemerging disease in Europe, at least partly due to climate change. An international initiative hopes to turn the tide by scaling up a system to track wheat diseases and forecast potential outbreaks to governments and farmers in close to real time. And by doing so, they hope to protect a crop that supplies about one-fifth of the world’s calories. Read the full story. —Shaoni Bhattacharya
The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Meta has taken down its creepy AI profiles Following a big backlash from unhappy users. (NBC News)+ Many of the profiles were likely to have been live from as far back as 2023. (404 Media)+ It also appears they were never very popular in the first place. (The Verge) 2 Uber and Lyft are racing to catch up with their robotaxi rivalsAfter abandoning their own self-driving projects years ago. (WSJ $)+ China’s Pony.ai is gearing up to expand to Hong Kong. (Reuters)3 Elon Musk is going after NASA He’s largely veered away from criticising the space agency publicly—until now. (Wired $)+ SpaceX’s Starship rocket has a legion of scientist fans. (The Guardian)+ What’s next for NASA’s giant moon rocket? (MIT Technology Review) 4 How Sam Altman actually runs OpenAIFeaturing three-hour meetings and a whole lot of Slack messages. (Bloomberg $)+ ChatGPT Pro is a pricey loss-maker, apparently. (MIT Technology Review) 5 The dangerous allure of TikTokMigrants’ online portrayal of their experiences in America aren’t always reflective of their realities. (New Yorker $) 6 Demand for electricity is skyrocketingAnd AI is only a part of it. (Economist $)+ AI’s search for more energy is growing more urgent. (MIT Technology Review) 7 The messy ethics of writing religious sermons using AISkeptics aren’t convinced the technology should be used to channel spirituality. (NYT $)
8 How a wildlife app became an invaluable wildfire trackerWatch Duty has become a safeguarding sensation across the US west. (The Guardian)+ How AI can help spot wildfires. (MIT Technology Review) 9 Computer scientists just love oracles 🔮 Hypothetical devices are a surprisingly important part of computing. (Quanta Magazine)
10 Pet tech is booming 🐾But not all gadgets are made equal. (FT $)+ These scientists are working to extend the lifespan of pet dogs—and their owners. (MIT Technology Review) Quote of the day “The next kind of wave of this is like, well, what is AI doing for me right now other than telling me that I have AI?” —Anshel Sag, principal analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy, tells Wired a lot of companies’ AI claims are overblown.
The big story Broadband funding for Native communities could finally connect some of America’s most isolated places September 2022 Rural and Native communities in the US have long had lower rates of cellular and broadband connectivity than urban areas, where four out of every five Americans live. Outside the cities and suburbs, which occupy barely 3% of US land, reliable internet service can still be hard to come by.
The covid-19 pandemic underscored the problem as Native communities locked down and moved school and other essential daily activities online. But it also kicked off an unprecedented surge of relief funding to solve it. Read the full story. —Robert Chaney We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.) + Rollerskating Spice Girls is exactly what your Monday morning needs.+ It’s not just you, some people really do look like their dogs!+ I’m not sure if this is actually the world’s healthiest meal, but it sure looks tasty.+ Ah, the old “bitten by a rabid fox chestnut.”

Equinor Secures $3 Billion Financing for US Offshore Wind Project
Equinor ASA has announced a final investment decision on Empire Wind 1 and financial close for $3 billion in debt financing for the under-construction project offshore Long Island, expected to power 500,000 New York homes. The Norwegian majority state-owned energy major said in a statement it intends to farm down ownership “to further enhance value and reduce exposure”. Equinor has taken full ownership of Empire Wind 1 and 2 since last year, in a swap transaction with 50 percent co-venturer BP PLC that allowed the former to exit the Beacon Wind lease, also a 50-50 venture between the two. Equinor has yet to complete a portion of the transaction under which it would also acquire BP’s 50 percent share in the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal lease, according to the latest transaction update on Equinor’s website. The lease involves a terminal conversion project that was intended to serve as an interconnection station for Beacon Wind and Empire Wind, as agreed on by the two companies and the state of New York in 2022. “The expected total capital investments, including fees for the use of the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal, are approximately $5 billion including the effect of expected future tax credits (ITCs)”, said the statement on Equinor’s website announcing financial close. Equinor did not disclose its backers, only saying, “The final group of lenders includes some of the most experienced lenders in the sector along with many of Equinor’s relationship banks”. “Empire Wind 1 will be the first offshore wind project to connect into the New York City grid”, the statement added. “The redevelopment of the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal and construction of Empire Wind 1 will create more than 1,000 union jobs in the construction phase”, Equinor said. On February 22, 2024, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) announced

USA Crude Oil Stocks Drop Week on Week
U.S. commercial crude oil inventories, excluding those in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), decreased by 1.2 million barrels from the week ending December 20 to the week ending December 27, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) highlighted in its latest weekly petroleum status report, which was released on January 2. Crude oil stocks, excluding the SPR, stood at 415.6 million barrels on December 27, 416.8 million barrels on December 20, and 431.1 million barrels on December 29, 2023, the report revealed. Crude oil in the SPR came in at 393.6 million barrels on December 27, 393.3 million barrels on December 20, and 354.4 million barrels on December 29, 2023, the report showed. Total petroleum stocks – including crude oil, total motor gasoline, fuel ethanol, kerosene type jet fuel, distillate fuel oil, residual fuel oil, propane/propylene, and other oils – stood at 1.623 billion barrels on December 27, the report revealed. This figure was up 9.6 million barrels week on week and up 17.8 million barrels year on year, the report outlined. “At 415.6 million barrels, U.S. crude oil inventories are about five percent below the five year average for this time of year,” the EIA said in its latest report. “Total motor gasoline inventories increased by 7.7 million barrels from last week and are slightly below the five year average for this time of year. Finished gasoline inventories decreased last week while blending components inventories increased last week,” it added. “Distillate fuel inventories increased by 6.4 million barrels last week and are about six percent below the five year average for this time of year. Propane/propylene inventories decreased by 0.6 million barrels from last week and are 10 percent above the five year average for this time of year,” it went on to state. In the report, the EIA noted

More telecom firms were breached by Chinese hackers than previously reported
Broader implications for US infrastructure The Salt Typhoon revelations follow a broader pattern of state-sponsored cyber operations targeting the US technology ecosystem. The telecom sector, serving as a backbone for industries including finance, energy, and transportation, remains particularly vulnerable to such attacks. While Chinese officials have dismissed the accusations as disinformation, the recurring breaches underscore the pressing need for international collaboration and policy enforcement to deter future attacks. The Salt Typhoon campaign has uncovered alarming gaps in the cybersecurity of US telecommunications firms, with breaches now extending to over a dozen networks. Federal agencies and private firms must act swiftly to mitigate risks as adversaries continue to evolve their attack strategies. Strengthening oversight, fostering industry-wide collaboration, and investing in advanced defense mechanisms are essential steps toward safeguarding national security and public trust.

From friction to flow: Why Swissport scrapped its VPN maze for Cato’s SASE fabric
Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More In Swissport’s world, strengthening security and networking provides an opportunity to serve more customers and grow. Swissport’s global IT operations started to expose the strains of relying on legacy systems for security and networking, which were quickly becoming a liability for the company. Senior management could see that centralized visibility was a major challenge, which led them to take quick action. Swissport’s growth outpaced its legacy systems The security and networking challenges that Swissport faced began to multiply as its business expansion accelerated. Legacy systems were hindering the ability to serve customers, secure global locations and expand the business. The senior management team told VentureBeat that legacy systems weren’t keeping up with the pace of their business, leading the team to consider new alternatives, starting with secure access service edge (SASE). In 2024, Swissport provided ground services for 247 million airline passengers, handled more than five million tons of air freight at 117 cargo centers and served airlines at 279 airports in 45 countries across six continents. As the world’s largest provider of ground and cargo handling services in the aviation industry, a core part of how Swissport excels for its customers is connecting and securing its global IT operations. That’s table stakes for a business with over 26,000 users, including ground crew and remote workers. “The biggest challenge wasn’t just visibility—it was consistency,” said Giles Ashton-Roberts, Chief Information Security Officer at Swissport. “We had to unify how we enforce security across hundreds of sites without slowing down the business.” From fragmented infrastructure to SASE “We’re truly a 24/7 business. It’s always peak time somewhere in the world, and we need to keep our network both secure and available,” Richard Thorp,

OpenAI makes ChatGPT’s image generation available as API
Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More People can now natively incorporate Studio Ghibli-inspired pictures generated by ChatGPT into their businesses. OpenAI has added the model behind its wildly popular image generation tool, used in ChatGPT, to its API. The gpt-image-1 model will allow developers and enterprises to “integrate high-quality, professional-grade image generation directly into their own tools and platforms.” “The model’s versatility allows it to create images across diverse styles, faithfully follow custom guidelines, leverage world knowledge, and accurately render text — unlocking countless practical applications across multiple domains,” OpenAI said in a blog post. Pricing for the API separates tokens for text and images. Text input tokens, or the prompt text, will cost $5 per 1 million tokens. Image input tokens will be $10 per million tokens, while image output tokens, or the generated image, will be a whopping $40 per million tokens. Competitors like Stability AI offer a credit-based system for its API where one credit is equal to $0.01. Using its flagship Stable Image Ultra costs eight credits per generation. Google’s image generation model, Imagen, charges paying users $0.03 per image generated using the Gemini API. Image generation in one place OpenAI allowed ChatGPT users to generate and edit images directly on the chat interface in April, a few months after adding image generation into ChatGPT through the GPT-4o model. The company said image generation in the chat platform “quickly became one of our most popular features.” OpenAI said over 130 million users have accessed the feature and created 700 million photos in the first week alone. However, this popularity also presented OpenAI with some challenges. Social media users quickly discovered that they could prompt ChatGPT to generate images inspired by the Japanese animation juggernaut Studio Ghibli,

The Download: introducing the Creativity issue
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Introducing: the Creativity issue The university computer lab may seem like an unlikely center for creativity. We tend to think of creativity as happening more in the artist’s studio or writers’ workshop. But throughout history, very often our greatest creative leaps—and I would argue that the web and its descendants represent one such leap—have been due to advances in technology. But the key to artistic achievement has never been the technology itself. It has been the way artists have applied it to express our humanity.This latest issue of our magazine, which was entirely produced by human beings using computers, explores creativity and the tension between the artist and technology. We hope you enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed putting it together. —Mat Honan, editor in chief
Here’s just a taste of what you can expect: + AI is warping our expectations of music. New diffusion AI models that make songs from scratch are complicating our definitions of authorship and human creativity. Read the full story.+ Meet the researchers testing the “Armageddon” approach to asteroid defense. Read the full story.
+ How the federal government is tracking changes in the supply of street drugs. A new harm reduction initiative is helping prevent needless deaths. Read the full story.+ How AI is ushering in a new era of co-creativity, laying the groundwork for a future in which humans and machines create things together. Read the full story. + South Korea’s graphic artists are divided over whether AI will immortalize their work or threaten their creativity. + A new biosensor can detect bird flu in just five minutes. Read the full story. MIT Technology Review Narrated: Quantum computing is taking on its biggest challenge—noise For a while researchers thought they’d have to make do with noisy, error-prone systems, at least in the near term. That’s starting to change.This is our latest story to be turned into a MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast, which we’re publishing each week on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Just navigate to MIT Technology Review Narrated on either platform, and follow us to get all our new content as it’s released. Join us today to chat about brain-computer interfaces
Brain-computer interfaces are electrodes implanted into the brain to send neural commands to computers, primarily to assist paralyzed people, and our readers recently named them as the 11th Breakthrough Technology of 2025 in our annual list. So what are the next steps for companies like Neuralink, Synchron, and Neuracle? And will they be able to help paralyzed people at scale?Join our editor at large David Rotman and senior editor for biomedicine Antonio Regalado today for an exclusive subscriber-only Roundtable discussion exploring the past, present, and future of brain-computer interfaces. Register here to tune in at 1pm ET this afternoon! The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 OpenAI is interested in buying Chrome from Google ChatGPT’s head of product Nick Turley said folding its tech into Chrome would improve it greatly. (Bloomberg $)+ It would be just one of many prospective buyers. (Insider $)+ Turley would also be happy with a distribution deal with Google. (The Information $) 2 Instagram’s founder says Meta starved it of resourcesKevin Systrom believes Mark Zuckerberg saw the app as a threat to Facebook. (NYT $)+ It sounds as if the pair had a strained relationship. (The Verge) 3 Elon Musk will step back from DOGE next month In his absence, Tesla’s profits have plummeted. (WP $)+ But he’ll still spend a day or so a week working on US government matters. (CNBC)+ There’s no denying that his political activities have damaged Tesla’s brand. (WSJ $)+ DOGE’s tech takeover threatens the safety and stability of our critical data. (MIT Technology Review) 4 Chinese scientists and students are under scrutiny in the USIt’s a repeat of the China Initiative program launched under Trump’s first Presidency. (WSJ $)+ US universities are starting to push back against government overreach. (Ars Technica)+ The FBI accused him of spying for China. It ruined his life. (MIT Technology Review)
5 Rare earth elements aren’t so rare after allWhich is bad news for China. (Wired $)+ But China’s export curbs are harming Tesla’s Optimus robot production. (Reuters)+ This rare earth metal shows us the future of our planet’s resources. (MIT Technology Review) 6 How to wean yourself off fossil fuelsMassive home batteries are an intriguing energy alternative. (Vox)
7 A new mission to grow food in space has blasted offScientists are investigating creating food from single cells in orbit. (BBC)+ Future space food could be made from astronaut breath. (MIT Technology Review) 8 It’s time to bid farewell to SkypeRIP to the OG video calling platform. (Rest of World) 9 Analysts are using AI to psychologically profile top soccer players ⚽And also to spot bright young talent. (The Guardian) 10 Saving the world’s seeds is a tricky business 🌱They’re the first line of defense against extinction. (Knowable Magazine)+ The weeds are winning. (MIT Technology Review) Quote of the day
“Stuffing Chrome with even more AI crap is one way to spur browser innovation, I guess.” —Tech critic Paris Marx isn’t convinced that OpenAI buying Chrome would improve it, in a post on Bluesky. The big story
How gamification took over the worldIt’s a thought that occurs to every video-game player at some point: What if the weird, hyper-focused state I enter when playing in virtual worlds could somehow be applied to the real one?Often pondered during especially challenging or tedious tasks in meatspace (writing essays, say, or doing your taxes), it’s an eminently reasonable question to ask. Life, after all, is hard. And while video games are too, there’s something almost magical about the way they can promote sustained bouts of superhuman concentration and resolve.For some, this phenomenon leads to an interest in flow states and immersion. For others, it’s simply a reason to play more games. For a handful of consultants, startup gurus, and game designers in the late 2000s, it became the key to unlocking our true human potential. But instead of liberating us, gamification turned out to be just another tool for coercion, distraction, and control. Read the full story. —Bryan Gardiner We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.) + Succession creator Jesse Armstrong’s new film Mountainhead looks intriguing.+ Domestic cats have a much more complicated history than we previously realized.+ If you enjoyed the new vampire flick Sinners, you’ll love these Indian folk horrors.+ This hispi cabbage side dish looks incredible.

3 Things Caiwei Chen is into right now
A new play about OpenAI I recently saw Doomers, a new play by Matthew Gasda about the aborted 2023 coup at OpenAI, here represented by a fictional company called MindMesh. The action is set almost entirely in a meeting room; the first act follows executives immediately after the firing of company CEO Seth (a stand-in for Sam Altman), and the second re-creates the board negotiations that determined his fate. It’s a solid attempt to capture the zeitgeist of Silicon Valley’s AI frenzy and the world’s moral panic over artificial intelligence, but the rapid-fire, high-stakes exchanges mean it sometimes seems to get lost in its own verbosity. Themed dinner parties and culinary experiments The vastness of Chinese cuisine defies easy categorization, and even in a city with no shortage of options, I often find myself cooking—not just to recapture something closer to home, but to create a home unlike one that ever existed. Recently, I’ve been experimenting with a Chinese take on the charcuterie board—pairing toasted steamed buns, called mantou, with furu, a fermented tofu spread that is sharp, pungent, and full of umami. Sewing and copying my own clothes I started sewing three years ago, but only in the past year have I begun making clothes from scratch. As a lover of vintage fashion—especially ’80s silhouettes—I started out with old patterns I found on Etsy. But recently, I tried something new: copying a beloved dress I bought in a thrift store in Beijing years ago. Doing this is quite literally a process of reverse-engineering—pinning the garment down, tracing its seams, deconstructing its logic, and rebuilding it. At times my brain feels like an old Mac hitting its GPU limit. But when it works, it feels like a small act of magic. It’s an exercise in certainty, the very thing that drew me to fashion in the first place—a chance to inhabit something that feels like an extension of myself.

Seeing AI as a collaborator, not a creator
The reason you are reading this letter from me today is that I was bored 30 years ago. I was bored and curious about the world and so I wound up spending a lot of time in the university computer lab, screwing around on Usenet and the early World Wide Web, looking for interesting things to read. Soon enough I wasn’t content to just read stuff on the internet—I wanted to make it. So I learned HTML and made a basic web page, and then a better web page, and then a whole website full of web things. And then I just kept going from there. That amateurish collection of web pages led to a journalism internship with the online arm of a magazine that paid little attention to what we geeks were doing on the web. And that led to my first real journalism job, and then another, and, well, eventually this journalism job. But none of that would have been possible if I hadn’t been bored and curious. And more to the point: curious about tech. The university computer lab may seem at first like an unlikely center for creativity. We tend to think of creativity as happening more in the artist’s studio or writers’ workshop. But throughout history, very often our greatest creative leaps—and I would argue that the web and its descendants represent one such leap—have been due to advances in technology.
There are the big easy examples, like photography or the printing press, but it’s also true of all sorts of creative inventions that we often take for granted. Oil paints. Theaters. Musical scores. Electric synthesizers! Almost anywhere you look in the arts, perhaps outside of pure vocalization, technology has played a role. But the key to artistic achievement has never been the technology itself. It has been the way artists have applied it to express our humanity. Think of the way we talk about the arts. We often compliment it with words that refer to our humanity, like soul, heart, and life; we often criticize it with descriptors such as sterile, clinical, or lifeless. (And sure, you can love a sterile piece of art, but typically that’s because the artist has leaned into sterility to make a point about humanity!)
All of which is to say I think that AI can be, will be, and already is a tool for creative expression, but that true art will always be something steered by human creativity, not machines. I could be wrong. I hope not. This issue, which was entirely produced by human beings using computers, explores creativity and the tension between the artist and technology. You can see it on our cover illustrated by Tom Humberstone, and read about it in stories from James O’Donnell, Will Douglas Heaven, Rebecca Ackermann, Michelle Kim, Bryan Gardiner, and Allison Arieff. Yet of course, creativity is about more than just the arts. All of human advancement stems from creativity, because creativity is how we solve problems. So it was important to us to bring you accounts of that as well. You’ll find those in stories from Carrie Klein, Carly Kay, Matthew Ponsford, and Robin George Andrews. (If you’ve ever wanted to know how we might nuke an asteroid, this is the issue for you!) We’re also trying to get a little more creative ourselves. Over the next few issues, you’ll notice some changes coming to this magazine with the addition of some new regular items (see Caiwei Chen’s “3 Things” for one such example). Among those changes, we are planning to solicit and publish more regular reader feedback and answer questions you may have about technology. We invite you to get creative and email us: [email protected]. As always, thanks for reading.

$42.1 million poured into startup offering energy-efficient solutions for costly and unwieldy operational data and AI workloads
Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Hyperscale data warehouse vendor Ocient announced today that it has raised $42.1 million as the second extension of its series B funding to accelerate the development and delivery of energy-efficient solutions for costly and unwieldy operational data and AI workloads. The funding infusion doesn’t just add to the Chicago startup’s already hefty war chest; it sharpens a mission to make hyperscale analytics radically cheaper and greener at the very moment enterprises fear ballooning data‑center power bills. The new round increases the company’s total funding to $159.4 million. The latest round was led by climate-savvy backers such as Blue Bear Capital and Allstate Strategic Ventures — a signal that investors now view data-platform efficiency as a climate issue as much as a performance one. Ocient CEO Chris Gladwin told VentureBeat that Ocient’s architecture already delivers “ten‑to‑one price‑performance gains” on multi‑petabyte workloads, and plans are underway to carry that advantage into new verticals from automotive telemetry to climate modeling. The startup has doubled its revenues for three consecutive years and appointed Henry Marshall, formerly CFO at space-infrastructure firm Loft Orbital, to steer its financial operations, signaling that Ocient is entering a formal growth stage. A funding round framed by climate economics The $42.1 million top‑up follows the $49.4 million raise in March 2024 that lifted Ocient’s invested capital to $119 million and marked 109 percent year‑over‑year revenue growth. Alongside its new investors, the company retains support from Greycroft and OCA Ventures, with Buoyant Ventures backing the extension for its “differentiated approach to delivering energy‑efficient analytics.” Gladwin linked the round to a broader mission: “Enterprises are grappling with complex data ecosystems, energy availability, and the pressure to control costs while proving business value,” he

Chevron adds Gulf of Mexico production with Ballymore subsea tieback startup
Chevron Corp. has started producing oil and natural gas from the Ballymore subsea tieback in the deepwater Mississippi Canyon area of the US Gulf of Mexico, the company said in a release Apr. 21. Chevron Corp. sanctioned the Ballymore project in 2018, four years after its discovery. The discovery well, drilled to a final depth of 8,898 m about 120 km offshore Louisiana in 2,000 m of water, encountered 205 m of net oil pay in a high-quality Jurassic Norphlet reservoir (OGJ Online, Jan. 31, 2018; May 12, 2022). Ballymore, the operator’s first in the Norphlet trend of the Gulf, has been developed as a three-mile subsea tieback to the existing Chevron-operated Blind Faith semisubmersible platform and is expected to produce up to 75,000 gross b/d of oil and 50 MMcfd of gas.

US BOEM begins process to replace current OCS lease sale plan
US Interior Secretary Doug Burgum directed the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) to start developing a plan for offshore oil and gas lease sales on the US Outer Continental Shelf (OCS), including likely sales in a newly established 27h OCS planning area offshore Alaska in the High Arctic. The 11th National OCS program will replace the current 10th Program (2024–29), which includes only three oil and gas lease sales over 5 years—all in the Gulf, Burgum said in a release Apr. 18. BOEM will work to complete those sales, while it begins to develop the new program, he said. Earlier this month, Burgum directed BOEM to move forward a lease sale in the Gulf, starting with publication in June 2025 of a notice of sale. BOEM will soon publish in the Federal Register a request for information and comments which starts a 45-day public comment period that serves as the initial step in the multi-year planning process that details lease sales BOEM will hold in the coming years. The Federal Register notice will also outline BOEM’s new jurisdiction over the High Arctic planning area offshore Alaska, as well as new boundaries for existing planning areas, Interior noted. The request for information will not propose a specific timeline for future lease sales or outline the potential sale areas. Instead, it invites stakeholders to provide recommendations for leasing opportunities and raise concerns about offshore leasing. BOEM manages 3.2 billion acres in the OCS, including 2,227 active oil and gas leases covering about 12.1 million acres in OCS regions. Of these, 469 leases are currently producing oil and gas. BOEM earlier in April increased its estimate of oil and gas reserves in the US Gulf’s OCS by 1.30 billion boe from its 2021 estimate, bringing the total reserve estimate to 7.04 billion

Valero to shutter at least one of its California refineries
Lengthening legislative shadow Valero’s proposal for the Benicia refinery follows Phillips 66 Co.’s October 2024 confirmation that it will permanently cease conventional crude oil processing operations its 138,700-b/d dual-sited refinery in Los Angeles by yearend 2025 amid the operator’s determination that market conditions will prevent the long-term viability and competitiveness of the manufacturing site (OGJ Online, Oct. 17, 2024). Announcement of the Los Angeles refinery closure came on the heels of California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Oct. 14, 2024, signing of legislation aimed at making the state’s oil refiners manage California’s gasoline supplies more responsibly to prevent price spikes at the pump. The legislation specifically provides the CEC more tools for requiring petroleum refiners to backfill supplies and plan for maintenance downtime as a means of helping prevent gasoline-price spikes that cost Californians upwards of $2 billion in 2023, Newsom’s office said. Introduced in early September 2024 in response to Newsom’s late-August proclamation convening the state’s legislature into special session “to take on Big Oil’s gas-price spikes,” the new legislation allows the state to require that refiners maintain a minimum inventory of fuel to avoid supply shortages that “create higher gasoline prices for consumers and higher profits for the industry,” the governor’s office said. While Valero did not reveal in its April 2025 statement any specific reasons for its decision on the Benicia refinery, in the wake of the market announcement, Brian W. Jones (R-Calif.) and Vince Fong (R-Calif.) both attributed the pending refinery closure to the legislation and policies heralded by Newsom and state regulatory departments. “Valero intends to shut down its Benicia refinery thanks to Newsom and radical Democrats’ extreme regulations and hostile business climate,” Jones said on Apr. 16, citing Phillips 66’s decision on the Los Angeles refinery and Chevron Corp.’s relocation of headquarters from San Ramon, Calif.,

Texas Oil, Gas Regulator Continues Digitization Drive
In a statement posted on its website recently, the Railroad Commission of Texas (RRC) revealed that its records digitization drive is “fast approaching 100 million files”. “The Railroad Commission of Texas continues to make great strides in digitizing oil and gas records as the agency improves both transparency and efficiency in its daily functions,” the RRC noted in the statement. “With more than 89.4 million records now digitized, up by more than six million since last October, the RRC is fast approaching 100 million records being added to its online digital archives by the end of this fiscal year,” it added. “The accomplishment saves RRC staff significant man hours and reduces the processing time for routine records requests, allowing them to focus on more complex tasks that require more time to fulfill,” the RRC continued. In the statement, the RRC highlighted that it has nearly a century’s worth of oil and gas records on file. It went on to state that the organization has been “tirelessly working to digitize and upload this vast trove of paper and microfilm information to make it more easily available to the public who can now access them online rather than having to travel in person to the RRC’s Central Records office in Austin or hire a consultant to search the records for them”. Documents that have been digitized range from oil and gas production and well completion records to hearing files, well status reports, and various types of permits, the RRC noted in its statement. It highlighted that these records are routinely used by researchers, landowners, royalty owners, energy companies, and public information requesters. “This milestone represents a major step forward for the Railroad Commission and for government transparency and efficiency,” RRC Chairman Christi Craddick said in the statement. “When I took office, the

Energy Secretary Aims to Reassure Oil Bosses Amid Trade War
Energy Secretary Chris Wright sought to reassure US oil companies during a visit to Oklahoma, saying turmoil from President Donald Trump’s trade war is apt to be fleeting and the administration fully supports more crude output. “The uncertainty you are seeing around tariffs — that’s a short term issue,” Wright said during an interview with Bloomberg Television at an energy conference in Oklahoma City. He later added: “We’re doing everything we can to encourage production.” Wright, who previously ran one of the world’s biggest fracking-service providers, said the uncertainty roiling the broader market is because the US in the midst of negotiating more favorable trade deals. He predicted it would only last “a few more weeks.” When it comes to oil production, Wright said the Trump administration is focused on tearing down barriers to make it cheaper and easier to pump crude and natural gas. Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum appeared at the event hosted by shale billionaire Harold Hamm as oil prices have plunged more than 10% this month in the wake of Trump’s trade war and a decision by OPEC to beef up a production increase scheduled for later this year. For 14 consecutive days, West Texas Intermediate futures have settled below $65 a barrel — the price many companies need to break even on new wells. Those lower prices coupled with the trade war have caused significant unease across the industry, threatening to undercut the president’s own goal to ramp up fossil-fuel production. Two of the largest oilfield service providers, Halliburton Co. and Baker Hughes Co., warned this week that tariffs were impacting their bottom line. Matador Resources Co., a Texas shale company, announced Wednesday it was dropping one of its nine drilling rigs. And last month, a host of oil bosses delivered scathing critiques of Trump’s policies

AI plus digital twins could be the pairing enterprises need
3. Link AI with transactional workflows The third point of cooperation is the linkage of AI with transactional workflows. Companies already have applications that take orders, ship goods, move component parts around, and so forth. It’s these applications that currently drive the commercial side of a business, but taking an order or scheduling shipment doesn’t load a truck or label a package. Digital twins have historically been linked to the real world via sensors that detect actual movement, work. How do they capture the commercial applications, the transactions? An open data framework like OpenUSD is a possible answer, and if AI also supports OpenUSD, then there’s a mechanism that not only lets AI “read” workflow data from existing applications, but also generate work to be introduced into those flows. All of this, in combination, makes AI and digital twins a partner in a business at both the transactional and real-world functional level. The new combination introduces a whole new kind of automation, automation of an entire business. Automation that can touch every process, every worker. Remember that our current IT spending is justified almost entirely by enhancing the productivity of the 60% of workers who are involved with the commercial/transactional side of things? That’s left 40% of the workforce out of the productivity picture, and their value of labor is actually a bit higher than that of the 60% of workers we’ve already reached. What kind of IT spending could reaching these workers justify? Digital twins, combined with AI, could totally remake IT, and totally remake networking. Why networking? The 40% of “functional” workers, the ones out there pushing boxes, driving, even fighting fires or protecting the population, will need their own data collections to be empowered successfully. We’ll need to know what’s going on in the real world at
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