BP Canada late Tuesday extinguished the fire on the remaining well at its Fort Saskatchewan plant by setting a plug downhole in the well to isolate the cavern that stores ethane at the natural gas liquids (NGL) facility. The plant fire started following an explosion Aug. 26, which caused two wells to catch fire (see Daily GPI, Sept. 4). BP said it was sending emergency crews home and would bring in a recovery team to return operations to normal. The BP team now will focus on what caused the incident and will bring all pipeline systems and operations up by the end of the week. Most of the systems affected by the fire are now fully or partially operational, BP said, with the Peace and AEGS systems operating at 100%; Co-Ed running at 80%; and Cochin operating at 50% volumes.

Royale Energy Inc., headquartered in San Diego, said it has successfully drilled its Victor Ranch 1-7 and 4-8 wells. The 1-7 well found natural gas-filled sands in the East Rice Creek Field. Four different gas-charged zones were encountered. Preliminary log analysis indicates that the two main pay zones in the well have 70-80 net feet of gas-charged sands. The 4-8 well found two zones of gas pay that had a total of 5-10 net feet of gas-charged sands. The Victor Ranch 11 and 13 have been producing gas from similar pay zones for more than 11 and seven years respectively, said Royale.

Chevron Corp. announced it plans to move its headquarters from San Francisco to San Ramon, Calif., where its Chevron Park campus (and other nearby buildings at Bishop Ranch) already houses most of its Bay Area-based operations and some 3,500 employees. The company’s combined work force in the San Francisco Bay Area is about 8,500 people, with just 200 located in leased space in San Francisco. “We have enjoyed important and positive relationships in San Francisco for nearly a century, and we’ll miss being part of a community that has been our corporate home for so long,” said Chevron CEO Dave O’Reilly. “While San Francisco is a great location, we need to bring all of our people together. We’ve found over the past couple of years that it just isn’t efficient to operate our headquarters from San Francisco.” The roughly 200 employees will begin relocating to San Ramon during the second quarter of next year. The company expects the moves to be completed by the end of next year.

©Copyright 2001 Intelligence Press Inc. All rights reserved. The preceding news report may not be republished or redistributed, in whole or in part, in any form, without prior written consent of Intelligence Press, Inc.