Oil majors will spend US$208 billion on offshore drilling and other oilfield services this year, but not all sector players are positioned to benefit from the higher spending, Bloomberg reported last week, citing Rystad Energy’s head of oilfield service research, Audun Martinsen. Bigger oilfield service providers, unsurprisingly, would have a better chance at making the most of the recovery in offshore drilling, especially those with expertise in deepwater projects, according to Martinsen, among them UK-based TechnipFMC and Subsea 7. All in all, Martinsen told Bloomberg that Big Oil will probably approve about 110 offshore projects this year, up from 96 last year and 43 in 2016. That’s also slightly more specific than what Rystad forecast for offshore oil in a December report . What the forecast suggests is that optimism remains robust despite the oil price drop in the last quarter of 2018. Thanks to this optimism and relatively […]