In this paper, I suggest that taking seriously the way in which the trust is founded on a duty of conscience has far-reaching ramifications for the appropriate attitude towards new forms of trusts that are designed to allow people to enjoy the benefits of ownership without incurring the duties that come with it. The morally freighted concept of conscience that lies at the heart of trust law means that every claim against trustees invokes a demand that the trustee abide by the requirements of their conscience. The conditions on the right to blame others for a moral wrongdoing, and the relationship between blaming and suing in the context of trust law, lead to the conclusion that, in novel forms of trust that are geared towards the creation of a morally bankrupt “orphan property”, beneficiaries do not have moral standing to sue the trustee for a breach of trust.

This article reviews the “gaps” that allow for the creation of the “offshore” in international law and argues that these are instead constituted by constraints on our spatial imaginary of law than by any “real” gaps between state jurisdictions. The modern practices of sovereignty by states and non-state actors are at odds with the implicit geography of international law that assumes a static and fixed concept of territory. By rethinking the relevant legal spaces of international law and the sovereign practices that constitute the supposedly deterritorialized offshore, we can see that the offshore is actually onshore somewhere; we can reterritorialize the supposed deterritorialized competences. This article identifies a desynchronization between state territories and the actual exercise of sovereignty that presents as pseudo deterritorialization. Yet if both the concept of sovereignty and the implicit geography of international law confirm and reinforce one another in international law discourse, international lawyers are blind to the changing “landscape” of sovereignty in international law.

The probability of a human-caused incident occurring during dynamic positioning (DP) drilling operations is determined in this paper using binary logistic regression models built with data on 42 incidents that took place during the period 2011–2015. For each case, a range of variables characterising the configuration of the DP system, weather conditions and water depth are taken into account. These variables are taken into account to develop a logistic regression model that shows the likelihood of an incident being caused by human error. The results obtained show that human-based incidents are significantly more likely to occur when there is a lower usage of thrusters. These results are useful for focusing our attention on variables that may be associated with incidents attributable to human error, as well as for setting operational limits that could help to prevent these incidents and improve safety during these operations.

Relatively little is known about the distribution and diversity of marine mammals around offshore anthropogenic structures. We present results obtained from incidental sightings of marine mammals around oil and gas installations located 200 km off the Danish coast. A total of 131 sightings corresponding to about 288 animals were reported between May 2013 and May 2016. A total of seven marine mammal species were identified, five cetaceans: harbour porpoise (Phocoena phocoena), minke whale (Balaenoptera acutorostrata), white-beaked dolphin (Lagenorhynchus albirostris), killer whale (Orcinus orca), pilot whales (Globicephala spp.) and two species of pinnipeds: harbour (Phoca vitulina) and grey seals (Halichoerus grypus). The most sighted species were harbour porpoise (41%) and minke whale (31%). Relative counts and biodiversity of marine mammals observed around installations corresponded well with the expected distribution in the central North Sea. Several taxon-specific correlations were identified between number of sightings and environmental parameters (depth and latitude) or installation characteristics (installation aerial footprint). Furthermore, 85% of sightings were made during spring and summer and it is unclear whether the pattern observed reflected a natural seasonal occurrence of marine mammals in the area or an effect of reduced effort during autumn and winter. Despite the potential caveats, results obtained during this programme provide an insight into the relationship between marine mammals and oil and gas offshore installations in the North Sea.

Serious accidents in the marine and offshore industry have underscored the need for safety evaluation of maritime operations using risk and safety analysis methods which have become a powerful tool in identifying technical solutions and operational management procedures. Given that Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) is a known methodology used for analysing engineering systems, the approach is usually conducted using known failure data. But most offshore operations are conducted in a challenging and uncertain environment and the failure data of some of these systems are usually unavailable requiring a flexible and yet robust algorithm for their analysis. This paper therefore seeks to analyse the complex structure of Offshore Supply Vessel (OSV) collision with platforms by incorporating a Fuzzy Fault Tree Analysis (FFTA) method. Fuzzy set theory provides the flexibility to represent vague information from the analysis process. The methodology is structured in such a manner that diverse sets of data are integrated and synthesized for analysing the system. It is envisaged that the proposed method could provide the analyst with a framework to evaluate the risks of collision enabling informed decisions regarding the deployments of resources for system improvement.

The Suriname–Guyana and Ghana–Ivorian Basins exhibit strong geological similarities which are of interest from a petroleum exploration point of view. These include (1) a well-developed system of Late Cretaceous erosional canyons allowing coarse-grained shallow-water clastics to enter the deep marine basin to form attractive turbidite exploration targets; (2) a broad shelf with strong longshore currents which sort and transport coarse clastics into the canyon heads; (3) an organic-rich Cenomanian–Turonian hydrocarbon source rock which is thermally mature in the centre of the basin; and (4) a series of extensional fault-networks along the shelf margin that extend upwards from the Rift Sequence into the overlying Drift Sequence and which, along with the canyon geometries, enable migrating oil and gas to accumulate in combination structural and stratigraphic traps. In June 2007, Tullow and its partners made an important discovery in offshore Ghana, at Mahogany, which subsequently became the giant Jubilee field. Tullow is currently applying the same geoscientific technologies in offshore Suriname in the search for analogous subtle combination traps.

Over the last 10 years, in centres surrounding the United Kingdom, a cross-border insurance industry has been developing — an industry which is exporting British expertise in life assurance and investment products on a large scale to a world-wide market.

The industry is offshore life assurance. The purpose of this paper is principally to outline what this industry is and why it exists.

The particular financial management and operational management issues resulting from this activity are highlighted and explored in subsequent sections. The paper concludes with an assessment of market trends and future development in what is a very young, dynamic and highly competitive market.