The run of bad luck, bad planning, or bad management hit a low point last week with a trio of events around the world.

In Brazil, Chevron was accused by government regulators of "critical non-compliance" over an oil leak at its Frade project.

In Australia, the attempted prosecution of Apache over the 2008 Varanus Island explosion and fire failed on a legal technicality.

In the North Sea, French oil company Total was struggling to control a potentially disastrous gas leak apparently caused by the unexpected consequences of extracting gas from high-pressure, high-temperature fields.

On their own, each event can be explained and possibly understood.

Taken collectively, there is a pattern that spells trouble for everyone in offshore oil and gas, from rig workers to management to shareholders.

Onsite workers obviously face danger, which has always been part of the job description. Management and shareholders, however, are potentially facing a much more torrid time as government and environmental activists start to ask questions about whether the offshore industry is losing its ability to control events when they turn nasty.

It might be The Slug's imagination, or the fact that oil and gas exploration is reaching into ever-deeper waters, but it seems that the spate of incidents has been increasing.

Whereas we once had the odd spot of trouble, and you do have to reach back 23 years to reminisce about the worst of all disasters from a public relations perspective, the Exxon Valdez spill of 1989, there appears to have has been an acceleration of incidents more recently.

In Australian waters there have been the Varanus Island and the Montara fires of the past few years.

In the Gulf of Mexico there was the Macondo disaster, which killed 11 workers and almost killed BP as an independent business.

The one that has The Slug sitting bolt-upright though is Total's crisis on the Elgin gasfield in the North Sea. At Elgin, technology and geology are combining to produce an alarming set of events that has produced exquisitely difficult engineering challenges.

Details of what has happened at Elgin are sketchy, but that will not be the case for long. Governments and environmental activists are watching closely as an apparently uncontrolled gas leak threatens to incinerate a major North Sea complex.

From what The Slug has been reading, the Elgin problem will take months to fix, if it can be fixed, because depletion of the high-pressure gas has produced dramatic geological changes in the reservoir.

Some geologists and reservoir engineers had suspected the possibility of an event such as what might be occurring at Elgin. Namely that extracting high-pressure gas causes earth movements of sufficient strength to break the casing around wells.

According to The Wall Street Journal a team of Total employees warned in a paper submitted in 2009 to the British Geological Society that as the Elgin and nearby Franklin fields became depleted, they would become more unstable.

Three earthquakes were reported on the Elgin boundary fault in 2007 and 2008, and there were signs that: "geological stresses resulting from huge pressure changes were deforming the rocks around the reservoir," the Total employees reported, adding the prophetic comment that "the threat of well failure could become reality".

Last year, according to the WSJ, a manager of Total's drilling division, Louis Bergerot, acknowledged the challenges of managing high-pressure, high-temperature reservoirs.

In a paper for the Society of Petroleum Engineers, Bergerot wrote: "In fields such as Elgin/Franklin, wells are exposed to multiple threats resulting from the large amounts of depletion. As gas is pumped out of the reservoir, its pressure drops relative to the surrounding rock, unleashing powerful stresses".

The effects of the pressure changes could include steel casing that lines wells to buckle or deform.

"Eventually, the liner may become sheared off completely," Bergerot wrote.

Everyone in the petroleum business will be watching carefully to see how Total fixes its Elgin gas leak problem, which is probably being caused by a casing leak - hoping that the uncontrolled gas reaching the surface does not ignite.

The last thing the industry needs after Macondo, Montara, Frade and Varanus is another headline-making incident.