Rig company Seadrill Ltd. and salmon farmer Marine Harvest ASA slumped in Oslo trading amid a fallout between their main owner, billionaire John Fredriksen, and his long-time adviser Tor Olav Troeim.sins
Siemens AG agreed to buy Dresser- Rand Group Inc. for $7.6 billion including debt as Europe’s largest engineering company expands its business with oil-and- gas equipment in the U.S. Siemens will pay $83 a share in cash, the Munich-based company said in a statement today. That’s a premium of about 37 percent to Dresser-Rand’s share price in July before reports about a potential bid boosted the stock.
The cost of keeping uranium out of the hands of terrorists and safe from natural disasters is sidelining nuclear energy, which officials once dreamed would power a Utopian future of cheap, almost limitless electricity.
Russia will remain committed to developing its market economy as the state offers billions of dollars of aid to help the country’s biggest companies weather sanctions imposed by the US and Europe.
A BP Plc-led group broke ground on a project to pipe natural gas from Phase 2 of the Shah Deniz project in Azerbaijan to Italy, offering the European Union an alternative to Russian supplies.
A felon suspected of defrauding investors in the booming oil fields of North Dakota was charged with arranging the murders of a business partner gunned down in his kitchen and a truck driver who vanished in 2012. James Henrikson, 35, orchestrated the murder of his partner, Douglas Carlile, on Dec. 15 in Spokane, Washington, according to an indictment unsealed there two days ago by US prosecutors. Henrikson, a felon with drug and weapons arrests, faces the death penalty or life in prison. He joined Carlile, a roads contractor, in trying to cash in on the gold rush spawned by hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, in North Dakota.
Shipping companies probably will miss out on exports from the record U.S. grain harvest because the shale-oil boom is clogging up rail lines to ports. While the US will reap the most crops ever, fourth- quarter export cargoes will be 15 percent lower than last year, according to RS Platou Markets AS, a Norwegian bank specialized in shipping. Rates for Panamaxes, the most commonly used vessels for grains, averaged $7,574 a day this year, headed for the lowest level since at least 1999, Baltic Exchange data show.
Exxon Mobil Corp. halted drilling on an offshore oil well intended as the first step in unlocking billions of barrels of crude in Russia’s remote Arctic, according to people familiar with the project.
West Texas Intermediate and Brent headed for their first weekly increase this month as the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries considered cutting output next year. Futures were little changed in New York, poised for a 0.8% increase this week. OPEC, the group that supplies about 40% of the world’s oil, may reduce its daily production target by 500,000 barrels to 29.5 million in 2015, its secretary general said in Vienna on Sept. 16. Libya halted the Sharara field, the country’s largest, following a rocket attack at the connected Zawiya refinery, threatening almost 30% of the OPEC member’s output.
Award-winning Nigerian sculptor Olu Amoda took eight months to complete The Sunflower, a giant artwork of steel and metal spoons, in his studio in Lagos, Africa’s biggest city, because of electricity shortages. Amoda could have finished the piece in several weeks if he lived in a country with a steady power supply, such as the US, where he has presented works at the New York Museum of Art and Design. But he lives in Nigeria, which produces a 10th of the amount generated in South Africa even though its population of 170 million is more than three times larger. Blackouts are a daily occurrence. “In some places people ask ‘how’s the weather’,” he said. “Here my friends ask, ‘how is electricity in your area’.”
Total SA, Europe’s second-biggest oil company, will probably announce “demanding” cost-cutting measures next week to counter shortfalls expected in production and cash-generation goals, BMO Capital Markets said.
The arrest of one of Russia’s oldest billionaires is sending shivers down the backs of business owners already reeling from US and European sanctions over President Vladimir Putin’s policies in Ukraine. A decade after Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s imprisonment led to Russia’s largest nationalization since the Soviet era, the prosecution of Vladimir Evtushenkov, 65, may prod businesses to pull even more money out of an economy on the verge of recession and relocate abroad, Alexander Shokhin, who lobbies on behalf of the country’s largest companies as head of the Russian Union of Industrialists & Entrepreneurs, said yesterday. Evtushenkov was charged with money-laundering and placed under house arrest two days ago, triggering a sell-off in shares of his companies, including AFK Sistema, and slicing his net worth by a third, to $4.5billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Evtushenkov denies the charges. The case against Evtushenkov stems from a probe into the alleged theft of shares in oil assets in the central region of Bashkortostan that Sistema acquired in 2009, according to investigators.
Kenya expects its estimate of oil resources to almost double to 1 billion barrels as well-drilling climbs and the government forges ahead with plans to build an export pipeline, an energy ministry official said. Tullow Oil and its partner Africa Oil Corp. have discovered an estimated 600 million barrels of oil in the South Lokichar Basin since announcing the country’s first crude find in March 2012. The discovery has spurred the East African nation to accelerate infrastructure-development plans, including construction of an oil pipeline that will link Uganda to a planned port in the Kenyan coastal town of Lamu.
Voters in Scotland are deciding whether to seek independence from the UK in a ballot that could spell the end of a three-century-old union that once dominated the world from America to Australia and trigger a new era of self-determination across Europe.
Apache Corp., the oil producer under investor pressure to shed its international assets, is seeking to raise as much as $840million from the sale of oil and gas projects in Alberta, two people with knowledge of the matter said.
A study that blamed natural gas drilling for water pollution in two states has spurred calls for stricter regulations to keep wells from leaking methane into aquifers. The study backed the oil and gas industry in one respect: It discounted hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, as the source for harmful methane in water. Some environmentalists contend that by blasting rock with a mixture of water, chemicals and sand, producers can force the gas into drinking water near the surface.
Saudi Arabia will need to keep cutting oil output to sustain prices above $100 a barrel, even after the kingdom’s largest reduction in two years, according to BNP Paribas SA and Societe Generale SA. The world’s biggest crude exporter told OPEC last week it pumped 408,000 barrels a day less last month, about as much as Australia produces. Output rose in Iran, Iraq and Nigeria, adding to supply that drove benchmark Brent crude futures below $100 this month for the first time since June 2013. Saudi Arabia probably will have to cut a similar amount again to stabilize prices, the banks said. Global oil demand growth this year will be the weakest since 2011, just as the U.S. shale boom means oil production from countries outside OPEC rises by the most since the 1980s, according to the International Energy Agency. The glut is prompting most of OPEC’s Middle Eastern members, including Saudi Arabia, to cut prices to customers.
South Sudan is using a $250-million Qatar National Bank credit line to fund food and fuel purchases after civil war cut crude output, a key source of state revenue, the governor of the central bank said.
A deadly pipeline explosion that shattered a California town four years ago continues to rip through the state agency weighing a record penalty for the disaster. The president of the California Public Utilities Commission asked his chief of staff to resign and stepped down himself from the case after “inappropriate e-mail exchanges” with utility PG&E Corp. raised questions about the agency’s bias, according to a statement from the commission yesterday. The CPUC may decide within weeks whether to levy a proposed $1.4billion penalty -- the biggest safety fine in the state’s history -- against PG&E for the 2010 explosion of its natural gas pipeline that killed eight people in San Bruno, California. Commission President Michael Peevey, who has been accused by San Bruno officials and consumer advocates of being too close to the utility, said in the statement he was recusing himself from the probe to eliminate any appearance of impropriety. The move is a step toward regaining credibility for the CPUC after two years of political infighting has created an ongoing climate of scandal.
BP Plc, which already has paid more than $28billion for the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, seeks to get a $750million chunk of that back by convincing a Texas court that a missing comma may give the oil company access to Transocean Ltd.’s insurance policies on the Deepwater Horizon.
UK prompt natural gas contracts jumped the most in two weeks as flows declined amid maintenance and continued elevated exports to Belgium. Gas for October gained amid renewed fighting in eastern Ukraine. Gas for within-day delivery rose as much as 8.4% and next-day fuel added as much as 7%, the most since Sept. 1 for both contracts, broker data on Bloomberg showed. Supply is forecast to fall 15 million cubic meters short of demand, according to National Grid Plc data.
Brazil’s criminal case against former billionaire Eike Batista will be a complex one that may take a year to come to trial and as long as 10 years to be fully resolved, lawyers said. Brazilian federal prosecutors accused Batista of financial- market crimes and are seeking to freeze his assets valued at as much as 1.5 billion reais ($641 million). They allege that to deceive investors and shore up their confidence he signed a $1 billion put-option contract that included conditions designed never to materialize, doing so with privileged knowledge that three exploration prospects were unviable. “If prosecutors can link these facts in the judicial procedure, then Eike may have problems,” said Leonardo Theon de Moraes, head of the corporate and bankruptcy areas at Sao Paulo- based law firm Theon de Moraes e Britto Sociedade de Advogados. “It’s like the cherry on the cake. All his assets are failing, are ruining, and now there are prosecutors’ accusations of crimes against him.”
With natural gas prices in Europe more than double costs in the U.S., Ineos Group AG has a novel solution: start fracking.
Rex Tillerson, the Texas-bred Eagle Scout atop the world’s largest energy company, and Vladimir Putin confidante Igor Sechin, his counterpart at Russia’s state oil company, forged a partnership to tap billions of barrels of crude together in Russia. Now, Big Oil’s power couple are being pushed apart in their boldest venture by U.S. and European Union sanctions imposed yesterday. Last month, Exxon Mobil Corp. and OAO Rosneft started drilling their first Arctic oil well after sanctions were imposed to restrict such exploration. The move exposed a loophole that the governments have now closed. It also irked some competitors and European and U.S. officials who felt Exxon was violating the spirit of the sanctions, even if it was observing the letter of the law, according to people familiar with the discussions.
South Sudan plans to split an oil block awarded to Star Petroleum SA, a Luxembourg-registered company, as part of a review of a concession criticized by the country’s lawmakers, Petroleum Minister Stephen Dhieu Dau said. Block E, which covers 45,000 square kilometers (17,375 square miles), will be divided into two, Dau said in an interview on Sept. 9 in the capital, Juba. The terms were reviewed because the concession was awarded in 2010, the year before South Sudan gained independence from Sudan, he said. A draft agreement is being assessed by the country’s Petroleum and Gas Commission. “The terms that were given when we were one country, some are not favorable to our interests regarding the environment and the economy,” Dau said. Two years ago, South Sudan split Block B, an oil concession in which Total SA had a controlling stake, into three parts to encourage more foreign investment in its oil industry. Total signed exploration and production-sharing agreements for the block with the Sudanese government before South Sudan seceded. Exxon Mobil Corp., the U.S.’s largest oil company, in April ended exploration plans with Total in South Sudan.
