Russia is ready to consider lowering the price paid by Ukraine if the country pays its debt, Miller said in an e-mailed statement. Ukraine still owes for supplies in April and May.
Russia plans to submit a United Nations Security Council resolution today seeking a cease-fire and peace talks in eastern Ukraine, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said at a televised news briefing in Moscow. The proposal would create humanitarian aid corridors, allowing civilians to seek safety and access for the Red Cross.
“We deliberately framed our resolution in a depoliticized way, focusing on measures that can quickly relieve the suffering of the civilian population,” Lavrov said. “We hope the humanitarian character of our resolution will be understood correctly by the UN Security Council and will be adopted rapidly.”
President Barack Obama is set to take his boldest step to halt the rise of the oceans and stop the warming of the planet.
It won’t be enough unless the rest of the world follows.
Trimming carbon emissions from U.S. power plants by 25 percent in coming decades, as Obama is said to be proposing, would be more than overwhelmed by increases in China and India where coal-fired power plants are springing up and new cars are rolling out of showrooms.
Royal Dutch Shell Plc may boost the internal carbon emissions price it uses for planning new projects if governments tighten climate rules, according to an executive in its emissions unit.
Europe’s biggest oil company budgets for future capital investment on the assumption it will pay $40 a metric ton for carbon emissions, according to Angus Gillespie, vice president of CO2. That’s almost six times the current price for pollution rights in the European Union’s carbon market, the world’s biggest.
Repsol SA won government approval to start a $10billion oil drilling project off Spain’s Canary Islands, signaling success in its 12-year campaign to start exploration near the Atlantic archipelago.
Planned maintenance at fields and facilities in Norway, including at the Nyhamna plant that processes gas from the Ormen Lange field, curbed supply from the U.K.’s biggest foreign supplier. ConocoPhillips has had four unplanned outages at its J-Block field in the North Sea this month. Four LNG tankers will arrive in the U.K. from today through June 8, with 2 tankers expected to dock at Belgium’s Zeebrugge on June 3 and June 14. Ten tankers arrived in the U.K. in May, the most in a year, according to port and ship-tracking data compiled by Bloomberg.
As dawn breaks over the Gulf of Fonseca, southeast of El Salvador, Patri Friedman sets out for a jog. He trots past domed hothouses filled with fruit trees and feels the sidewalk sway gently underfoot as a tugboat chugs by with a floating apartment building in tow. The year is 2024, and Friedman lives on a so-called seastead, a waterbound city of some 1,000 people who produce their own food, their own energy and -- most important -- their own laws.
That’s the dream that Friedman, a libertarian software engineer at Google Inc. and the grandson of Nobel Memorial Prize–winning economist Milton Friedman, is working to make a reality. As Bloomberg Pursuits will report in its Summer 2014 issue, Friedman is chairman of The Seasteading Institute, an Oakland, California–based group financed with $1.2 million in seed money from PayPal Inc. billionaire Peter Thiel.
Billionaire Li Ka-shing’s Cheung Kong Group agreed to acquire Envestra Ltd. in a cash deal that values the Australian natural gas distributor at A$2.4 billion ($2.2 billion), edging out a rival share offer from APA Group.
Envestra’s independent directors recommended the A$1.32 a share offer from a group including Cheung Kong Infrastructure Holdings Ltd., the Adelaide-based company said today in a statement. The bid, announced earlier this month, compares with APA’s offer worth A$1.34 a share at today’s close. Envestra advanced 1.1 percent to close at a record A$1.365.
An oil barge sailing into Chatham Sound near the Canadian port of Prince Rupert, 30 miles south of Alaska, runs aground and spills heavy oil into the Pacific Ocean.
“Lukoil remains our top pick in the sector,” Ildar Davletshin, an oil and gas analyst at Renaissance Capital who has a buy rating on the stock, wrote in a note yesterday. “We continue to favor it over state-owned Rosneft and Gazprom. We are much more confident than the market in new projects that the company is pursuing and the value they could create in the future.”
U.S. President Barack Obama says natural gas can be a bridge from coal to a cleaner energy future.
Investors are showing it’s more likely a bridge to nowhere.
The country’s embrace of natural gas means less love for wind and solar. New investments in renewable energy sources declined 5 percent in North America last year to $56 billion, the lowest since 2010, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. By comparison, North American oil and gas companies spent $168.2 billion on exploration and production last year, more than double 2009, according to data.
The strategy shift comes as China escalates disputes with the Philippines and Vietnam, fellow members of the Association of Southeast Asean Nations. China’s standoff with Vietnam over an oil rig this month followed its 2012 success in taking control of the Scarborough Shoal from the Philippines.
Japanese lawmakers are renewing the push for a 600 billion yen ($5.9 billion) natural gas pipeline from Russia, which last week signed a supply deal with China, in a bid to cut energy costs after the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
Ukraine’s government said it will press on with military operations against pro-Russian rebel fighters after its forces retook Donetsk airport and inflicted “significant” losses on the separatists.
Troops killed “dozens” of rebels in Donetsk without suffering any losses, Interior Minister Arsen Avakov said yesterday, while the mayor’s office in the eastern city said 40 people died and 31 were wounded.
President-elect Petro Poroshenko has vowed to wipe out the rebels and re-establish order across Ukraine after winning office May 25. He must stabilize a shrinking economy and confront separatists who’ve captured swaths of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. They’ve declared themselves independent and are fighting to join Russia, which annexed Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula in March.
China Oilfield Services Ltd., which is drilling exploration wells in the disputed waters of the South China Sea, said it completed the first phase of operations and will go on to the next.
Platform HYSY981 has moved to “another location” to begin the second phase, the company known as COSL, said in a newsletter posted on its website today, without giving specifics. COSL started drilling in the area on May 2 and is expected to finish by mid-August, according to the statement.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi appointed a former banker to oversee coal, power and clean- energy reforms in a move aimed at resolving fuel bottlenecks and chronic blackouts hampering economic growth.
Piyush Goyal was named minister of state for power, coal and renewable energy with independent charge, meaning he can take decisions without cabinet oversight, according to a government statement today. The 49-year-old chartered accountant and investment banker was treasurer of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party and served on the board of the State Bank of India, the nation’s largest bank, according to his website.
Turkey and Iraqi Kurds defended last week’s sale of more than 1 million barrels of Kurdish oil to world markets, dismissing Baghdad’s claim before an international court that the sale was unauthorized.
Turkey’s Energy Minister Taner Yildiz said yesterday that Iraq had agreed that Kurdish-held northern Iraq could export 100,000 barrels of oil a day and that Turkey didn’t violate agreements, state-run Anadolu agency reported today. The Kurdistan Regional Government, which controls the semi- autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq, dismissed Iraq’s May 23 claim before the International Chamber of Commerce’s International Court of Arbitration in Paris, and vowed in a statement yesterday to continue exporting oil.
The export of Kurdish crude through a pipeline controlled by the central government in Baghdad deepens the divide between Iraqi Kurds, who want to control oil and gas resources in the north, and the Baghdad government, which says all energy transactions require its approval. Turkey’s collaboration with Iraqi Kurds further complicates the issue, while straining ties with Baghdad.
Statoil ASA, the biggest seller of gas to Europe after Russia’s OAO Gazprom, said the continent’s stability in fuel supplies has improved in the last decade, even as tensions over Ukraine have raised concerns over disruptions.
The official who designed Saudi Arabia’s strategy to lure $109 billion in investment for solar energy left his post, raising questions over how quickly the effort will progress.
Khalid al-Sulaiman, a vice president of the King Abdullah City for Renewable and Atomic Energy, has departed because the government didn’t renew his contract, three people with knowledge of the decision said. Another person close to the executive said he retired. The people asked not to be named because they’re not authorized to speak on the matter publicly.
Ka-Care, as the organization is known, was chartered by the king in 2010 to form a strategy on nuclear and renewable energy. Two years ago, it set goals for boosting solar power to reduce domestic demand for oil and natural gas, allowing the kingdom to entrench its position as the world’s biggest exporter of crude. So far, there’s only a handful of small solar projects.
“Al-Sulaiman’s departure is a big loss for Ka-Care and the kingdom,” said Vahid Fotuhi, head of strategic advisory Access, a Dubai-based consultant, and president of the Middle East Solar Industry Association. “He is a man of action, and his departure signals that he wasn’t given enough support by the central government to achieve what he was brought to do.”
Petroleos de Venezuela SA will receive a “pre-payment” of $2 billion for oil supplied to OAO Rosneft as South America’s biggest oil exporter seeks financing amid domestic shortages and the world’s fastest inflation.
Exxon Mobil Corp., operator of a $19 billion liquefied natural gas project in Papua New Guinea, is talking to customers in Asia about selling initial cargoes on the spot market as demand traditionally rises over summer.
China National Offshore Oil Corp., operator of an oil rig in disputed waters that’s stoking tension between Vietnam and China, said it’s determined to finish drilling at the site.
Drilling in the South China sea is a business decision, chairman Wang Yilin told reporters today in Hong Kong after the annual shareholder meeting of its listed unit, Cnooc Ltd., of which he is also chairman. Cnooc’s parent will oppose Vietnamese disruptions to drilling, he said, adding that he expects the operation there to be protected by the Chinese government.
The company this month placed an oil rig near the disputed Paracel Islands off the coast of Vietnam, leading to confrontations between Vietnamese and Chinese boats. The move set off violent anti-China protests in Vietnam and prompted China to evacuate thousands of its citizens.
Liquefied natural gas sellers may face more competitive markets in Japan and South Korea, which together bought more than half of the world’s supply in 2013, after China signed a mega gas deal with Russia.
“A lot of the suppliers have to be more competitive and scramble to find more demand,” Fereidun Fesharaki, chairman of industry consultant Facts Global Energy, said in a phone interview yesterday. “In Japan, the only real opportunity is replacing expired contracts like those from Abu Dhabi or Qatar, but that will not emerge until late this decade or early next decade.”
