Experts have put the UK on a “watch list” over concerns about the security and affordability of its energy supplies, despite scoring highly in global rankings.
The UK is only one of three countries to achieve an AAA rating in a report on 129 countries from the World Energy Council and management consultants Oliver Wyman for the security, affordability and sustainability of energy supplies.
But it is experiencing a downward slide in two out of the three areas the World Energy Council assesses in its latest World Energy Trilemma report, which looks at how countries balance having secure, equitable and clean energy resources.
The biggest FTSE 100 faller was oilfield services company Petrofac, which lost nearly a quarter of its value after issuing a profits warning.
It said it expected net profit for 2015 of $500million (£320million), due to lower oil prices and expectations for the delivery of some projects, with current oil price expectations expected to result in a $45million (£29million) hit.
Malcolm Webb’s introduction to the oil and gas sector came three pints deep during a random run-in at the pub.
He later forged an incredible path in the sector, fullfilling posts with the British National Oil Corporation, Charterhouse Petroleum, PetroFina and the UK Petroleum Industry Association.
In 2004 he took over the chief executive role at Oil & Gas UK.
In his 10 years at the helm of the industry body, he’s weathered downturns, witnessed surges, suffered the sector’s tragedies and celebrated its triumphs.
Now in his first sit-down interview since announcing his retirement, Malcolm looks back at his journey reliving the memories and offering up hopeful insight for the industry’s future.
He discusses demanding the political attention the industry deserves, holding court with Tony Blair, the North Sea’s complicated fiscal regime and even gives advice to his hotly anticipated successor.
Business interested in taking a spot at the Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire Councils' pavilion at Offshore Europe 2015 have been invited to get in touch and register their details.
The two local authorities, who have joined up to take a stand at the biennial event since 1996, said they will be recruiting north-east companies to take space on the pavilion shortly.
The UK and Netherlands focused Parkmead Group has doubled its profits since last year.
The company announced its preliminary results for the year ending June 2014 and said its profits had risen from £1.6million to £3.2million.
Its revenue also increased from £4.1million to £24.7million since last year.
With crude at $75 a barrel, the price Goldman Sachs Group Inc. says will be the average in the first three months of next year, 19 U.S. shale regions are no longer profitable, according to data compiled by Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
The world’s carbon emissions will have to be cut to zero in around half a century to avoid dangerous climate change, the UN has warned.
The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) said that carbon emissions from human activities such as burning fossil fuels should hit net zero by between 2055 and 2070 to prevent temperatures rising more than 2C above pre-industrial levels.
Other greenhouse gases, such as methane, nitrous oxide and hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), need to follow suit so that overall greenhouse gas emissions reach net zero between 2080 and 2100, a report from UNEP said.
The Spanish authorities have detained Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise after the activist group staged a protest against Repsol’s oil exploration campaign off the Canary Islands.
Halliburton's takeover of Baker Hughes dominated headline space and rightly so. The move saw one major snap-up another - shrinking the competition pool and sending the office gossip talk into overdrive. Nearly every headline carried the billion dollar figure allotted to the bid. But more than any number are the thousands of people who now have a new employer or will soon be welcoming their once-considered rivals to come on board
US investors remained in a record-setting mood, edging the Dow Jones industrial average and Standard & Poor’s 500 index to their latest all-time highs.
Major US indexes managed to close marginally higher, setting another high for the Standard & Poor’s 500 index.
Energy stocks fell as the price of crude oil resumed its slide.
In 1980, I sat on a summer bench with my friend Jimmy Steele. We talked about the future, our options, our hopes and our dreams. He had already left school and was studying civil engineering at Paisley Technical College, which was just outside of Glasgow, Scotland. I was about to enter my fifth, and hopefully final, year at school.
"So what are you going to do after leaving school?" he asked.
I told him art was my favourite subject, so I hoped to go to art college to study graphic art design. I wanted to become an illustrator of book covers and, more importantly, of album covers for the music industry. I was really into music!
I had ideas for fantastic landscapes and creatures that I felt would bring the covers and records to life — striking text and colourful fonts — all airbrushed and painted by hand. I imagined I would design dragons and angels, princes and thieves, lovers and rockers.
Jimmy cautioned me that the creative arts field is a tough industry to break into, that talent alone may not be enough. He said I might be better off to consider a more solid career option with better job prospects, even as a safety net or a fall back option. “A trade to fall back on” was how he put it.
I thought hard about it. The two roads diverged, and at the time, I was sorry I could not travel both.
Billionaire Kjell Inge Roekke, who controls Norway’s biggest oil-services company and its second- largest crude producer, is looking to make more deals as plunging prices force consolidation.
Aker ASA, Roekke’s holding company, will use transactions more actively in the coming years, Chief Executive Officer Oeyvind Eriksen said today. Aker is encouraged by the success of recent deals such as Det Norske Oljeselskap ASA’s $2.7 billion purchase of Marathon Oil Corp.’s Norwegian unit, he said. Det Norske is 50 percent owned by Aker.
“There will be consolidations and structural changes because of the downturn, especially in oil and gas,” he said in an interview after Aker reported a 7.5 percent decline in third- quarter net asset value. “That means opportunities.”
Iraqi government forces have driven Islamic State militants out from their remaining strongholds inside the oil refinery town of Beiji.
Officials said it is a key victory over the terror group that has captured much of northern and western Iraq in a summer offensive.
The Iraqi troops, backed by allied Sunni militiamen, also lifted the Islamic State group’s siege of the oil refinery, Iraq’s largest, and hoisted Iraq’s red, white and black flags atop the sprawling complex hosting the facility.
The officials said the army used loudspeakers to warn the small number of residents still holed up in the town to stay indoors while bomb squads detonated booby-trapped houses and remaining bombs planted on the roads.
State Iraqi television also reported the “liberation of Beiji”, quoting the top army commander there, General Abdul-Wahab al-Saadi.
Islamic State extremists captured Beiji during their summer offensive. The Iraqi forces had collapsed in the face of that onslaught but have since partially regrouped and went on the offensive, with Beiji the biggest area they have recaptured to date.
Since August, the Iraqi military has been aided by air strikes from a US-led coalition targeting Islamic State positions in Iraq and in neighbouring Syria.
The two officials said fierce battles were fought early on Friday around the refinery and that government warplanes hit Islamic State positions around the facility on the northern edge of the town. The refinery’s capacity of some 320,000 barrels a day accounts for a quarter of Iraq’s refining capacity.
Beiji will now likely be a base for staging a push to take back Saddam Hussein’s home town of Tikrit to the south.
Government forces tried to retake Tikrit earlier this year, but their campaign stalled and the city remains in Islamic State hands.
Bibby Offshore won a scope of work with Total worth millions. Through the deal, the subsea firm will carry out work on the Ellon and Grant fields, located 270 miles north-east of Aberdeen.
Anti-wind farm campaigners are gearing up to fight plans for another batch of turbines near Loch Ness.
The 17 towers - each standing 415ft-high - are being proposed by Force 9 Energy for hills close to the world-famous beauty spot.
The developer claims the devices, part of the Cnoc an Eas project near Balnain, will generate enough electricity to power 87,000 homes per year.
However, local residents have hit out at the "relentless" tide of wind farm applications in the area, which is close to the renowned Glen Affric nature reserve.
There are no scientific or technical grounds to ban fracking in Europe but it will not be a “silver bullet” to improve energy security or cut emissions, European science academies have said.
Measures such as replacing potentially harmful additives and disclosing the chemicals used in the fracking process to the authorities had greatly reduced the environmental impact of the process, the EU’s national science academies said.
There are “potential synergies” between emerging coal burning technologies and emission reduction techniques which could boost Scotland’s energy output without harming the environment, according to First Minister Alex Salmond.
The Greens have urged the Scottish Government to stop the “damaging and destructive distraction” of unconventional gas extraction, such as the schemes currently licensed in the North Sea or proposed for the Firth of Forth.
But Mr Salmond said Scotland must recognise the potential for new energy technologies.
Engineer and project manager Amec has joined forces with Foster Wheeler in a deal involving two major players in the UK’s oil and gas sector.
The creation of Amec Foster Wheeler, with more than 40,000 staff worldwide and an order book worth £6.3billion, comes after a deal announced in January for Amec to buy Foster Wheeler for $3.2billion (£2billion).
North Sea independent oil and gas firm Ithaca Energy today announced an 81% drop in its third quarter profits as planned maintenance shutdowns took their toll.
The Aberdeen and Calgary-based company said its profit after tax of $8million, down $35million year-on-year, represented a solid result, given the disruption to production, most notably a six week shutdown of the Cook field.
The oil market is also reeling from spiralling exploration development costs and a tumbling Brent price, which has slipped from its June high of more than $115 a barrel to just below $80, amid fears of an oil surplus.
