Month: May 2020

When oil supply threatened to overwhelm storage tanks in Cushing, Oklahoma, in April, the pain was felt as far as Chongqing. Retail investors in the Bank of China’s oil bao, or “treasure”, a speculative vehicle linked to crude futures, took a hit as the May contract for West Texas Intermediate settled at an astonishing -$37.63 a barrel on April 20th. The market’s gyrations have led to consternation in China—regulators have reportedly called for an investigation—and revealed unexpected victims. In general, though, plunging prices have served Chinese buyers rather well. In 2017 China…

Read More

Oxy acquired Anadarko Petroleum in August 2019, for $38 billion. In order to help finance the deal, it agreed to sell Anadarko’s African assets to Total for $8.8bn. The transfer of exploration rights in South Africa and a major stake in Mozambique LNG has been completed. Total, in September, said the Mozambique portion had closed with a value of $3.9bn. Ghana and Algeria both threw up problems, though. There was opposition to the deal from Algeria’s street movements, which forced the president out of office in April 2019. This encouraged…

Read More

New York — The US oil and gas rig count fell 34 to a total of 398 in the Oil rigs again led the decline, falling 29 on the week to 286, while the number of gas-focused rigs slipped 5 to 112. Total US drilling activity has declined nearly 53% from its recent peak during the week-ended March 4, and is now 63% behind year-ago levels. The decline in oil-focused drilling operations has been sharp, with the nationwide rig count down 404 from 838 on March 4, a 59% decline. Rig counts…

Read More

Africa Oil & Power launched its Africa Energy Series Special Report: Angola 2020 on Thursday; the available-for-download report provides the status of several investment projects in development in Angola, including its 2020 licensing round, construction of gas processing facilities in Soyo, and more; the publication follows the announcement of the new dates for the Angola Oil & Gas 2020 Conference & Exhibition, which will now take place in Talatona from October 14-15. In line with Angola’s aim to drive capital inflows into its bankable oil and gas projects, Africa Oil…

Read More

For Danish Oil and Natural Gas (DONG) Energy, everything flipped once it made the switch. In 2015, DONG Energy made the largest loss of any company in Denmark’s history, the equivalent of $1.78bn today. It had been a bad year for the company’s oil and gas investments, resulting in a $1.4bn cost to disposing of assets in the North Sea. At that point, oil and gas was a small part of the company’s business, as it had steadily moved toward wind energy over years. The next year, the firm decided to finally…

Read More