Year: 2020

The former chief of Mexico’s state oil giant has accused former President Enrique Pena Nieto of taking bribes, Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office said. In a televised statement, Attorney General Alejandro Gerts Manero said Pena Nieto and finance minister Luis Videgaray had allegedly tasked former Pemex chief Emilio Lozoya to use more than $4 million in illicit payments from Brazilian conglomerate Odebrecht to pay consultants to Pena Nieto’s campaign. “There were a series of bribes for a quantity of more than 100 million pesos, which were fundamentally used for the 2012 campaign…

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Iran is considering letting residents invest in oil on the domestic energy exchange, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said, as the Islamic Republic’s economy and its people are struggling with the coronavirus outbreak, low oil prices, and U.S. sanctions on Iran’s energy, shipping, and banking industries.    “The government, especially the economic board, has always been trying to adopt and implement policies and measures to control liquidity and direct it to the right path and production cycle,” the official website of the Iranian president quoted Rouhani as saying on Tuesday. Iran’s plan…

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Chevron’s interest in the giant offshore Leviathan gas field in the Mediterranean is the starting point for what ended as a $5-billion acquisition of Noble Energy, Reuters reports, citing a regulatory filing. The filing reveals that Chevron initially planned to take a 50-percent stake in the Israeli field that Noble Energy is developing in partnership with local Delek. The field’s development will cost billions of dollars, so Noble was on the prowl for a partner to shoulder part of the burden. But things worsened. As the oil industry collapsed this year…

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U.S. horizontal drilling activity in oil basins, which has plummeted due to the Covid-19 pandemic, is not likely to materially recover this year, a new Rystad Energy analysis shows. Drilling permits, which are increasingly reliable indicators of future activity levels, dipped to a 10-year monthly low this July, with only 454 awards. July’s drilling permits number is the lowest since September 2010, when horizontal permits in oil basins amounted to 438. But unlike the current situation, activity then was on the increase, while the current downturn is still under way. Comparing to…

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