The number of companies going bust in Scotland fell in the second quarter compared to the same period last year but was up compared to the first three months of 2015, new figures show.
But while professional services firm KPMG said the figures were “positive for the majority of businesses”, it warned that the oil and gas industry is continuing to “struggle” due to the oil price slump.
The food and drink, construction and care homes sectors are also faring comparatively poorly, according to the latest Scottish insolvency figures from KPMG.
As Technip’s project director for the £800million Quad 204 project, Richard Wylie is tasked with restoring one of the North Sea’s prized assets at a crucial time for the industry.
The project involves the redevelopment of the Schiehallion field, 110miles west of Shetland, and the target is to squeeze another 25 years and 450million barrels of oil out of it.
The BP-operated field started producing in 1998, but the old FPSO, which was towed away last year, now needs to be replaced along with subsea infrastructure.
Waste-management giant Augean said yesterday that contract wins for its North Sea energy service arm contributed to a strong first half performance for the group.
Aberdeen-based Augean North Sea Services (ANSS) sealed a number of deals in June and July, including a first contract for the disposal of naturally occurring radioactive material that builds up on offshore drilling equipment.
The group’s Radioactive Waste Services (RWS) division will work with ANSS on the contract, which was agreed with an unspecified major operator.
Ukraine increased its purchase of natural gas imports from Slovakia by 41 percent on Tuesday, boosting its storage supplies, transport monopoly Ukrtransgaz said.
Cash-strapped Ukraine is now buying most of its natural gas from Slovakia after halting imports from Russia three weeks ago due to a pricing dispute.
It was unclear whether the increase on Tuesday was due to price factors or other reasons.
The builder of a ruptured Nexen Energy oil sands pipeline in Canada that caused one of North America's largest oil-related land spills said on Monday it had followed the design plans it was given for the infrastructure.
Surerus Pipeline Inc, a contractor based in Fort St. John in British Columbia, "had no involvement in this project after the completion, so whatever Nexen's doing, they're doing," said Sean Surerus, vice president of the company, said in an interview.
"The project was completed to the standards. We were the installers. ... We had no design capacity in the project."
Mexican state oil company Pemex reached a $295 million settlement with a group including German industrial conglomerate Siemens in a longstanding dispute over a refinery project, a person familiar with the matter said on Monday.
The deal was originally announced in March but did not give details of the final settlement.
A Mexican official close to the negotiations said that Pemex had agreed to settle for $295 million. Earlier in the day, Pemex said in a statement that the deal struck definitively ends the 14-year-long dispute, but it did not give a sum.
Engineering software specialist Aveva today saw its shares soar 27% after agreeing to a £1.3billion “reverse takeover” by France’s Schneider Electric due to the slump in oil and gas prices.
The tie-up reduces Cambridge-based Aveva's exposure to oil and gas markets, the source of about 45% of its revenue, and where lower oil prices have cut demand for rigs designed using its software.
Aveva, a subject of takeover speculation for months, will also build up its chemicals, mining and pharmaceuticals businesses and expand its market share in the Americas, a Schneider stronghold.
Britain's Oil and Gas Authority (OGA) has given consent to Centrica to increase storage capacity at Rough, the country's largest gas storage site, the company said on Monday.
The OGA decision will enable the site to increase its storage capacity by around 15 billion cubic feet or 4.5 terrawatt hours (TWh), Centrica said in a statement.
Norway's Statoil is to sell its 20-percent stake in the Trans Adriatic Gas Pipeline (TAP) project that will carry gas from Azerbaijan to Europe, the president of Azeri state energy firm SOCAR said.
"Statoil has decided to leave the TAP project completely, and there is a company which is ready to buy its stake," Rovnag Abdullayev told Azeri ANS TV late on Friday.
"Several companies have expressed an interest in buying Statoil's stake, and it would be better if several companies would buy it," he added.
Italy's Eni has discovered gas reserves of up to 15 billion cubic metres in Egypt's Nile Delta region, with production set to start in two months, the Egyptian oil ministry said on Monday.
The discovery was made in Western Abu Madi, 120 km northeast of Alexandria, where Eni holds 75 percent of exploration rights through an Egyptian subsidiary, with Britain's BP holding a 25 percent stake.
Eni made the discovery at a depth of 3,600 metres and initial estimates point towards reserves of up to 15 billion cubic metres of natural gas and natural gas condensate, an Egyptian oil ministry statement quoted the company as saying.
A diesel excess that has loomed over Europe for years is arriving, threatening to swamp refining margins with a flood from Saudi oil refineries and Asian units that feasted on a glut of light sweet crude oil.
Price-driven demand and refinery glitches that forced Latin America to import more postponed the reckoning. But with a string of tankers loading diesel in the Middle East, and more than 1.5 million tonnes set to arrive from the United States, Europe's distillate prices are falling and margins narrowing.
"In effect, Europe is caught in the crossroads of these trade flows," said Harry Tchilinguirian, global head of commodity markets strategy at Societe Generale. "We don't have sufficient strength to absorb the increased production and the imports."
Angola's state oil firm Sonangol on Monday requested prequalified bidders to submit bids for ten onshore oil blocks as Africa's second largest crude exporter aims to open up new exploration opportunities.
U.S. oil major Chevron, Italy's ENI, commodities trader Glencore and Portugal's GALP were among the prequalified companies who could operate the blocks, Sonangol said in a press release.
Bid proposals must be submitted by September 18.
A U.S. judge has rejected Brazilian state-run oil producer Petrobras' effort to dismiss a lawsuit claiming that years of corruption, including bribery, caused more than $98 billion of its stock and bonds to be overvalued.
The decision by U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff in Manhattan was made public on Friday, and clears the way for investors to pursue much of their class action lawsuit. A trial could begin as soon as Feb. 1, 2016.
Rakoff dismissed some claims related to Petrobras bonds issued in 2012 and some claims based on non-U.S. transactions, and also said some claims should be arbitrated.
The Dutch government said on Friday it would ban shale gas drilling for five years and not renew existing exploration licences due to uncertainties about the environmental impact.
Grangemouth plant operator Ineos yesterday moved a step closer to completing the construction of Europe’s largest ethane storage tank.
In a staggering feat of engineering, low pressure fans were used to lift the tank’s 300ton roof into place on “nothing more than a cushion of air”.
Ineos said the 150ft high tank is being built as part of a £450million rescue plan for Grangemouth, which closed briefly in 2013.
Ukraine will take about 21 percent more gas from Slovakia to boost deliveries to underground storage after the country suspended imports from Russia over a pricing dispute, transport monopoly Ukrtransgaz said on Friday.
Ukraine plans to import 16.5 million cubic metres (mcm) of gas on Friday from Slovakia, up from daily imports of 13.6 mcm so far this month, a spokesman for the company said.
He said Ukraine pumped 27 mcm of gas per day from July 1-9 and collected 12.2 billion cubic metres of gas in reserves as of July 10.
Royal Dutch Shell has acquired Morgan Stanley's European gas and power trading book as the U.S. bank continues its exit from the sector.
Shell is set to significantly increase its footprint in the gas market in the coming years if it completes its proposed $70 billion acquisition of smaller British rival BG Group and as part of a growing strategic alliance with Russia's Gazprom, the world's top gas producer.
Shell Energy Europe, its supply and trading arm in the region, has signed a binding sales and purchase agreement for Morgan Stanley's portfolio, the Anglo-Dutch company said on Friday, without providing further details.
Aberdeen-based engineering consultancy Xodus Group has won a contract to carry out gas leak detection work at a US Air Force base in Oklahoma.
The work involves surveying the piping system that takes gas to the Altus AFB base and is expected to take a week to complete.
Green-energy giant Infinis suffered a near 8% slide in the value of its shares after it confirmed the chancellor’s decision to scrap climate change tax breaks for renewables generators will cost it £7million by March.
In Wednesday’s Budget, Chancellor George Osborne said the Climate Change Levy (CCL) exemption, which allows businesses not to pay the environmental tax levied on energy if it has come from renewable power, would be removed in August.
The move continues the UK Government’s “crusade” to scale back financial support for renewables, which has not been perturbed by the approach of United Nations climate change talks in Paris later this year.
EU energy regulator ACER, until now largely toothless, will be given legal powers to enforce plans for a single energy market that breaks down national barriers under a proposal from the bloc's executive arm.
At a conference on Thursday in Slovenia, where the Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators is based, European Commission Vice President Maros Sefcovic and Energy Commissioner Miguel Arias Canete laid out their plans to bolster ACER.
Already next week in Brussels, the Commission will publish its thoughts on how to improve cross-border power and gas flows to try to bring down energy costs and curb the need for fossil fuels imported from nations such as Russia.
By By Jessica Resnick-Ault, Dmitry Zhdannikov and Terry Wade
In early May, with its legal options dwindling and investors impatient, BP saw a chance to negotiate what became a $18.7 billion settlement that ended five years of litigation over the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history.
An unexpected opportunity to secure a global deal that would wipe the slate clean of hundreds of claims and untold billions of dollar in penalties opened up when Chief Executive Bob Dudley met with Patrick Juneau, the lifelong Louisiana litigator who BP had panned for handing out "absurd" sums of money as part of a class settlement in 2012.
The British giant was ready to bury the hatchet after years of acrimony over payouts, which had ballooned to more than $10 billion. It had bigger problems: unresolved claims by the federal government, five Gulf of Mexico states and hundreds of local municipalities stemming from Macondo well blowout.
Russia's Gazprom has cancelled a contract with Italian oil services group Saipem to build the first line of a gas pipeline beneath the Black Sea, the Russian state gas company said in a statement on Wednesday.
Gazprom said it will start talks with other potential contractors to build the first line of the Turkish Stream pipeline, which would run beneath the Black Sea to Turkey. The project would consist of four lines, each capable of carrying 15.75 billion cubic metres of gas per year.
Saipem said last month it was asked by Gazprom to start work on a pipeline under the Black Sea, which should avoid Ukraine as a transit country for roughly half of Russian gas shipped to Europe.
A small Chinese energy firm has signed a deal with a state-controlled Russian oil company to invest in an East Siberian oilfield project.
CEFC China Energy signed the deal with Gazprom Neft, the oil arm of Russia's top natural gas producer, on July 6, according to a statement on the Shanghai-based company's website.
The private chemicals and fuel company said it is investing in three blocks holding 1.9 billion barrels of oil in the Baikal project, 90 kilometres away from the East Siberia-Pacific Ocean (ESPO) pipeline that supplies China with Russian oil.
Romanian prosecutors seized assets of Russian oil firm Lukoil worth up to 2 billion euros ($2.22 billion) in an investigation on suspicion of money laundering, a local court was quoted as saying on Wednesday by state agency Agerpres.
In October of last year Romanian prosecutors, police and customs inspectors raided the offices of Lukoil near the city of Ploiesti in an investigation into alleged tax evasion and money laundering concerning an estimated 230 million euros.
As a result, Lukoil briefly shut down its local refinery.
Russia's top oil producer Rosneft has made a significant step in its efforts to expand its global reach by signing a preliminary deal with Essar Group about acquiring up to 49 percent of the Vadinar oil refinery in India.
Rosneft, the world's top listed oil producer, has long sought to increase its exposure to the global markets but its efforts have been hampered by Western sanctions over Moscow's role in the Ukraine crisis.
State-controlled Rosneft said on Wednesday that it has also finalised a deal to supply 10 million tonnes of oil a year (200,000 barrels per day) to the refinery over 10 years.
