A U.S. appeals court on Tuesday rejected Ecuador's challenge to a $96 million international arbitration award in favor of energy giant Chevron, marking the latest twist in a decades-long dispute over the development of oil fields in the South American country.
The dispute stemmed from a 1973 deal that called for Texaco Petroleum Co, later acquired by Chevron, to develop oil fields in exchange for selling oil to the Ecuadorean government at below-market rates. Texaco filed several lawsuits in the 1990s accusing Ecuador of violating the contract.
The District of Columbia U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a 2011 award from The Hague's Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Netherlands.
Hungarian oil and gas group MOL's second-quarter net profit surged 161 percent from a year earlier as its downstream segment posted its best ever quarterly result thanks to strong refining and petrochemicals margins.
The company's so called clean EBITDA, or core earnings, jumped 89 percent to 179.5 billion forints ($629.63 million), exceeding analysts' median forecast of 169.9 billion in a poll by business website portfolio.hu. It was also above the 154.1 billion forints core earnings recorded in the first quarter.
MOL posted a net profit of 62.7 billion forints, compared to a profit of 24 billion forints in the same period of 2014.
Touchstone Exploration has disposed of its working interest in 1,166 hectares of undeveloped acreage in the Dodsland area of Saskatchewan for $4.2 million to a Canadian oil and gas producer.
Lundin Petroleum has reported second quarter earnings and production below expectations in the second quarter of 2015.
The company lowered its 2015 production guidance but has kept its year-end production target.
Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) dropped 38% on the year to $106.5million.
Mexico’s oil regulator has voted to change the rules for the second phase of the country’s round one auction.
The move includes lowering a required corporate guarantee that was said to have initially put investors off.
Last month the first inaugural oil auction – which covered 14 shallow water exploration blocks – took place.
However, only two blocks were awarded in the first stage of the highly anticipated auction.
Oil major BP has confirmed a $1billion investment in the North Sea.
The company's investment is expected to add an additional 15 years to the Eastern Trough Area Project (ETAP) as part of a special life extension project.
BP said it remained committed to the North Sea despite the current economic challenges which has seen the oil price dip below $50 this week.
US courts have been good to Jack Grynberg, netting him hundreds of millions of dollars in disputes with some of the world’s largest oil and gas producers since 1984.
Despite that fortune, the 83-year-old oilman says he’s fed up with America’s legal system and has taken his biggest suit yet -- a battle over profits from Kazakhstan’s most valuable oil fields -- to Switzerland.
Grynberg is suing a consortium led by BP Plc, saying the oil giant backtracked on a 1991 deal promising him 20 percent of the profits from Kazakh fields he helped find. Instead, Grynberg says in the lawsuit that BP cut him out and struck deals directly with the Kazakh government, greased with bribes paid by a CIA agent who was arrested in 2003.
Listed UK manufacturers weighed the effects of the global oil and gas downturn on their businesses revealing mixed results yesterday.
Engineering components firm Meggitt hailed a 6% boost to its half year profits thanks to its aviation spare parts business which offset a decline in its oil and gas valves business.
Meanwhile, pump actuator maker Rotork said its oil and gas business saw revenues drop £15million as it was hit by weak oil prices and political instability.
Meggitt rose to the top of the FTSE-100 leaders board last night, up 8% after half-year results showing pre-tax profits up 6% to £152 million at the engineering group.
The head of an Aberdeen-based energy sector procurement services firm that went bust last month has started trading again.
Warren Anderson was the controlling shareholder in Gas and Oil Technology Services (GOT Services) when administrators were brought in to wind down the business in July, putting 19 employees out of work with immediate effect.
But last week it emerged that Mr Anderson had set up GOT Procurement Services at the same registered address less than a fortnight after the earlier venture hit the buffers.
BP has confirmed a bumper $1billion investment in one of its cornerstone North Sea assets.
The cash injection is expected to add 15 years to the project – nearly doubling the site’s lifespan.
The North Sea pioneer revealed the billion dollar price tag exclusively to Energy Voice.
The money will be funnelled into its Eastern Trough Area Project (ETAP) as part of a special life extension project, securing its future through to 2030.
An energy company has applied for permission to explore the potential for fracking in north Nottinghamshire.
IGas Limited want to drill 12 bore holes on land in Misson, close to the boundary with South Yorkshire.
British oil major BP has halted its deepwater exploration activities off Uruguay as it prioritizes lower-risk projects at a time of low international prices, an official at Uruguay's state-owned oil company Ancap said on Monday.
BP confirmed its exit from the South American country, three years after it won rights to explore blocks 11 and 12 in Uruguay's Pelotas basin and block 6 in the Punta del Este basin. The acreage covers an area of almost 26,000 square kilometers in waters ranging from 50 to 2,000 meters deep.
"BP has other exploration projects in other parts of the world that are lower risk. In today's environment, there is a limit to investments," said Hector de Santa Ana, head of Exploration and Production at Ancap.
Libya’s new head of the state oil company for the eastern region is considering ending force majeure at the North African nation’s two largest ports and will seek to boost crude output.
Chevron has ruled out any output from its deepwater Big Foot project until at least 2018 as the oil major continues to investigate the cause of a setback at its facility.
A total of nine tendons sunk to the sea floor after initially losing buoyancy.
The Big Foot deepwater oil project in the Gulf of Mexico had been months away from a planned initial startup for later in the year.
Russia has submitted its bid for vast territories in the Arctic to the United Nations.
It is claiming 1.2 million square kilometres (more than 463,000 square miles) of Arctic sea shelf, the Russian foreign ministry said.
Russia, the US, Canada, Denmark and Norway have all been trying to assert jurisdiction over parts of the Arctic, which is believed to hold up to a quarter of the planet’s undiscovered oil and gas.
The chief executive of Eni has met with the President of Nigeria to express condolences over an explosion in the country in June which killed 14 people.
Claudio Descalzi met with Mohammadu Buhari for the first time since the President was elected earlier this year.
The Saudi stock market is showing its mettle in the face of the latest oil rout that drove Brent into a bear market in July.
The kingdom’s Tadawul All Share Index has retreated 4.2 percent since the end of June, compared with declines of 15 percent in Brazil in dollar terms, 11 percent in Russia and almost 10 percent in Nigeria.
Brent, the benchmark oil grade against which Saudi crude is priced, has tumbled 21 percent in that period.
The resilience shows how the world’s biggest crude producer is riding out the slump thanks to the confidence of locals who account for almost all the $525 billion market’s investors and the government’s determination to press ahead with infrastructure spending.
Petrotechnics has opened a new competency and training centre in Aberdeen.
The company said the new facility will offer increased capacity to meet the growing demand for a range of courses.
Energy firm GE Oil and Gas today announced plans to cut jobs at its facility in Peterhead due to low oil prices.
GE employs about 130 people at the base, where components used in the oil and gas industry are made.
The firm, which also has operations in Aberdeen and Montrose, did not specify the exact number of staff members it intends to lay off, or the amount of money it expects to save as a result of the measure.
Support for controversial fracking has fallen to a new low, according to an official Government survey.
Only a fifth of people (21%) back extracting shale gas for use in the UK, the lowest level of support since the quarterly public attitudes survey by the Department of Energy and Climate Change first quizzed people on the issue in December 2013.
Overall 28% of people opposed fracking, with 46% expressing no opinion either way, the survey of 2,118 UK households found.
But the level of opposition was higher among people who said they knew about fracking, with 54% of those who know a lot about the process opposing it, compared to 32% backing it.
Gazprom is in talks with Engie on participation in an expanded Nord Stream pipeline to carry gas from Russia to Germany under the Baltic Sea, two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.