LAST month, a FTSE100 company announced plans to spend $4.5billion on developing its interests in various US gas fields. Nothing unusual in that you say; however, but the business in question is not an oil & gas company, but a miner.
ERNST & Young's Global Capital Confidence Barometer is a regular survey of senior executives from large companies around the world conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU).
I ENJOY visiting Shetland; I spent a lot of time there in the 1970s when the Sullom Voe oil terminal was being built and have been back many times since.
WHENEVER I see the words "jobs joy" in a headline, I skip the first six paragraphs in order to search for the nitty-gritty. Does the project exist or is it proposed? Therein sits a crucial world of difference.
I'VE just been in Norway; Bergen to be precise. The objective was to visit a number of key companies with a heavy commitment to subsea, including the biggest purchaser of technologies and services on the Norwegian Continental Shelf . . . Statoil itself.
Hooray ... at last ... a UK company, Scottish to boot, has made a bold step into meaningful manufacturing of components for large wind turbines by buying Finnish company Moventas for £85million.
So, the platforms for the Nexen-operated Golden Eagle project have gone to the Middle East, or more correctly the UAE-domiciled but London-listed group Lamprell.
THE safety and environmental impact of the offshore oil and gas industry has, in past year or so, seen unprecedented scrutiny by the press and regulators.
THE world's most-populous country, China, is also the second-largest consumer of oil; moreover, this huge country's rapidly rising demand and imports have made it a significant player in global energy markets.
WHEN we at Oil & Gas UK recently published our 2011 Economic Report, we highlighted some pretty positive findings: increasing investment, a flourishing supply chain, a massive economic contribution and a bright future ahead with considerable reserves remaining to be extracted.
IN JANUARY 2009, Heritage Oil, in partnership with Tullow Oil, announced that exploration on concessions in the Lake Albert Basin in Uganda held over 2billion barrels in reserves, far exceeding the commercial viability threshold.
OH DEAR, the meddlers at the European Commission are at it again . . . planning a raft of new rules and regulations without taking proper account of what is already in place.
LONGANNET is dead. Long live carbon capture and storage. The two statements are by no means incompatible, as some of the obituary notices for the ScottishPower project in Fife have suggested.
THE latest UKCS oil and production statistics from the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) show big falls. June's output averaged 946,982 barrels per day, which was down 12.4% on June 2010. Gas averaged 4,004million (4billion) cu.ft, down 26.5% year on year.
THE announcement by BP of its intention to invest £4.5billion in the Clair Ridge development West of Shetland has quite rightly attracted a lot of interest, not least from PM David Cameron.
With PM Cameron just having jetted into Aberdeen to grab a bit of positive publicity and Treasury first secretary Alexander scheduled to be in Europe's Energy Capital in a couple of weeks for a bunch of engagements, including a (SCDI) Scottish Council Development and Industry dinner, this looks suspiciously like a government charm offensive.
IN 1966, Sergio Leone directed Clint Eastwood in The Good the Bad and the Ugly. In recent months, three FTSE100 listed E&P companies have re-written the script, issuing drilling updates which have been received in the market as "the good, the bad and the indifferent".
THERE'S a funny clip on YouTube of Donald Trump's appearance on the David Letterman show on American television when he talks about owning "thousands of acres of Scotland" and his plans to make the dunes "even more beautiful than they are now".