A plan for developing Norway's Zidane natural gas field could be presented in the second or third quarter of 2016, with the early parts of summer being the most likely time frame, Austria's OMV has indicated.
OMV said it has revised its oil price assumption for coming years and will take special charges in the third quarter of the year of around €1billion in its upstream business. The move comes after production fell to 292,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day from 307,000 in the previous quarter and 311,000 in the same quarter last year. The Austrian company said the decline in oil price had “significantly burdened” its performance in the quarter.
Austria's OMV has made a new gas discovery in the Latif South-1 exploration well in Pakistan.
Further writedowns on Austrian oil and gas group OMV's ailing Samsun gas power plant in Turkey are possible and the facility could be sold, the head of OMV's downstream division, Manfred Leitner, told Reuters. OMV this month booked an impairment of 205 million euros ($227 million) at Samsun, where regulatory measures are weighing on margins. "I wouldn't rule out further impairments in the future," Leitner said in an interview late on Tuesday, adding he did not expect more writedowns this year at Samsun, which now has a book value of around half its original 600 million euro price tag.
Austrian oil and gas group OMV's new chief executive is looking towards Russia for low-cost energy sources to boost the company's upstream business, which has been squeezed by low crude prices. Though OMV's downstream refining and marketing operations bolstered second-quarter results posted on Wednesday, CEO Rainer Seele cast a wary eye over margin prospects for that side of the business and sees exploration as key for the longer term. OMV has placed its bets on expensive but stable exploration projects in the North Sea as output in Yemen and Libya stalls, and Seele is keen to maintain the upstream focus.
OMV has plugged and abandoned its dry well near the Wisting oil discovery. The purpose of the well was to find petroleum in reservoir rocks from the middle jurassic to late triassic age. It was drilled about 6 kilometres south-east of oil discovery 7324/8-1 'Wisting' in the Barents Sea and 310km north of Hammerfest.
Wintershall boss Rainer Seele has been appointed chief executive of OMV. The 54-year-old will take up the role from July this year and has signed a three-year contract with an extension option with OMV for a further two years. The current chief executive, Gerhard Roiss, had previously announced his departure from the company.
OMV Petrom SA, Romania’s largest oil company, said its 2014 net income declined 56% from a year earlier as falling oil prices caused a loss in the fourth quarter. Profit dropped to 2.1 billion lei ($539 million) from 4.8 billion lei in 2013 because of cheaper oil and higher production costs, the company said in a statement to the Bucharest bourse on Thursday. Sales fell 11% to 21.5 billion lei from 24 billion lei. Company turned to a loss of 304 million lei in the fourth quarter compared with a profit of 1.16 billion lei in the last three months of 2013. “In light of the volatile and potentially prolonged weaker market fundamentals, we are scaling back our investment plans for 2015 and have intensified cost optimization programs while maintaining our potential growth projects in the Black Sea,” Petrom Chief Executive Officer Mariana Gheorghe said in the statement.