Thursday, August 04, 2011
Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News
A company based in the Arab Gulf state of Kuwait has expressed interest in conducting oil-wells drilling and exploration activities in Sudan, state media reported on Tuesday.
Sudan's daily oil output currently stands at 110,000 barrels, according to official figures, after the country lost nearly 75 percent of the previous 500,000 barrels per day figure it was splitting evenly since 2005 with South Sudan which seceded on 9 July.
Officials say they expect the current oil figure to rise to 170,000 barrel per day by 2012.
Exploration and production scene of Sudan's oil sector is dominated by Asian and Arab companies, with Chinese-led companies as the main operators.
A delegation of Gulf Petroleum Investment Company (GPI), a Kuwaiti shareholding company, arrived in the country and held a meeting on Tuesday with the country's acting minister of oil Ali Ahmad Osman at his office in Khartoum.
The minister instructed the competent departments at his ministry to provide GPI with necessary support and facilitate its venture to join Sudan's market of oil wells drilling and exploration.
Meanwhile, the company's delegation apprised the minister of its activities in oil-exploration fields, including its operations in Egypt, UAE and Syria.
It is not clear where will the Kuwaiti company's exploration activities take place but new explorations are underway in a number of areas.
In October last year, Sudan announced that oil exploration activities would be initiated in three areas in South Darfur State, one of the three states that make up the country's war-battered western region.
In 2006, Sudan awarded a license to a consortium of Arab and Sudanese companies for block 12A which covers part of North Darfur and stretches up to the border with Libya.
Analysts opine that oil exploration activities in Sudan are subject to a number of uncertainties, including political instability and armed conflicts.
- Total Eyes Brazil Pre-Salt Resources Development Role-Exec
Thursday, July 07, 2011
Dow Jones Newswires
PARIS
by Geraldine Amiel
Total is "well prepared" to take part in the development of Brazil's pre-salt oil resources, Total's head of exploration and production, said Yves-Louis Darricarrere.
Speaking during a conference on Brazil here, Darricarrere said the country is "a land of opportunity" for oil groups such as his.
Brazil's pre-salt resources are located on the deep-offshore field of Santos.
Total acquired in June 2010 a 20% interest in the BM-S-54 block on Santos, operated by Shell. The block is being explored, and no production has been planned yet.
"Total is well prepared to participate and is waiting for Brazil to decide when these interesting areas will be open," Darricarrere said on the country's pre-salt resources.
"In the short term, the announced 11th concession round which deals with non pre-salt discoveries will certainly be of interest to us," he also said.
Total also owns a 41.2% interest in the BC-2 block and a 50% interest in the BM-C-14 block both located on the Campos field, which is non pre-salt.
Tuesday, June 07, 2011
Dow Jones Newswires
by Yvonne Lee & Edward Welsch
The buzz about Hong Kong's market for initial public offerings is luring Sunshine Oilsands Ltd., an early-stage Canadian oil-sands company that could lose some of its land to a preserve for caribou.
The Calgary-based company wants to raise around US $1 billion through an IPO in the fourth quarter, a person familiar with the situation said Tuesday. It plans to submit its listing application in July and has hired Holdings Ltd. to handle the share sale.
The listing plan comes as Canadian energy companies seek investments from investors in China amid rising demand for energy resources in the country. Last week, Toronto-listed Husky Energy Inc. said it is exploring a potential secondary listing of its shares on the Hong Kong stock exchange, home to the world's busiest IPO market last year and a market that is increasingly attracting companies outside the region.
Sunshine Oilsands, which was incorporated in early 2007 and isn't expected to produce any oil until next year, owns and controls 4,600 square kilometers of oil-sand leases in the Athabasca sands region in the Canadian province of Alberta.
The Athabasca region holds an estimated 170 billion barrels of a type of heavy crude oil that requires heat, steam or chemicals to extract it from sandy deposits. The oil sands make Canada the holder of the world's third-largest oil reserves, after Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.
One risk facing Sunshine is a land conservation plan unveiled by the Alberta government earlier this year that would expropriate a large section of the company's prospective oil sands land in order to preserve it as a caribou habitat. The conservation plan hasn't been finalized, and Sunshine is negotiating with the government over the scope of the conservation plan as well as potential compensation for seized land.
A Sunshine Oilsands executive wasn't immediately available for comment.
According to Sunshine's 2010 financial statement, the company lost 9.1 million Canadian dollars (US $9.2 million) last year, before accounting for future income-tax credits, and has a deficit of C$17.8 million.
China, the world's second-largest oil consumer after the U.S., has been investing aggressively in Canada's energy sector to fuel its rapidly growing economy. Chinese investment in oil sands has jumped as crude prices surged over the past year amid the global economic recovery, with prices now hovering near US $100.
Last year, state-owned Corp. bought a 9% stake in Syncrude, Canada's largest oil-sands project, for US $4.65 billion. In 2009, Co. purchased a stake in an Athabasca Oil Sands Corp. project for C$1.9 billion.
Sunshine Oilsands in March said it had raised C$230 million through investments from China Life Insurance (Overseas) Company Ltd., Bank of China Group Investment Ltd., Cross-Strait Common Development Fund Co., and several other investors.
KUWAIT CITY // The Kuwait Foreign Petroleum Exploration Company (Kufpec) expects D-Day in August for a final investment decision on its participation in a A$20 billion (Dh75.83bn) Australian liquefied natural gas (LNG) project.
Development of the Wheatstone LNG project off the coast of north-west Australia is slated to start next year, Ali al Shammari, the deputy managing director of Kufpec, told a conference in the Kuwaiti capital.
Kufpec, which is the Kuwaiti government's overseas oil and gas investment arm, has joined forces with the US oil and gas producer Apache to explore and develop gas prospects including the Julimar and Brunello fields off the north-west coast of Australia. The Kufpec-Apache partnership's licences are for areas close to the Wheatstone gasfield, operated by the US oil major Chevron, and the Gorgon and Pluto fields, where two other large LNG projects are under development.
Kuwait, which started importing LNG in 2009, is expected to do so until it boosts production from its own gasfields.
Kimimasa Mayama / Bloomberg News
"We selected Australia as an exploration focus due to stable fiscal terms and high geological potential," Mr al Shammari said.
In October 2009, Kufpec and Apache signed an agreement with Chevron to supply gas to Wheatstone LNG in return for equity stakes in the project. Kufpec now holds a 7 per cent interest in the project, after the South Korean utility Kogas also signed up as an equity partner.
"Wheatstone is a potential game-changer for Apache, unlocking 2.1 trillion cubic feet of gas reserves at two of Apache's largest discoveries and generating steady production for 15 years at prices pegged to world oil markets," G Steven Farris, the chairman and chief executive of Apache, said at the 2009 signing ceremony.
On completion, the planned LNG plant at Ashburton North, in the state of Western Australia, will have an annual production capacity of 15 million tonnes of the super-chilled fuel. The first phase of the project, already under development, will export up to 8.9 million tonnes per year of LNG to Asian customers including Kogas, and the Japanese utilities Tokyo Electric Power and Kyushu Electric Power.
The power companies have already signed long-term gas purchase contracts with the Wheatstone partners. Exports are expected to commence in 2014.
Japanese plans to import gas from Wheatstone are unlikely to be affected by the recent earthquake disaster and nuclear crisis in the country. Analysts expect Japan to require substantial additional LNG imports to compensate for potential nuclear plant closures and slower nuclear development.
Natural gas is an important part of Kufpec's development portfolio.
The company is also involved in a Singapore project that exports gas to industrial users in South East Asia and a Chinese project supplying gas for domestic power generation. It has interests in producing gasfields in Pakistan and expects soon to bring a new Indonesian field into production and to sanction the development of a Malaysian field with 1 trillion cubic feet of reserves, a company official said yesterday.
The overseas gas projects are part of a Kuwaiti government plan to increase the emirate's access to global gas supplies and to broaden its oil and gas industry technical expertise.
"We are looking at an area in which we can transfer technology. LNG is an area where we were lacking," Mr al Shammari said.
Kuwait started importing gas in 2009. The LNG imports are expected to continue until the emirate completes complex projects to boost production from deep gasfields in the north of the country.
