Monthly Archives: April 2017

Instability unnerves commodity markets, and as tension between the United States and North Korea heightens and the death toll in Venezuela rises, oil prices struggle to regain equilibrium. The U.S.-N. Korea stand-off is essentially two countries revisiting old wounds. The United States wants the Asian country to disarm and abandon its nuclear dreams; North Korea… Read more »

On March 9, 1776, the Scottish economist Adam Smith published his influential book The Wealth of Nations, which has left an indelible mark on international trade ever since. Interestingly, exactly 240 years later a pioneering liquefied natural gas (LNG) carrier departed a Philadelphia-area terminal bound for Europe and opened a new chapter in the global gas… Read more »

The undiscovered oil and gas resources in the Barents Sea are twice as large as previously assumed, according to the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate’s new calculations. The NPD recently mapped the eastern part of the northern Barents Sea, a large part of which is located in a previously disputed area. With new information to hand, the… Read more »

Far from the $40,000 per acre land rush for shale in the Permian Basin, operators in the Gulf of Mexico are toiling offshore to outpace their own production records. In January, Gulf of Mexico (GOM) production totaled 1.75 million barrels per day, less than a percentage point away from the previous record set in 2009,… Read more »

If you take a glance at OTC’s official website, it’ll give you a wealth of information about the conference’s history, location and benefits. What it won’t tell you, however, is a few key actions to avoid during your first outing at the show. Luckily, Rigzone has you covered. Don’t forget where you park your car… Read more »

Reassured by Donald Trump’s presidential agenda and the relative stability of oil prices once OPEC and non-OPEC countries settled on oil quotas, investors opened 2017 with a record $73.04 billion deals, according to findings by PwC. The investment represents a 160 percent increase in mergers and acquisitions (M&A) deal value, year over year, which includes… Read more »

Bullish global oil demand is expected to draw 1 million barrels per day off inventories in 2017, positioning the supply/demand dynamic to boost WTI price of oil by more than 32 percent by year-end. For the last two years, analysts at Raymond James have forecast a draw of 900,000 barrels per day (bpd), and massive… Read more »

RIO DE JANEIRO, April 10 (Reuters) – Brazil’s oil industry regulator ANP will submit next month the calculations to base the revision of a large contract with Petrobras known as the Transfer of Rights, the Energy Minister Fernando Coelho Filho said on Monday. The contract, through which the government exchanged in 2010 exploratory rights over… Read more »

BEIJING/SEOUL, April 13 (Reuters) – Isolated North Korea doesn’t consume much oil, but curbing or cutting off its supplies in retaliation for further nuclear or long-range missile tests would be painful and potentially destabilising to the regime of Kim Jong Un. U.S. officials have told Reuters that an oil embargo is among tougher sanctions Washington… Read more »

(Bloomberg) — Relying on natural gas to fuel Europe’s second-largest economy was never going to be easy for the U.K., even before Brexit. Britain’s once vast North Sea gas fields are fading, and even after a decade of trying, the island nation hasn’t replicated the fracking boom that turned the U.S. into the world’s largest… Read more »