Saudi Arabia: fissures within

King Salman The lack of agreement between members at the 168th OPEC meeting on 4th December means that Saudi Arabia can continue to pursue its strategy of maintaining market share over price for a little longer. In fact, recent production figures show that Saudi Arabia is pumping record amounts of crude this year, a sign of its commitment to this strategy. However, with oil prices reaching recent lows of c.USD40/bbl and little sign of a recovery...

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The Egyptian gas landscape

The Egyptian gas sector has historically suffered from underinvestment and the country has experienced a domestic supply shortfall since the beginning of 2015. Subsidised gas pricing encouraged strong demand growth during the 1990s and 2000s and at the same time, declining gas reserves in the onshore and the high cost of offshore gas developments have resulted in investment being diverted away from gas to onshore oil. The state of the gas market...

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Repsol and Statoil announce asset swap

Alfa Sentral platform in the North Sea On 11th December, Statoil and Repsol announced that they had entered into number of asset swaps as part of a packaged deal: In the North Sea, Statoil farms down a 15% WI in Gudrun (Norway), whilst retaining operatorship and will acquire a 31% WI in Alfa Sentral (UK portion), a field which spans the UK-Norway border In the US, Statoil acquires a 13% WI in the Eagle Ford JV and becomes operator, taking...

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Bienvenido Victor Hugo

Amerisur's pipeline into the Victor Hugo field On 1 December, Amerisur provided an operational update on its interconnector pipeline from Platanillo to the Ecuadorian export pipeline. Once operational, oil export will benefit from the low cost, under-utilised Ecuadorian infrastructure bringing transportation costs to below USD5/bbl. In addition to improved netbacks, the excess export capacity will support increasing production levels at Platanillo. The...

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Fortnum & Mason: the true cost of Christmas

Spending became complacent when oil prices were high and now with oil prices in a lower for longer environment, oil companies are tightening the purse strings. All costs are scrutinised, projects are being sent back to the drawing board to be re-engineered and no dollar of spend is approved unless it is absolutely necessary. In the spirit of Christmas, the team at OGInsights thought we would do a little cost scrutiny of our own following stories...

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ExxonMobil - finding a needle in a haystack

We met with ExxonMobil in the first week of December to catch up on what they have been up in 2015 on the M&A front. The low oil price has certainly prompted an internal flurry of screening for targets and the teams have been looking at “a lot of opportunities” with billions of dollars ready to be spent on acquisitions. Despite a desire to do something, finding the right opportunity is still like “finding a needle in a haystack”. ExxonMobil’s...

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