Energy Exporter News

A ship carrying wheat from Ukraine to the drought-stricken Horn of Africa docked on Tuesday, the United Nations said, the first to make the journey since the Russian invasion six months ago.The vessel Brave Commander is carrying 23,000 tonnes of grain and will soon be followed by another carrying 7,000 tonnes.The total shipment, which will be unloaded in Djibouti and transported to Ethiopia, is enough to feed 1.5 million people for a month.That barely begins to alleviate the problems of Eastern Africa, where the United Nations' World Food Programme says extreme weather, surging food prices and conflict mean 82 million people need food aid across nine countries - Burundi…

The United States is projected to become a net energy exporter over the next decade due to rising natural gas exports and falling petroleum product imports, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said on Thursday. While the United States has been a net energy importer since 1953, declining energy imports and growing exports that started over the past year will allow that trend to switch by 2026, the EIA said. In late 2015, the U.S. government lifted a decades-old ban on U.S. crude exports, while natural gas exports from the Lower 48 began in 2016. "The U.S.

Energy majors BP and Eni on Thursday announced a significant natural gas discovery off the Egyptian coast. The discovery is in the Baltim southwest exploration prospect in the East Nile Delta. It is 10 km north of the Nooros gas field which was discovered in July last year and has a production rate of 65,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day, the companies said. Italy's Eni, through its subsidiary IEOC, holds a 50 percent stake in the licence of Baltim South and BP holds the other 50 percent. The new discovery "further confirms the significant potential of the so called Great Nooros Area, which is now estimated to hold 70-80 billion cubic metres of gas in place," Eni said in a statement. BP said that appraisal activities will be required to understand its full resource potential.

Egypt will receive the first of five agreed shipments of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from Russia's Rosneft this month, an official at the state gas board EGAS told Reuters on Thursday. Last year Egypt and Rosneft signed a memorandum of understanding for a slew of petroleum products as well as 24 LNG cargoes. Only five of the 24 initially agreed cargoes were later inked into a final deal. "We're receiving the first shipments of LNG from Rosneft this month out of the five shipments that were agreed upon," said the EGAS official, declining to provide the value of the shipment or its size. Once an energy exporter, Egypt has turned into a net importer because of declining oil and gas production and increasing consumption.

Canadian non-resource exports should post healthy gains this year, the country's trade financing agency said on Monday, a development the central bank is counting on to help revive an economy hobbled by weak global energy prices. Export Development Canada predicted the consumer goods, automotive and aerospace sectors would post double-digit growth in 2016 on the back of a robust U.S. economy. Industrial machinery exports should advance by 7 percent, it said. Overall exports are seen rising a modest 2 percent this year, held back by a 14-percent drop in the value of energy shipments. Canada is a major energy exporter and has been hit hard by slumping crude oil prices.

Prices for Eurobonds from many commodity-exporting emerging markets have fallen sharply this week on fears that the latest metals price reversal will hit the ability to repay debt, especially in some African countries. A major casualty of the metals price plunge is Glencore , whose bonds and shares have tanked to a record low. Almost a third of the mining and trading firm's value was wiped out on Monday alone. The moves underscore the challenges faced by economies and companies exposed to the sector and to China's slowdown. Fears of job cuts by Glencore and other mining firms are weighing on the assets of producing nations, especially Zambia whose kwacha currency plunged 17 percent on Monday to record lows.

Egypt has issued a five-year tender to lease a second liquefied natural gas (LNG) import terminal, the head of the state gas board told Reuters on Monday, seeking to tackle an energy crisis. Egypt was once an energy exporter but declining oil and gas production and increasing consumption has forced the government to divert energy supplies to the domestic market, turning the country into a net energy importer. "We launched yesterday a tender to lease a second LNG import terminal for a period of five years. We have sent it to eight international companies and we expect to get a reply within a week," Khaled Abdel Badie said in a telephone interview. The floating regasification and import terminal, which converts super-cooled LNG into gas, would be Egypt's second.

Egypt's state-owned gas company EGAS has tendered to buy at least 48 cargoes of liquefied natural gas (LNG) for delivery in 2015/16, three traders said. A senior official at EGAS confirmed that there was a tender for multiple LNG cargoes during Egypt's 2015/16 financial year, which runs from July 2015 to June 2016, but declined to say how many cargoes. The official told Reuters that the result of the tender was due by the end of this month and that seven companies had bid, adding that the contract would be split among multiple companies. Egypt finalised a long-delayed deal last month with Norway's Hoegh LNG for a floating storage and regasification unit that will allow the country to begin importing LNG.

Egypt will launch a tender for a second liquefied natural gas (LNG) import terminal in the coming weeks, which could help address the country's ongoing energy crisis, a source at the state gas board said on Tuesday. High consumption, along with foreign firms' reluctance to invest in the sector until the government pays billions of dollars it owes, have turned the country from a net energy exporter into a net importer over the last few years. Egypt can export LNG, which is natural gas chilled to minus 162 degrees Celsius into a liquid state, but it cannot import it without installing regasification and storage terminals. The country finalised a long-delayed deal last month with Norway's Hoegh LNG for a floating storage and regasification unit that will allow it to begin LNG imports.

Unrealistic Fears and Overstated Risks obscure the benefits of new seismic data. The United States stands poised on the edge of a bright energy future. After decades of decreasing domestic energy production and increasing reliance on foreign sources of oil and natural gas, a revolution in production has positioned this nation to become a net energy exporter by 2017, according to the International Energy Agency. It seems the future is bright and promising for U.S. energy security, yet this promise is under threat from unrealistic fears and overstated risks. Policy makers must understand the true dynamics at play in the energy sector so they can make informed decisions. If not, we risk squandering the opportunity being presented to us.

Russia, the world's biggest energy exporter, does not plan to cut oil production to shore up prices, Rossiya 24 television quoted Energy Minister Alexander Novak as saying on Saturday. Russia, which relies on oil and gas exports for about half its federal budget, has been hit this year by a fall in global oil prices as well as by Western sanctions over its role in the Ukraine's crisis. The Energy Ministry confirmed Novak's quote to Reuters, adding that it was part of an interview with state-run Rossiya 24, the full version of which has yet to be aired. It was not immediately clear when the interview was recorded and whether Novak was replying to a remark he made on Friday, when he said Russia was discussing whether to cut oil output but had not yet taken a decision on this.

Shipping services that support Russia's attempts to extract oil from remote parts of the Arctic will run into difficulties as banks scale back energy financing due to Western sanctions, increasing transport costs for the frontier sector. Sanctions imposed on Russia by the United States and European Union over Ukraine have targeted the delivery of oil technology, goods and services, aiming to make it impossible for Moscow to access new oil sources. The world's largest energy exporter, Russia relies on oil and gas exports for about half its federal budget.

Egypt finalized a deal with Norway's Hoegh LNG for a long-delayed liquefied natural gas import terminal on Monday that will eventually help the power-hungry country resolve a chronic energy shortage. However, the expected launch date for the floating storage and regasification unit was pushed back to the end of March, the latest in a series of delays over the past two years. Liquefied natural gas shipper Hoegh signed a five-year contract with Egypt's EGAS in Cairo at an event that included Egypt's oil minister and the Norwegian ambassador. The firm was initially looking to start up operations by the third quarter of 2014 but the project was delayed earlier this year. In September, the oil ministry said the terminal would be up and running by December.

"China is our reliable friend," Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Monday in an interview ahead of a conference in Shanghai. Most evaluations of the bilateral relationship begin by reciting the historical border disputes, rift between Mao Zedong and Nikita Khrushchev, opening to China by Richard Nixon, and the perennial problem of reaching an agreement on gas pricing. But these are all essentially backward looking and ignore the growing community of interests between the two countries. The case for a closer bilateral relationship on energy, trade, security and diplomatic issues is compelling. In the energy sphere, the two countries are an almost perfect match: the world's largest net energy exporter and its second-largest net energy importer (2011) with a long land border.

Congressman Michael McCaul introduced H.R. 4349, the Crude Oil Export Act, which lifts the 1970s era prohibition on the export of American crude oil and would remove the major remaining barrier that keeps the U.S. from being competitive with other oil exporting nations. McCaul said, "Most of America's crude oil production is taking place underneath the feet of Texans in the Eagle Ford Shale and the Permian Basin. According to McCaul, the Crude Oil Export Act will repeal the 1970s era ban on crude oil exports; maintain a ban on crude oil exports to any country that is subject to U.S. trade restrictions, sanctions or that the President or Congress has designated as subject to exclusion for national security reasons…

ExxonMobil’s 'Outlook for Energy' forecasts new opportunities for international trade and economic growth. The global energy landscape will evolve significantly as regional demand-and-supply patterns shift in the coming decades, creating new opportunities for international trade and economic growth, says newly-releaed 'Outlook for Energy: A View to 2040'. In its annual forecast, ExxonMobil projects that global energy demand in 2040 will be approximately 35 percent higher than in 2010. Future energy needs will be supported by more efficient energy-saving practices and technologies, increased use of less-carbon-intensive fuels such as natural gas, nuclear and renewables, and the development of unconventional energy sources that were previously inaccessible without technology advances.

Statoil ASA (STO, STL.OS), which built its oil and gas expertise in Norway's offshore waters, is stretching its land legs in the U.S., where it seeks to partake of the shale bounty. Like many international oil and gas companies, Norway's Statoil has poured billions into joint ventures with some of the North American independents that in the last decade figured out how to profitably unlock the oil and gas trapped in shale, bankrolling their drilling while hoping to learn some of their techniques. But peering over its partners' shoulders is not enough: Statoil plans to run its own U.S. shale operation in South Texas's Eagle Ford Shale by early 2013, said the company's executive vice president for North America, Bill Maloney.

According to Bloomberg, Petroleo Brasileiro SA, Brazil's state-controlled oil company, may purchase tankers from Brazilian shipyards to export ethanol as the company moves to quadruple foreign sales of the biofuel. The ships would expand a plan to build 42 vessels for Rio de Janeiro-based Petrobras's fleet of tankers as increased oil, gas and fuels production transforms Brazil from an energy importer into an energy exporter, said Sergio Machado, head of Transpetro, the company's transportation unit. Machado expects the first such ethanol tanker, which would likely be a 75,000 metric-ton, Panamax-class fuel tanker treated to resist the biofuel's corrosive effect on steel, to be built by 2011.