Tag Archives: oil

CPC increases flow from Kazakhstan to Russia

JAN. 11 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — The Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC), a pipeline designed to transport oil from the Tengiz oil field in western Kazakhstan to the Russian Black Sea coast, said it had increased its output by 7% in 2015, in line with its expansion plans. CPC has now reached a throughput of 42.8m tonnes, up from just below 40m tonnes in 2014. Chevron, Lukoil, Shell, BG and ENI own stakes in CPC. The Tengiz oil field if one of Kazakhstan’s most important oil projects.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 263, published on Jan. 15 2016)

Markets: Tethys spotlight

JAN. 12 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Guernsey-based oil and gas company Tethys Petroleum continues to travel along the bumpy roads of Central Asia. After a lengthy tug-of-war with Nostrum Petroleum over a takeover offer, it finally agreed with a $35m deal with Olisol, an oil investment group in Kazakhstan.

The funds, however, have not yet reached Tethys and at the end of December, the company said it “does not have sufficient funding to meet its requirements beyond next few months.”

In its operation at Tajikistan’s Bokhtar field, Tethys has lost the confidence of Total and CNPC, its partners in the project, after failing to pay its share for two consecutive cash calls.

What Tethys now doesn’t need is a fight with the Tajik government over the Bokhtar licence. The Tajik side says it’s been seven years since the beginning of the exploration and it is now entitled by law to strip 25% of the licensed area from the consortium.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 263, published on Jan. 15 2016)

Azerbaijan’s President puts on a brave face

JAN. 11 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Apparently putting a brave face on an increasingly poor economic outlook, Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev said at a government meeting that the country’s GDP had actually grown last year by one percentage point. He also said that Azerbaijan needed to reduce its dependency on oil, something that most analysts have been urging for some time.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 263, published on Jan. 15 2016)

Azerbaijan finds two bodies in the Caspian Sea

JAN. 4 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Azerbaijan’s emergency ministry confirmed that it had recovered two bodies from the Turkmen sector of the Caspian Sea thought to be those of workers washed overboard during a storm and fire on an oil rig in December. 33 workers died in the fire, the worst offshore oil rig platform disaster since the North Sea Piper Alpha fire in 1988.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 262, published on Jan. 8 2016)

Service companies sign deals with Azerbaijan

DEC. 22-29 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Norway’s Agility, Britain’s KCA Deutag and British-Azerbaijani joint venture SOCAR-Cape all signed contracts with BP and Azerbaijan’s state-owned energy company SOCAR to provide services to off- shore energy projects in the Caspian Sea. These separate deals show Azerbaijan’s reliance on Western technology to operate and service its oil and gas projects.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 262, published on Jan. 8 2016)

Azerbaijani businessman denies accusations

DEC. 22 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Malta-based Oil Transportation and Shipping Services, owned by Azerbaijani businessman Mubariz Mansimov, denied any allegation of its association with the BMZ Group, owned by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s son. Russia accused the BMZ Group of smuggling oil on behalf of the Islamic State. Relations between Russia and Turkey have broken down after a Turkish fighter-jet shot down a Russian fighter-jet over Syria in November.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 262, published on Jan. 8 2016)

ArmOil to build $35m oil refinery in Armenia

DEC. 25 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — ArmOil, a privately-owned Armenian oil company, will finance the construction of the first oil refinery in the country, a move that would make Armenia less dependent on Russian refined products.

The company will pay for the $35m refinery, which would be built in Yeghvard, a town 20 km north of Yerevan.

Karen Chshmarityan, Armenia’s minister of economy, said the deal will include the construction of a storage facility and a small refinery.

“At the initial stage the company will build a storage facility for 4,000 tonnes of oil products and then equip it with a laboratory, and in 2016 the company will build a small refinery,” Mr Chshmarityan said.

ArmOil, owned by a Russian-Armenian group of businessmen, was founded in 2013 and does not publicly disclose company data.

Armenia has wanted to build an oil refinery for more than a decade. From 1999 to 2007, Russian energy company Gazprom said it was considering building a refinery but the plan was scrapped.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 262, published on Jan. 8 2016)

Stock market: Nostrum Oil & Gas, Roxi Petroleum

JAN. 8 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — The winter break has not been too kind to stock prices of oil and gas companies focusing on the South Caucasus and Central Asia. The continued fall in oil prices, now at around $33/barrel, has not stopped yet, which keeps investors worried.

After a rough third week of December, when they lost between 4-6%, Nostrum Oil & Gas and Roxi Petroleum shares picked up again, only to fall back to mid-December levels.

Nostrum’s 15% spike on Dec. 23 was reabsorbed in the first week of January. Roxi shares grew 60% in two days from Dec. 28, but it is now trading back at 8.25p. Tethys Petroleum suf- fered most, as its shares lost 28% .

The two Georgian companies listed in London, Bank of Georgia and Georgia Healthcare Group were hit too. Bank of Georgia lost 8.2% in the past three weeks, closing at £17.87. Georgia Healthcare Group lost 4%, closing at £1.56.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 262, published on Jan. 8 2016)

Lukoil says sanctions hit exploration in Kazakh section of Caspian Sea

ALMATY, JAN. 3 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Russian energy company Lukoil said Western sanctions have damaged its ability to carry out exploration work in the Kazakh section of the Caspian Sea, just as Kazakhstan’s government said it wanted to intensify the search for oil and gas.

Amid an ongoing economic downturn, Kazakhstan’s state-owned energy company Kazmunaigas is looking to boost revenues through new oil and gas projects. In the northern section of the Caspian Sea, Russia’s Rosneft and Lukoil are its main partners.

But Lukoil said Western sanctions had hit its operations.

“We don’t have free available drilling rigs and we cannot import them because of Western sanctions,” Vagit Alekperov, Lukoil’s CEO told Russia-24 in an interview.

Kazakh-Russian consortia explored several fields for oil and gas in the early 2000s but failed to make any major discoveries. Although there were some promising indications that fields held decent reserves, most of the projects were suspended as costs mounted.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 262, published on Jan. 8 2016)

Stock market: Tethys, Nostrum, Tengri

DEC. 17 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Commodities prices keep declining and the industry continues to worry and use caution. This is reflected in the markets, which show the poor performance of Central Asia and South Caucasus focused firms.

Tethys Petroleum (-6% in the past week), Nostrum Oil & Gas (-5.8%) and Roxi Petroleum (-4%) were hit by oil prices plummeting to around $37/barrel.

Industrial and judicial news affected the performance of several miners in the region.

KAZ Minerals closed at 88.5p on Thursday a 7.7% fall in share prices compared to last week. Centerra Gold lost 11% on the Toronto Stock Exchange, closing at 7.07 Canadian dollars on Thursday.

Generally stable Tengri Resources also fell after it announced it was not going to mine the Taldybulak gold and copper project in Kyrgyzstan. It lost 17.4% in one day to close at 3p per share on Thursday.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 261, published on Dec. 20 2015)