The US Supreme Court will hear this Friday an appeal against an intermediate court decision accepting jurisdiction over Argentina and its majority state-owned oil giant YPF, in a case relating to YPF’s 2012 re-nationalization by Argentina, then under the rule of ex-president Cristina Fernandez.
Oil prices jumped as much as 3% on Friday to win back a chunk of the ground they lost in the previous session, but growth in U.S. crude stockpiles and ongoing concerns about the global economy kept markets under pressure.
Petrobras has unveiled plans to invest US$ 84.1bn in deepwater exploration and production projects in Brazil, as well as raise $27bn through asset sales and partnerships by 2023. Around US$ 69bn of the planned investment will be channelled into the development of production in the pre-salt areas. Other key focus areas of investment include refining, transportation, trading, and natural gas and petrochemicals.
Oil prices crashed to new one-year lows on Tuesday, dragged down by a deepening sense of global economic gloom as well as fears of oversupply in the oil market itself.
Brazilian prosecutors on Friday charged two former executives of oil trader Trafigura over allegations of paying at least US$ 1.5 million in bribes to employees of Petrobras. Prosecutors said in a statement that the charges against Mariano Marcondes Ferraz, a former Trafigura top executive, and Marcio Pinto Magalhaes, a country representative, were the first of many to come against the world’s largest oil traders.
Brazil's environmental regulator on Friday denied French oil giant Total a license to drill for crude in five blocks near the mouth of the Amazon river. Regulatory agency Ibama said the license was denied “due to a set of technical problems” identified during the application process.
Venezuela this month plans to import over 300,000 barrels per day (bpd) of refined products to ease domestic fuel shortages caused by hobbled refineries and need to prioritize exports, according to internal documents, reports Reuters.
Argentina's state-run energy company YPF and Malaysia's Petronas agreed this week to invest US$ 2.3 billion in a shale oil project in Vaca Muerta, with a target of reaching 60,000 b/d of oil equivalent by 2022. The investment will be in La Amarga Chica, where the companies have been testing the shale oil potential since 2015 and have spent US$ 550 million to date in the process, YPF said in a statement.
Mexico’s newly inaugurated president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, AMLO, is turning up the heat on foreign oil companies to show results before he holds new auctions.
Thanks to ExxonMobil’s run of success in oil exploration offshore Guyana, the country is on a path to becoming a Latin American powerhouse, Wood Mackenzie said. The super-major announced its tenth Guyana discovery this week, increasing the discovered recoverable resource in its Stabroek Block to more than five billion barrels.