
Argentine President Cristina Fernández met on Monday with her Uruguayan counterpart José Mujica after the pair inaugurated a new vessel belonging to the ferry company Buquebús, (which joins Montevideo with Buenos Aires), in order to discuss matters related to the controversial UPM pulp plant formerly known as Botnia.

Chile's Supreme Court confirmed a freeze on Barrick Gold Corp's suspended Pascua-Lama gold mine but the Toronto-based miner escaped having the project's environmental permit revoked. The ruling dispels a significant uncertainty surrounding the controversial project, which now essentially has to complete a water management system issued by the environmental regulator to likely be re-activated.

Thanks to the shale boom, markets already perceive the trade balance optimizing, energy prices are cheaper than they would otherwise be and we've even cut carbon emissions. And we are only getting started, according Tyler Cowen, New York Times best-selling author and one of the most influential economists of the decade.

Brazil's Petrobras and its Indian partners have made a beautiful oil discovery off Brazil's northeast coast, Sergipe-Alagoas basin, and it will produce a minimum 100,000 barrels of petroleum a day starting in 2018, the company's CEO said on Friday.

Uruguay’s president Jose Mujica anticipated that his intention is to authorize the UPM pulp mill to expand production, as the Finnish company had requested, but conditioned to certain additional environmental measures, which will not be made public until talks with Argentine president Cristina Fernandez on Monday.

Uruguay’s largest pulp mill UPM announced that it will be making final checks of the plant’s equipment in the rest of the week, following on annual maintenance work, but production is not scheduled to resume until the Finnish company receives a reply from President Jose Mujica regarding the output expansion request.

The Brazilian state development bank BNDES is “overbooked” and needs the private sector to step up funding in investments, according to bank president Luciano Coutinho. Lending by BNDES and other public banks has increased six times faster than credit by non-state bank this year, as the government tries to fuel economic growth.

Argentina’s oil and gas YPF and Dow Chemical Co. Argentine unit signed a final accord to invest 188 million dollars to jointly develop shale gas at the country’s Vaca Muerta formation, in the Patagonian province of Neuquen.

Germany’s Wintershall sealed a 150 million dollar unconventional exploration contract with the Argentine province of Neuquén’s owned Gas y Petroleo de Neuquén to search for oil in the Vaca Muerta formation. The agreement could later be extended to 3.35bn.

One of the several hydrocarbons companies operating in Falkland Islands waters expects its next drilling phase to begin in the fourth quarter of 2014 with a minimum of two exploration wells following extensive 3D surveying of southern licences in the Diomedea fan complex adjacent to the Darwin discovery.