Russia’s OJSC Rosneft has entered a deal with BP PLC to dissolve their Ruhr Oel GMBH (ROG) joint venture as part of a plan by the companies to restructure their refining and petrochemical businesses in Germany.

“The advent of [more sellers of] LNG is another challenge of the gas market,” Adeli said and noted that the U.S. has utilised modern technologies to produce gas from shale, so that the country has been turned from a gas importer to an exporter. Australia, another OECD country with no interest in joining organisations that could be seen as cartels, is already an LNG exporter and its output is rising sharply over the coming few years.

Next year Georgia plans to increase the volume of natural gas it imports from Russia by 25.2% against 2015 up to 250.5 mcm. According to the natural gas balance for 2016 approved by the Georgian Energy Ministry, it plans to import 65.9 mcm of commercial gas from Russia. Georgia will receive 184.6 million cub.m. (down from 7.7%) from Russian gas transit to Armenia, for which Georgia gets 10% in volume.

“The latest leg down in activity has led us to again evaluate our staffing levels against expected activity. Following which, we will further right-size the organization based on the activity outlook for 2016,” said Patrick Schorn, Schlumberger’s president of operations, at a speech on Tuesday in New York.

“I think, Iran can become a major gas supplier to the Persian Gulf and regional markets, but European LNG markets are a tough competitive place for Iran."

Germany will strive to ensure that all this remains under the competence of the German authorities, so if we can do this then opportunities for external meddling will be limited.

Gabriel explained that he would ensure that construction of the pipeline would remain legal in the eyes of the German authorities. Gabriel also made it clear that Brussels should have limited involvement with the project.

Nigeria's government has approved the payment of 413 billion naira ($2.1 billion) to oil marketers as outstanding payment for fuel subsidy claims, the state-run Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) said.

He gave the warning in a statement as Schlumberger reported third-quarter earnings per share that were 48 per cent below the equivalent period of 2014, but slightly above analysts’ expectations.

The business environment deteriorated further in the third quarter. However, the cost reduction actions we took in previous quarters and the acceleration of our transformation program enabled us to protect our financial performance in what is shaping up to be the most severe downturn in the industry for decades. As a result of our actions, we have been able to deliver pretax operating margins well above those seen in any previous downturn and we have continued to generate significant liquidity with free cash flow of $1.7 billion in the third quarter, representing 170% of earnings.