Brazil’s Petrobras will cut its spending by 37 percent through the next four years in an effort to tame its enormous $110 billion debt.

“The steel jacket will also be one of the most complex ever built by the industry. Not only will we route the land-based power through the jacket, we’ll also be controlling the subsea water injection and exporting the field’s oil and gas from it,”

The efforts of China to ensure its economic development and preeminence include the creation of the “New Silk Road” - the enormous system of infrastructure mega-projects to stretch from the Pacific to the Atlantic. If completed, it will be the largest infrastructure undertaking ever built. Natural gas features prominently in the plan.

The European Union would find it difficult to reduce its reliance on natural gas imports from Russia, according to industry experts.

Natural gas faces growing competition from coal and renewable energy sources at a time when its potential demand growth is slowing down, an International Energy Agency official said. “The last large contracts for [LNG] were signed in 2014 just before oil prices collapsed. We believe it is still competitive, but there are risks,” said Laszlo Varro, who heads IEA’s gas, coal and power markets division.

New corridors along the Nord Stream natural gas pipeline through the Baltic Sea to European markets should be in service by 2019, Russia's Gazprom said.

Argentina and China have respectively drilled more than 275 and 200 wells targeting shale plays over the past 2 years, providing each country with the potential to significantly increase production of shale gas and tight oil.

U.S. Rig Count is up 2 rigs from last week to 859, with oil rigs down 3 to 628, gas rigs up 5 to 228, and miscellaneous rigs unchanged at 3.

Share sales by US oil and gas companies have slowed sharply in recent months, in a sign of the tightening financial pressures on the industry following the fall in crude prices.

According to a recent report from Swift Worldwide Resources, over 150,000 jobs in the global oil and gas industry have been cut since oil prices began to tumble last summer.