SHALE GAS IN EUROPE: WE DON'T KNOW WHAT'S DOWN THERE

The US shale boom is connecting markets and changing the way oil and gas is bought and sold, according to BP’s trading unit.

Total SA and its partners will use a record 16 ice-breaking tankers to smash through floes en route to and from the Arctic’s biggest liquefied natural-gas development.

U.S. oil and gas companies have been an engine of growth through much of an otherwise lackluster economic expansion, providing steady employment, solid wages and fierce competition for workers across wide swaths of the country.

U.S. oil drillers pulled rigs this week as crude traded below $60 a barrel for the seventh straight day.

The main outcome of Putin’s visit to Turkey was the announcement that the $40 billion South Stream gas pipeline project would be cancelled. The effects of this cancellation on Russia and Turkey differ, even though the project was interpreted as a rapprochement of their strategic visions.

Over and over again, they keep insisting on their Third Energy Package, which the Russian leaders refer to as ‘a very harmful document’, and want Gazprom to unbundle its gas supplying, transporting and marketing businesses; share pipeline space with other gas producers; obey independent regulators and transmission operators; and drop manipulations with prices.

Shale gas was supposed to be Ukraine’s ticket to greater energy independence from Russia. Chevron Corp. (CVX)’s decision to pull the plug has smashed those hopes.

Israel made another discovery off its coast. The newly discovered field, Royee, may hold up to 3.2 Tcf of natural gas according to a statement made by the Israeli partners in the field Ratio and Israel Opportunity who hold respectively 70%, and 10% stakes.

America’s oil and gas boom was enabled by a huge pile of cheap financing.