The Saudi-Russian battle for Europe's crude oil buyers intensified this week as Swedish refiner Preem bought its first cargo of Saudi Arabian crude oil in around two decades, trading sources said.

The regulators gave a negative classification to $372.6 billion out of $3.9 trillion in loans impacted by the review, or 9.5 percent of the loans. Classified loans increased 9.4 percent from a year ago.

The worldwide rig count for October 2015 was 2,086, down 85 from the 2,171 counted in September 2015, and down 1,571 from the 3,657 counted in October 2014.

“The efficiency of Japanese investments (alternative to those in Russia) is mostly very low. From what we know in the last 3 yeast Japanese firms faced almost 600 bln yen of write downs (around 6 bln USD) because of bad investments in projects associated with hard-to-recover hydrocarbons in US and Canada, and also because of unsuccessful projects in the North Sea. And this had to be done in a period of high oil prices! De-facto IRR for international upstream projects of INPEX by the end of 2014 was 3.1% (Wood Macikenzie estimates). This is around 4 times less than a standard revenue ratio”.

Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Total SA and BP Plc will retain $8 billion a year in cash by giving investors the option of receiving payouts in shares instead, according to Jean-Pierre Dmirdjian, an analyst at Liberum Capital Ltd. That’s equivalent to about 8.5 percent of total cash and equivalents currently on their books, making the so-called scrip dividend a vital tool as companies curb spending to ride out the slump in oil prices.

Advanced biofuel made from agricultural waste — the so called Holy Grail of the alternative energy industry — will not be competitive with conventional fuel until the oil is back to $70-$80 per barrel, DuPont has said.

Fossil fuels provide more than 80 percent of the energy Americans use every day, according to the Energy Information Administration. The government’s own estimates show that we will need oil and natural gas for decades to come and it’s a critical part of an all-of-the-above energy strategy that makes our country strong.

Kazakhstan's vast Kashagan oil field, the world's biggest oil find in decades, is expected to restart production at the end of 2016, Exxon Mobil Production Vice President John Chaplin said.

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.

"Energy resources are plentiful. Concerns over running out of oil and gas have disappeared," Eyton said at the launch of BP's inaugural Technology Outlook.