Sparking fears for the long-term future of the industry, the UK upstream segment is expected to approve fewer than £1 billion in spending on new North Sea projects compared with an average of £8 billion/year over the past 5 years, according to Oil & Gas UK’s 2016 Activity Survey.

Following the path started in 2015, U.S. commercial crude oil inventories have continued to build in early 2016 and are nearing record highs.

The low oil prices are a lucky charm for Iran, because the production costs in Iran are really low and you can't find any other place in the world that has such low production costs. Also, companies that are coming to invest in Iran would have access to both oil and gas reserves.

OPEC launched a price war against U.S. shale and other high-cost producers, including Canadian oil sands and Brazilian deep-water oilfields, in November 2014 by not reducing output despite a global oversupply. Since then, oil prices have plunged by more than half, hitting a 12-year low of about $26 on Feb. 11.

Billions of barrels of oil could be lost completely, left in the seabed without the infrastructure or skills to get it out.

With more or less fanfare, several countries in the region have at one time or another announced their intention to become a gas hub. Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria and Romania have generally been the most vocal, though neither ever provided the specifics of what their respective hub proposal looks like.

“Russia will have to struggle for its market share one way or another,” said Andrey Polischuk, an oil and gas analyst at Raiffeisenbank AO in Moscow. Gazprom is gaining market muscle due to low oil now but may need changes to keep the price in line with competitors when crude rebounds, he said.

“The economy has held up surprisingly well when you consider the stresses on it” that include Western sanctions preventing banks and oil companies from issuing debt and imposing bans on high-tech oil equipment purchases, said Christopher Miller, Associate Director of the Brady-Johnson Grand Strategy Program at Yale ISS. “The reason is that government policies since 2008 have been relatively effective,” he said in a Feb. 18 presentation at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

LNG cannot reach every corner of Europe: there may be a lot of under-used capacity in import terminals in the Iberian peninsula but these are not useful for security of supply in mainland Europe except where they have reloading facilities. There is very little transport capacity overland into France.

Total imports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) by Japan, South Korea, and China, the three largest global LNG importers, all located in North Asia, declined by an average of 1.0 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) (5%) in 2015.

Rosneft's hydrocarbon reserve replacement ratio under the SEC classification amounted to 124%. Following 2015 Rosneft's hydrocarbon reserve life under the SEC classification totaled 19 years.

Oil prices fell 4 percent on Friday, with Brent down a third straight week, as record high U.S. crude stockpiles intensified worries that a plan to freeze world output will do little or nothing to reduce massive oil supplies already in the market.

U.S. Rig Count is down 27 rigs from last week to 514, with oil rigs down 26 to 413, and gas rigs down 1 to 101. Canadian Rig Count is down 16 rigs from last week to 206, with oil rigs down 9 to 109, and gas rigs down 7 to 97.

Global energy demand between 2014 and 2035 is expected to rise 34%, an average of 1.4%/year, with fossil fuels remaining the dominant form of energy over the period.

The world oil market is complex. Governments and private companies play various roles in moving oil from producers to consumers. Government-owned national oil companies (NOCs) control most of the world's proved oil reserves (75% in 2014) and oil production (58% in 2014). International oil companies (IOCs), which are often stockholder-owned corporations, make up the balance of global oil reserves and production. Proved oil reserves consist of the amount of oil in a given area, known with reasonable certainty, that current technology can recover cost effectively. Worldwide proved oil reserves in 2014 were almost 1.7 trillion barrels, and global oil production averaged roughly 93.2 million barrels a day.