September 2016

State-owned Saudi Arabian Oil Co., known as Aramco, increased its official selling price for Arab Light crude to Asia by 90 cents a barrel, to 20 cents below the regional benchmark, it said Sunday in an e-mailed statement. The company had been expected to raise Arab Light prices by 50 cents a barrel, to 60 cents less than the benchmark for Asian buyers, according to the median estimate in a Bloomberg survey of seven refiners and traders in the region.

Fitch Ratings has announced it affirmed Qatar's Long-Term Foreign- and Local-Currency Issuer Default Ratings (IDRs) at 'AA'. The issue ratings on Qatar's senior unsecured foreign-currency bonds are also affirmed at 'AA'; the Country Ceiling at 'AA+', and the Short-Term Foreign- and Local-Currency IDRs at 'F1+'.

In April, the company said it expected up to 12,000 employees to leave as part of the layoff program.

U.S. Rig Count is down 367 rigs from last year's count of 864, with oil rigs down 255, gas rigs down 114, and miscellaneous rigs up 2. Canadian Rig Count is down 50 rigs from last year's count of 187, with oil rigs down 1, and gas rigs down 49.

“From the viewpoint of economic sense and logic, then it would be correct to find some sort of compromise,” Putin said in an interview in Vladivostok. “I am confident that everyone understands that. We believe that this is the right decision for world energy.”

On the New York Mercantile Exchange, light, sweet crude futures for delivery in October traded at $43.35 a barrel at 0358 GMT, up $0.19 in the Globex electronic session. November Brent crude on London's ICE Futures exchange rose $0.22 to $45.67 a barrel. Week-to-date, both benchmarks were last down by around 9%, the biggest slump since the week of January 10 when prices dropped 11%.

The agreements were signed at the Eastern Economic Forum (EEF) in Vladivostok, Russia by Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin, the president of BP Russia David Campbell and Schlumberger’s regional president Gokhan Saygi.

The country is able to pump as much as 12.5 million barrels a day of oil, he said in comments broadcast during an official visit to buyers in Asia, its biggest market, including China.

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Jawad Kadhim Al Abadi and his Kurdish counterpart, Nechirvan Barzani, have agreed to split the proposed export volume of 150,000 bopd from Kirkuk’s Baba Gorgor and Khabbaz fields between them. On Tuesday, Kurdish news outlet Rudaw also claimed an agreement on Kirkuk oil had been reached.

“Combining CNPC’s operational expertise with BP’s technology and experience, we now expect to leverage the synergies between these blocks. This new PSC clearly demonstrates our continued commitment to invest in projects in China which will deliver long-term value to BP, to our Chinese partners and, most importantly, to the country.”