Page 18 - AfrOil Week 31 2021

AfrOil NEWSBASE ROUNDUP GLOBAL (NRG) AfrOil

NewsBase Roundup Global (NRG)

NRG Welcome to NewsBase’s Roundup Global as an eventual replacement of the export duties
(NRG), in which the reader is invited to join and mineral extraction tax (MET) that has long
our team of international editors, who provide a served as the primary way that Russia collects tax
snapshot of some of the key issues affecting their receipts from its oil resources.
regional beats. We hope you will like NRG’s new
concise format, but by clicking on the headline GLNG: Tellurian in offtake deal with Shell
link for each section the full text will be available US LNG developer Tellurian announced last
as before. week that it had signed a sales and purchase
agreement (SPA) with Royal Dutch Shell for
AsianOil: Santos/Oil Search merger to offtake from its planned Driftwood LNG export
create new upstream powerhouse terminal in Louisiana. The SPA is the third that
Australia-listed independents Santos and Oil Tellurian has finalised in the past 10 weeks and
Search’s proposed merger, first revealed last brings the company’s total offtake commitments
month, is back on track after Santos compro- to 9mn tonnes per year – covering almost all of
mised over ownership stakes. The two sides said Driftwood’s first phase of 9.2mn tpy.
on August 2 that Oil Search had agreed to Santos’
revised proposal, which would see the former LatAmOil: Another find offshore Suriname
take a 38.5% interest in what is set to become not TotalEnergies (France) and Apache (US) have
just Australia’s largest oil and gas producer but made their fifth discovery at Block 58 offshore
also one of the world’s top 20 producers. Suriname. The partners announced the find last
week, saying in separate statements that they
DMEA: Baiji strike and Nigerian losses had found crude oil in Sapakara South-1, an
Iraq’s refinery at the northern city of Baiji came appraisal well drilled in 850-metre-deep water
under attack again this week when it was struck at a site 4 km to the south-east of the Sapakara
by a rocket. Meanwhile, the state-owned Nige- West-1 discovery.
rian National Petroleum Corp. (NNPC) this
week provided its financial statements for the 13 MEOG: Iraq backtrack and Jurassic bids
months to February 2021, which showed that it Iraq’s Oil Minister said this week that Russian
made a loss in each of those months as refinery oil firm Lukoil was retracting its plan to sell
utilisation remained at 0%. its 75% stake in the technical service contract
(TSC) for the West Qurna-2 oilfield to Chinese
EurOil: Shell boosts investor appeal companies. Meanwhile, state-owned Kuwait Oil
Royal Dutch Shell has continued efforts to boost Co. (KOC) is reported to have set a September 1
its investor appeal, announcing on July 29 that it deadline for bids to construct facilities for Juras-
would buy back $2bn of shares and raise its divi- sic gas production in the north of the country.
dend by 40%. The promise of greater rewards to
shareholders comes after Shell reported its high- NorthAmOil: Crude oil prices boost
est quarterly profits since 2018. second-quarter performances
Oil and gas companies across North America are
FSU OGM: Russia expands profit-based oil reporting improved performances for the second
tax quarter of 2021 thanks to stronger crude and nat-
Russia plans to transfer around 25-30% of its oil- ural gas prices. The results are also markedly bet-
fields to its new excess profit tax (EPT) system ter year on year, given that Q2-2020 saw the peak
by the end of the year, Deputy Finance Minis- of the first wave of the coronavirus (COVID-19),
ter Alexei Sazanov said on July 30. Moscow when much of the world went into lockdown and
launched the EPT system in 2019, envisaging it US oil prices briefly turned negative. ™

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P18 www. NEWSBASE .com Week 31 04•August•2021