US Growth Revised Down As Rig Count Falls

...rch 2015’s record of 5.67mn b/d this month, although August projections had it achieving this last month. This was due to downward revisions to 2017 output from the Eagle Ford shale formation of southern Texas which was hit by Hurricane Harvey late last month (though the downgrades are also to pr...

What Embargo? Qatar Products Exports Hit Two-Year High

...e lowest since 2009, and domestic demand of 230,000 b/d had more than doubled since 2010. Despite the earlier outages, exports ought to breach 500,000 b/d for 2017 for the first time since 2013. Crude oil exports also rose in July to a four-month high of 496,000 b/d. The upshot is that total Qa...

Dubai Breaks Solar Capacity, Power Pricing Records With CSP Project

...70 Current Capacity 28.83 Projects Awarded:                                                                           13.57 Adwea (2017) Al-Mirfa CCGT (Ga...

Rosneft Plans Key Gas Pipeline To Unlock Kurdish Exports to Turkey

...creasingly competitive Turkish market. Turkey imported 45.4bcm of gas in 2016, of which number one supplier Russia provided 24.5bcm (54%). Imports are on course to soar to 55bcm in 2017, with Russian supplies growing to 29bcm, though Russia’s market share (53%) is broadly steady (see chart).  The ca...

KRG Receives Chevron Boost

...200 b/d at its Shewashan field over 2017. But while it completed a 10,000 b/d early production facility and a fourth well last quarter, output languishes at around 1,100 b/d due to water-cut problems....

Iran Signs For $10bn Chinese Credit, Eyes A Further $25bn

...int projects (MEES, 1 September). Iran is among the Middle East’s main suppliers of crude to China, with exports averaging 612,000 b/d in the second quarter of 2017, although Russia and Angola have recently been top suppliers, followed by Saudi Arabia (MEES, 28 July). Chinese energy companies have be...

Bahrain Taps Debt Market For Record $3bn

...gative reviews in recent months. It is therefore paying considerably higher rates on the bond than its fellow GCC states. S&P lowered its assessment of Bahrain to BB-, three notches below investment grade, in December 2016 and furthermore added a negative watch on 2 June. “At the end of February 2017...

Oman Oil $1bn Loan

...er Libor with the firm flagging it up as a “competitive new source of funding [which] will enable us to reduce reliance on government funding, so [the government] can redeploy resources to other areas of the economy” (MEES, 1 July 2016). Faced with a gaping 2017 budget deficit of OR3bn ($7.8bn) ca...

US Shale Oil Output (Mn B/D): Set To Break 2015’s Record This Month, Though The Latest Figures For 2017 Have Been Revised Down

Abu Dhabi Ramps Up Offshore Drilling But Targets Remain Elusive

...19. But first oil has been gradually pushed back, initially into the second half of 2017 and now into early 2018. Individual aspects of the project continue to get delayed. UK firm Petrofac was awarded a $500mn EPC contract in 2013 for SARB package 3, to be completed by April 2016. But Petrofac’s 2015 re...

Egypt’s Gas Output: Has It Turned A Corner?

...derlying decline). The additions, which equate to 8% of current output, are good news for Cairo as it fights to overcome a gas deficit before its two key expansion projects, the BP-led 5 tcf West Nile Delta and Eni’s 25 tcf Zohr come online in late 2017. Annual Egyptian gas output peaked at 6.07bn cfd in...

Abu Dhabi Looks To Break Dubai’s Solar Cost Record

...wea aims to sign a power purchase agreement with the winning consortium in the first quarter of 2017. While Adwea did not list the bidders, reports say Japan’s Marubeni and China’s Jinko Solar submitted the lowest bid. Although Adwea was the first Middle Eastern utility to develop a large-scale so...

Aramco Output Policy Under Scrutiny Ahead Of Algiers

...ter both the IEA and Opec have released more pessimistic market outlooks. The IEA now sees supply exceeding demand in every quarter of 2017, while Opec sees a large supply surplus for 2017 as a whole. Even if the gains to Opec output that the IEA has factored in to its forecasts fail to materialize, su...

Iraqi Finance Minister Sacked, Deepening Political, Financial Crisis

...th Iraq on drafting the 2017 budget. MP Najibah Najib, a member of the parliamentary economic committee, said on 18 September that the IMF had told Iraq to increase the oil price assumption in the first draft from a pessimistic $35/B to $43/B for 2017, with crude oil exports projected at 3....

Islamic Finance: A Young Industry Put To The Test

...eir assets by 12% in 2014 but this fell to 7% in 2015, according to a report published by S&P Global earlier this month (see chart 1). S&P Global predicts this slowdown will persist in 2016 and 2017, with growth stabilizing at around 5%. S&P cites two key factors as acting as a brake in 2017: the im...

Qatar Taps Debt Market

...e budget was almost balanced in 2015, a fiscal deficit of 5.3% of GDP is projected in 2016 ($8.7bn) and 2.2% in 2017 ($4.1bn), before recovering to near balance in 2018. The QNB estimate for the 2016 deficit is almost half the $17.8bn projected by the Ministry of Development Planning and Statistics (ME...

Kuwait Subsidies Row Hampers Efforts To Cut Record Deficit

...an its neighbor’s $17.8bn shortfall (see chart and MEES, 9 September). Under the budget law, passed in July, Kuwait is set to run a budget deficit of KD8.65bn ($28.7bn) for the financial year ending 31 March 2017. This rises to KD9.68bn ($31.9bn) after a further KD1.02bn ($3.4bn), 10% of re...

Cyprus And Israel Gas Going Nowhere… For Now At Least

...pointed PM – see p15) that he expects Egypt to receive Cypriot gas by 2017 (MEES, 11 September). Cairo has also been involved in the discussions between the partners in Israel’s 22tcf offshore Leviathan gas field (Noble 39.66%, Delek 45.34%, Ratio 15%) and BG, regarding the import of gas to the LNG te...

Kuwait Awards First Utility-Scale Solar Plant

...KUWAIT Kuwait Awards First Utility-Scale Solar Plant Kuwait has embarked on its first utility-scale solar power project, which it aims to connect to the grid by December 2017. Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research (KISR) has awarded Spain’s TSK a contract to build the 50MW Al-Sh...

Bahrain Plans Advance

...tional Oil and Gas Authority (NOGA) later opted for a less ambitious target of 360,000 b/d. Even the revised plan is about two years behind its original schedule: MEES reported previously that the expansion would be executed in two waves, with new and replaced units coming online between 2017 and 20...