Europe

Norway’s Statoil and partner ExxonMobil have made a large gas discovery in the Zafarani exploration well offshore Tanzania. 

Logging results have shown what Statoil is calling a “high impact discovery”, so far proving up to five trillion cubic feet of gas in-place.

The well has encountered 120 metres of excellent quality reservoir with high porosity and high permeability, Statoil said. The gas-water contact has not been established and drilling operations are ongoing.

InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG), one of the world’s leading hotel companies, has announced it will create nearly 3,000 new jobs across its 275 UK hotels over the next three years, including over 1,100 new jobs this year.

IHG, which operates brands such as Holiday Inn and Crowne Plaza, is also launching a new hospitality training Academy in London.

Another tale of “are they or aren’t they” emerged today in relation to a possible alliance of some kind between General Motors and PSA Peugeot Citroen.

It has been widely reported that the two car makers are talking to each other, and have been for some time, but at the time of writing neither company has confirmed this.

Shell Exploration & Production (Shell Bidco) has made an offer of £992.4 million for East Africa-focused Cove Energy.

UK-based Cove's primary asset is its 8.5 per cent stake in the Rovuma Offshore Area 1 in Mozambique, where operator Anadarko has found over 30 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. The Rovuma offshore basin is a frontier exploration area, holding large resources of natural gas reserves suitable for LNG projects.

Wood Group PSN has been awarded a contract extension from Shell in the UK to deliver midstream engineering and construction services to the St Fergus and Mossmoran gas plants.

The £75 million, two-year contract is effective from April 2012 and includes an option for a further two-year extension. The award is a continuation of the previous contract awarded to Wood Group in 2007.

National Grid and ScottishPower Transmission have awarded a contract for construction of the first ever subsea electricity link between Scotland and England & Wales.

The £1 billion contract has been awarded to Germany’s Siemens and Italian cable manufacturer Prysmian.

The major grid upgrade will increase the capacity of electricity flowing between England and Scotland by more than 2,000 megawatts, allowing new renewable energy projects to be developed in Scotland that could power three million homes.

A revitalized General Motors Co. today announced profits of $7.6 billion for the year ending 31 December 2011 after a strong performance in the US, but its European and South American operations are still losing money.

This figure represents a 62 percent increase over 2010 profits of $4.7 billion, despite a loss of $700 million across its Vauxhall/Opel plants in the UK and Germany—although this was an improvement over the 2010 loss of $1.3 billion in Europe.

The Scottish government has announced that Scotland’s first near shore commercial wave power array has been approved by energy minister Fergus Ewing.

Two new Oyster wave energy converters are to be added to an existing device at the European Marine Energy Centre at Billia Croo, Orkney, to allow operators Aquamarine Power to test the devices as an array.

Each machine has a capacity of 800 KW, bringing the total capacity of the array to 2.4MW.

Netherlands-based NEM has secured an order from Saudi Arabia’s Arabian Bemco Contracting Co. for generators at the PP10 Combined Cycle Power Plant project.

The order is for 40 unfored dual pressure heat recovery steam generators with integral deaerators. The generators are designed with vertical gas flow natural circulation.

African Minerals has received notification from China’s Shandong Iron and Steel Group that the relevant approval has now been received regarding its proposed $1.5 billion investment in African Minerals’ Tonkolili iron ore project.

The approval came from the China National Development and Reform Committee (NDRC), and African Minerals is expecting the remaining government approvals to follow shortly. The closure date for the transaction has now been extended until the end of March 2012.