Coal and oil and gas producer Consol has agreed to sell its Consolidation Coal Company subsidiary, which holds five West Virginia coal mines, to Murray Energy for $3.5 billion. Consol aims to whittle its assets down to growth markets – natural gas production and coal for export – as the future of US power generation veers more and more towards natural gas.
Chevron has sold about 1,500 acres in the West Virginia portion of the Marcellus shale to Chesapeake Energy. Chevron, a relative latecomer to US shale, announced it was buying into the Marcellus through the purchase of independent Atlas in 2010. Chesapeake has just finished up a huge round of layoffs, which could entail accounting charges of $95 MM.
Technically this news came about prior to this week, but BP has agreed to terms that allow Chevron to export crude from its Tengiz field in Kazakhstan via the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, which has running well below capacity. Energy Intelligence’s coverage suggests that BP may be under pressure from Azeri president Ilham Aliyev to boost throughput.
ConocoPhillips completed the sale of its 8.4% stake in Kazakhstan’s giant Kashagan field to Kazakh state-run KazMunaiGaz for $5.4 billion. The field finally came on stream several years behind schedule, only to shut down again, twice. ExxonMobil said yesterday during its third-quarter 2013 earnings call that production remains shut in while an investigation is ongoing into the cause of the most recent mishap, which involved a gas leak.
Canadian Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver and Deputy Chairman of the Indian Planning Commission Dr. Montek Singh Ahluwalia signed a “terms of reference” agreement delineating priority areas for cooperation, as well as a memorandum of understanding for oil and gas cooperation. “Deputy Chairman Ahluwalia emphasized that assured energy inputs were a critical guarantee of India’s aspiration of ensuring decades of long-term economic growth.” And Canada needs to market its oil and gas to someone other than the US.
Panasonic has agreed to expand its supply of automotive-grade lithium-ion batteries to Tesla to nearly 2 billion cells over four years to power the Model S and the Model X, which is scheduled to go into production by the end of next year.
