Nicholas Newman

Northern Macedonian’s Prime Minister Zoran Zaev is expected to visit Athens in early May to sign a treaty promoting a pipeline gas interconnection project linking the two Balkan country’s gas networks.

Following the example of other European gas pipeline operators, Ukraine’s GTS Ukrainy has announced that it will convert its pipeline network to accommodate hydrogen and construct dedicated hydrogen carrying pipelines to achieve carbon neutral targets.

A consortium comprising Dubai’s ENOC (Emirates National Oil Company) Group and Rotary Arabia have completed construction of four new pipelines from the Red Sea port’s Farabi Petrochemicals’ Yanbu facility to the nearby independent storage facility operated by Arab Tank Terminal Ltd. (ATTL). The ATTL facility has a petrochemical storage capacity of around 288,000 m³, spread over 28 tanks.

Nord Stream 2 has been the centre of a long-running dispute between the United States and Germany. Washington has criticised Nordstream 2 for potentially increasing Europe’s dependence on Russian gas but at the same time seeing it as reducing opportunities for US liquid natural gas exports to Europe.

At the start of April, Norwegian energy giant Equinor, together with partners French based Total and Norwegian owned Vår Energi, announced the discovery of oil and gas in the Tyrihans field in the Norwegian Sea.

As part of BP’s net zero corporate objective, the company plans to invest some $1.3 billion in an integrated oil, gas and water handling processing facility in the Permian basin. This is expected to be BP’s largest American-based onshore project investment, since it purchased the $10.5 billion worth of American shale assets from BHP.

China’s newly created independent pipeline contractor and operator PipeChina, has announced the start of construction of the $1.3 billion natural gas trunk line in northern China.

It is some 15 years since commercial sized crude oil deposits were discovered in Uganda near Lake Albert. During Sunday 11 April 2021, in Uganda’s state capital Kampala, Yoweri Museveni , President Samia Suluhu of Tanzania, and Patrick Pouyanne chief executive of the French oil company Total signed off on the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP).

Ireland, like several countries in Europe including Britain, Holland and Germany faces the prospect of declining natural gas production and the need to introduce a zero-carbon energy solution by 2050. The country’s state-owned gas producer and distributor, Gas Networks Ireland is pioneering efforts to replace natural gas with green hydrogen.

It is a year since the Houston based Phillips 66 consortium suspended the Liberty Pipeline project. It was not alone, for much of America’s oil and gas sector, ruthlessly cut new capital spending in response to Covid’s global suppression of demand for oil.