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Exxon won’t have to pay a $3-million fine the U.S. Treasury Department imposed on the supermajor for doing business with Rosneft amid a growing load of U.S. sanctions against Russia. The Wall Street Journal reports that a federal judge this week ruled against the fine, which followed the imposition of the first round of U.S. sanctions against Russia after its 2014 annexation of Crimea. According to the ruling, the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control had failed to give Exxon notice of how it interprets the sanctions, which was a violation of the Fifth Amendment. Hot Tip Thousands of recruiters use oilandgaspeople.com to post jobs and find suitable candidates. We are the industry’s most popular job and news site. If you are in the market for a new job you need to have a profile on our site. Sign up or update your existing profile now The reason for the fine was that the Rosneft official who signed the joint exploration contract with Exxon, chief executive Igor Sechin, was on the sanction list even though Rosneft itself was not. Exxon quit the project two years ago after its attempts to win a sanction waiver from Washington failed. Even so, the WSJ notes, the supermajor did not quit its legal fight against the fine. Exxon teamed up with Rosneft on Arctic oil exploration in 2011 and three years later the two announced they had struck oil. At the time, this was the northernmost oil well in the world, with Rosneft’s Sechin expecting the deposit could hold as much as 100 million tons of crude. However, that’s when the Crimea annexation came followed by the sanctions and activity around the Universitetskaya-1 well wound down. Rosneft is still active in the region, however, with drilling plans in place for more deposits in the Kara Sea where the Universitetskaya-1 well was drilled. Exxon, meanwhile, remains a partner to the Russian major in the Sakhalin-1 offshore project, which was exempted from sanctions. The two got embroiled in a dispute started by Rosneft, which claimed the Exxon-led consortium operating the project had unjustly enriched itself, but settled in 2018, when the consortium agreed to pay the Russian company $230 million out of court. Source: oilprice.com

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Petrofac awarded Central North Sea decommissioning contract

  Petrofac has been awarded a well plugging and abandonment contract with leading independent energy company, Hess Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hess Corporation. The agreement includes provision of Well Operator and Well Engineering Project Management services for four wells within the Rubie and Renee fields, 200 km north east of Aberdeen. The wells,

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KCA Deutag Secures New Drilling Contracts in the Middle East, Russia, Europe and Africa

Further to the announcement issued on 18 February, global drilling and engineering contractor KCA Deutag (“KCAD”) is delighted to announce the award of new contracts on the back of strong tendering activity in its land drilling business. These contracts, with a combined value of approximately $54M, are for drilling operations in the Middle East, Russia,

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ExxonMobil, Qatar Bet on U.S. Gas Export with $10 billion Project

ExxonMobil Corp. and Qatar Petroleum are officially moving forward with a $10 billion liquefied natural gas export terminal in Texas, the latest in a series of massive projects designed to send U.S. shale supplies to growing markets across the globe. U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry joined Qatari Energy Minister Saad Sherida al-Kaabi in announcing the

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Equinor Granted Drilling Permit for Cape Vulture Appraisal Wells

The Norwegian Petroleum Directorate has granted Equinor Energy AS a drilling permit for wells 6608/10-18, 6608/10-18 A and 6608/10-18 B, cf. Section 15 of the Resource Management Regulations. Wells 6608/10-18, 6608/10-18 A and 6608/10-18 B will be drilled from the Songa Encourage drilling facility, at position 66°6’9.52″ North and 8°4’23.19″ East. The drilling program for

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Saudi Aramco Gets Bids to Expand Hawiyah Gas Plant

Saudi Aramco has received bids from international engineering firms to expand the Hawiyah gas plant, industry sources said on Wednesday. They said the companies that submitted their proposals, on Sunday, were: South Korean Samsung Engineering, Spain’s Tecnicas Reunidas, Taiwan’s CTCI, Italy’s Saipem, Britain’s Petrofac, India’s Larsen & Toubro (L&T). South Korea’s Hyundai Engineering and Hyundai

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