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State-held China National Coal Group Corporation (ChinaCoal) has signed a 5-year contract to supply 180 Mt of thermal coal to seven power utilities. Starting from 2019, ChinaCoal will provides coal to seven national utilities, including Guangdong Yuedean Group, Jiangsu Guoxin Group, Shenzhen Energy Group, Zhejiang Energy Group and Greenland Energy Group.

Prices will be adjusted monthly using CNY535/t (around U$S77/t) as a base price during the 2019-2021 period, while prices will be negotiated between the contractual parties based on market trends for the 2021-2023 period.

Two weeks ago, ChinaCoal already signed a similar contract to supply China’s top six centrally-administered state-run power utilities (Datang Group, Huadian Group, China Resources Power Holdings, Huaneng Group, State Power Investment Corp and SDIC Power Group) using the same pricing policy.

ChinaCoal expects to sign additional mid-term and long-term coal supply contracts with other utilities soon, in line with the government’s strategy to ensure coal supplies at stable prices. The company is a major domestic coal producer with 63 mines spread across several provinces and autonomous regions such as Shaanxi, Inner Mongolia and Jiangsu. 41 mines are in operations and 22 under construction, with a total production capacity of 288 Mt/year. In 2017, the company sold 129 Mt (-2.3% on 2016).

Algerian state-held oil and gas company Sonatrach has completed the purchase of the 198,000 bbl/d Augusta refinery in Sicily (Italy) from ExxonMobil’s subsidiary Esso Italiana. The transaction was announced in May 2018 and also includes three fuel storage terminals and related pipelines in Augusta, Palermo and Naples (Italy).

French nuclear equipment supplier Framatome have signed a CAD19m (US$14m) Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Canadian utility Bruce Power for the modernisation of the Bruce A and Bruce B nuclear units as part of the Bruce power plant life extension programme.

Global oil and gas company ExxonMobil has made a new discovery at the Pluma-1 well offshore Guyana and has consequently increased its estimate for the Stabroek block to more than 5 Gboe, up from the previous estimate of 4 Gboe. This is the second estimate increase in a year as the resource level amounted 3.2 Gboe at the beginning of 2018.

Global oil and gas company Shell expects to start producing LNG at its 3.6 Mt/year (or 4.8 bcm/year) Prelude floating liquefied natural gas (FLNG) facility in Western Australia by the end of 2018. The project was launched in 2011 and suffered from long delays. The FLNG facility moored in Australia in August 2017.

The Minister of Energy of Indonesia announced that the Merakes offshore gas field in the East Sepinggan PSC (Makassar Strait, East Kalimantan) will begin gas production in 2021 at an initial rate of 155 mcf/d (4.4 mcm/d) and then raise to a peak output of 391 mcf/d (11.1 mcm/d).

State-run refiner Kuwait National Petroleum Company (KNPC) has announced plans to invest US$25bn in new downstream projects over the next 20 years. This will encompass in particular the construction of a new refinery in order to bring the country’s total refining capacity to 2 mb/d by 2035 from the current 762,000 bbl/d.