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The nation of South Sudan plans to hold an oil licensing auction, inviting oil companies from around the world to bid for 14 oil exploration blocks.  The young country intends to officially launch the tender for the licenses at a conference in the capital city of Juba on October 29-30 with results being declared toward the end of the first quarter of 2020.

On Monday October 7, Occidental Petroleum chartered the Very Large Crude Carrier (VLCC) Maran Andromeda to carry oil to South Korea for a record rate of $13.25 million that is set to depart the United States toward the end of November.  The reasons for the spike in freight rates recently for VLCCs is related to sanctions imposed by the United States on China, which is causing oil shippers globally to scramble to find unsanctioned vessels to transport its crude oil.

The events over the weekend in Saudi Arabia are causing concerns throughout the nation.  The oil installations attacked resulted in the removal of six percent of daily world consumption, which will have an impact on motorists and consumers in the United States as early as today.  The attack on Saudi Aramco’s Abqaiq plant in Buqyaq and the Khurais oil field is the biggest disruption to Saudi Arabia’s oil industry since the early 1990’s.  The pain consumers may feel center around how long it takes normal output from the world’s second-largest oil producer to return.

British Petroleum (BP) announced this week that they are selling their Alaska operations to Hilcorp Energy Co. for $5.6 billion dollars, ending their six-decade existence in “The Land of the Midnight Sun.”  The sale to Hilcorp Energy Co includes BP’s stake in the Prudhoe Bay oil field, the Point Thomson gas field and the Trans-Alaska Pipeline.  The deal makes Hilcorp Energy Co. the second largest Alaska producer, between leader ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobil.  The proposed deal is subject to state and federal regulatory approval but the deal is expected to be finalized in 2020, according to BP.

Halliburton Co. announced this week that it has cut eight percent of its North American workforce as a response to a slump in demand for hydraulic fracturing and have removed unused fracking equipment in the United States and Canada.  The Houston-based contractor and world’s biggest provider of fracking equipment made the decision to downsize personnel after its revenue fell thirteen percent in the second quarter of this year.  Halliburton has 60,000 employees worldwide and although an official number of jobs to be cut was not announced, it will most definitely affect their employees in the natural gas shale field.