Petroleum industry

Greece's sole oil producer, Energean Oil & Gas, has stepped up daily production by about 30 percent since early January, it said on Wednesday, as the debt-ridden country seeks to tap into its limited oil reserves.

Oil prices rose on April 19 as an oil workers' strike in Kuwait nearly halved crude production from the OPEC member, overshadowing bearish sentiment following the failure by oil producers to agree to freeze output levels on April 17. 

Major oil producers gathered in Qatar yesteray for crucial talks on capping production to boost prices, despite Iran's refusal to take part.

Top energy officials from some 15 countries including Saudi Arabia and Russia were at the Doha talks, amid reports a draft agreement was in the works to freeze output at January levels until at least October.

British oil major BP expects flat oil production in 2016 at its Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli (ACG) oilfields in Azerbaijan, where it plans two rounds of maintenance this year, the company's regional head said.

OPEC members and key oil producers from outside the cartel will meet on April 17 in Doha in a bid to stabilize falling crude prices, Qatari energy minister Mohammed al-Sada said on March 16.

Iraq will pay foreign oil companies about $2 billion in remaining arrears for 2015 this April and expects to reach an agreement over contracts by half-way through the year, the deputy oil minister said.

Bulgaria sealed a deal with Royal Dutch Shell on Feb. 23 to explore for oil and gas in an offshore block in the Black Sea in a bid to end its almost total dependence on Russian natural gas.

Oil markets will begin to rebalance in 2017 thanks to falling U.S. production but that decline will prove short-lived as efficiency gains will push U.S. output to new records by the beginning of the next decade, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said on Feb. 22.

"The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent," said John Maynard Keynes (or maybe it wasn't him, but no matter). At any rate, that was the eternal verity the Saudi Arabians were counting on when they decided to let oil production rip - and the oil price collapse - in late 2014.

British energy giant BP on Feb. 2 posted the company's biggest loss in at least 20 years, ravaged by tumbling oil prices, and axed another 3,000 jobs.