Commodities

By Our Oilbarrel  Staff Specialist wellhead provider Plexus Holdings has started 2015 with another contract win, securing a £1.5 million add-on order from Brunei Shell Petroleum for three exploration wells. The new contracts covers both high pressure/high temperature and standard pressured wellhead systems and services as an addition to the company’s existing four-year contract with…

By Alastair Ford There’s been quite a lot of change at Caledonia Mining lately, what with a departing chairman, new personnel coming on board and a new plan for the company’s Blanket gold mine in Zimbabwe. But things are starting to settle down now – the plan is in place and the focus is now…

By Alastair Ford For investors battered by the sustained negativity towards junior mining, the headlines around Amara Mining’s Yaoure gold project in Cote D’Ivoire make for comforting reading. The latest upgrade has delivered a 63 per cent increase in the indicated resource, and takes the total resource base at Yaoure to 6.8 million ounces. Combined…

By Amy McLellan A good start to the year for London-listed Gulf Keystone Petroleum, which begins 2015 having met its year-end production target of 40,000 barrels per day from its Shaikan field in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. This has been a long-held goal for the company and, given the turbulent geopolitical backdrop in the…

By Martin Clark Yemen has never been the easiest of places to operate, but many companies do so profitably, and many have been there for a long period of time. Known oil and gas deposits make it worth the trouble, of which there can be plenty of that, despite the country dropping off the map…

  Right at the end of the year Serabi Gold completed on the drawdown of the US$8 million debt finance facility that had been provided to it by Sprott. Sprott doesn’t lend lightly, as anybody who’s been in the mining finance business for more than a day or two will readily appreciate, even allowing for…

By Alastair Ford There’ve been one or two changes at the top in Zimbabwe over the past few months, as the standard periodic shuffling of the deck in regimes like Robert Mugabe’s took place without too much kerfuffle. A senior minister that was ousted claimed that the ruling Zanu PF party was behaving “undemocratically”, which…

By Stewart Dalby CAMAC Energy, which is listed in New York (NYSE CAK) and Johannesburg (CMC), is a full cycle E&P group focused on developing hydrocarbon resources in sub-Saharan Africa. It currently holds nine licences in four countries covering an area of 43,000 sq km (10 million acres) including current production and other exploration properties…

By Amy McLellan The saga of Range Resources has entered a new chapter. The Trinidad-focused E&P, still suspended from trading, is readying plans to begin extended waterflooding to drain additional barrels from its fields. These plans, underpinned by a US$50 million credit facility with China’s Sinosure, could lift production from the Beach Marcelle field to…

By Alastair Ford   If you are a miner with a product to sell, or even if you’re an explorer simply hoping to have a product to sell one day, there seems little doubt that 2015 is opening on a fairly downbeat note.   The gold price remains hidebound at under US$1,200 per ounce, silver…