Regional News

Bloomberg European nations are far behind Mexico and China when it comes to receiving liquefied natural gas from the US, but the region is making its biggest effort to date to change that. European Commission trade officials will travel to Washington on August 20 to follow up on an energy agreement last month between the Commission’s President Jean-Claude Juncker and ...

Bloomberg Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund is in talks that could see it becoming a significant investor in Tesla as part of Elon Musk’s plan to take the electric car maker private, according to a person with direct knowledge of the fund’s plans. The Public Investment Fund (PIF), which has built up a stake just shy of 5 percent in ...

Bloomberg Some of the latest battery technologies may become obsolete before reaching the market because of the breakneck pace of advances in the industry. Teams of scientists from San Francisco to Shenzhen are experimenting with new chemical processes to improve the traditional lithium-ion cell and find new ways to bottle up electricity for use at another time. Investors in those ...

Bloomberg General Electric Co. is working with bankers on a possible sale of its power-conversion business, people familiar with the matter said, as the fallen manufacturer attempts to regain its footing by slimming down. The unit formerly known as Converteam could fetch about $1.5 billion, below the $3.2 billion GE paid for the assets in 2011, said the people, who ...

Bloomberg State-owned Indian Oil Corp. posted a 50 percent jump in quarterly profit as the margin for converting crude into fuels more than doubled. Net income climbed to 68.3 billion rupees ($992 million) in the quarter ended on June 30, from 45.5 billion rupees a year earlier, the company said in a stock-exchange filing. That compares with the 53.3 billion-rupee ...

Cairo / Emirates Business The Emirates NBD Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) for Egypt, sponsored by Emirates NBD and produced by IHS Markit, contains original data collected from a monthly survey of business conditions in the Egyptian private sector. Commenting on the Egypt PMI survey, Daniel Richards, MENA Economist at Emirates NBD, says, “The positive PMI reading for the first month ...

Bloomberg Fears about global oil supplies have receded after producers pumped more, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), which a month ago warned of a potential shortage. “Concerns about the stability of oil supply have cooled down somewhat, at least for now,” the agency, which advises most of the world’s major economies, said in a monthly report. “We have ...

Bloomberg After partnering for nearly three decades at Australia’s oldest liquefied natural gas export plant, Woodside Petroleum Ltd. and Chevron Corp. are competing to shape the next phase of the country’s gas development. Both are vying to build a pipeline from hundreds of kilometers offshore that will allow them to develop their own fields, as well as let third parties ...

Bloomberg Barry Sternlicht’s Starwood Property Trust Inc. agreed to buy a General Electric Co. energy-finance business for $2.56 billion to expand beyond real estate holdings. The acquisition includes a roughly $2.1 billion portfolio of 51 loans backed by assets such as pipelines, power plants and wind farms, as well as $400 million of unfunded commitments, Starwood and GE said in ...

Bloomberg A clean-power company owned by billionaire Richard Branson’s Virgin Group has taken over a Caribbean solar farm that was damaged last year by Hurricane Maria. Virgin’s BMR Energy unit, which develops, owns and operates clean-energy projects in the Caribbean and Latin America, plans to restore the 4-megawatt farm in St. Croix, the US Virgin Islands, and take over a ...