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Date:	Thursday 6th May 2004
Title:	Fatal Accident at south Pars Field Offshore Iran

A man was killed on May 4th while working on the installation of the jacket for one of the gas platforms for the South Pars field off Iran. Statoil is operator for the development of the offshore part of phases six, seven and eight.

The man, a Russian citizen, worked for Seaway Heavy Lifting Ltd, a subcontractor of ISOICO.

ISOICO has the contract for construction and installation of the jackets for the gas platforms.

The accident happened when piles were being loaded from a barge to the Stanislav Yudin crane ship.

Both Statoil and Seaway Heavy Lifting have appointed internal commissions of inquiry to find the cause of the accident. The commissions are expected to arrive at the Stanislav Yudin on May 5th.

Source: Statoil

Date:	Tuesday 11th May 2004
Title:	Brent Crude Cools after Saudi Arabia Demands OPEC Raise Output

Oil prices fell after Saudi Arabia, the world's biggest oil exporter, said an output increase by OPEC was essential to help cool prices, which last week hit 13-year high points. The price of benchmark Brent North Sea crude oil for June delivery shed 85 cents to 36.15 dollars in late trading here.
New York's reference light sweet crude for June delivery lost 88 cents to 39.05 dollars in early deals.

The New York contract hit 40 dollars per barrel on Friday before closing at 39.93 dollars, the highest finish since Oct 1990 when Iraq invaded Kuwait ahead of the 1991 Gulf War. Meanwhile, it emerged that tanker loadings from Iraq's main southern port of Basra have been halved by sabotage of one of the terminal's two feeder pipelines on Sunday. "We have dropped from an average of 80,000 barrels per hour to 40,000," Ali Nasr al-Rubaie, director of Basra's offshore terminal, said Monday. Aside from terrorism fears, crude prices were also being infected by a feverish gasoline market, with fuel stocks low ahead of the summer driving season in the US, analysts said. But comments today by Saudi Arabia's oil minister Ali al-Naimi helped to cool the market. "It is certain that the kingdom believes that increasing OPEC's production ceiling is essential to keep supply and demand balance," Naimi said. "It is apparent that demand, especially that of Asia, has and will continue to increase in the second half of this year. "We in the kingdom estimate the required increase of the (OPEC) ceiling to be no less than one and a half million bpd," Naimi said in a statement released by the Saudi oil ministry.

The minister said Saudi Arabia did "not want to see prices rise to the level that they negatively affect the growth of the international economy or the demand for oil." But the world's top central bankers, meeting in Switzerland on Monday, said the global economy would continue to grow despite a sharp spike in oil prices. "This steady growth is not hampered by the rise of commodity prices or oil prices, even if we have to be vigilant," the president of the European Central Bank Jean-Claude Trichet said after chairing a regular meeting of the G10 group of central bank chiefs.

OPEC member Kuwait meanwhile hailed Saudi calls for increased output. "This position is in line with the stance of the State of Kuwait which had called ahead of the last OPEC meeting in March not to implement a decision to cut production," Kuwaiti Energy Minister Sheikh Ahmad Fahd al-Sabah told the official KUNA news agency. But Commerzbank oil analyst Steve Turner said prices should remain strong. "It's not going to cause a clash in the oil prices given that we still have the tightness in the US gasoline market, which OPEC isn't really in a good position to do very much about," he said. Naimi said in his latest statement that OPEC ministers would discuss the market situation during a meeting of the International Energy Forum in Amsterdam on May 21 and "reach an understanding to increase the production ceiling during the extraordinary OPEC meeting to be held in Beirut" in early June.

Source: AFX News Limited

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