TPT September 2012

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Global Marketplace
100 September 2012
Total commenced its activities in Iraq in the 1920s with the
discovery of the Kirkuk field.
In the 1970s, the French company brought the Buzurgan and
Abu Ghirab fields on stream. Since then, Total E&P Iraq has
maintained an Iraqi presence by conducting technical studies
and training local engineers.
› On 7 June, in Oslo, British Prime Minister David Cameron
and his Norwegian counterpart Jens Stoltenberg signed
the “Energy Partnership for Sustainable Growth” that
elaborates an earlier memorandum of understanding that
Norway’s Statoil will invest $27.8bn in developing Britain’s
Mariner and Bressay oil fields in the North Sea.
The Mariner field is believed to hold recoverable resources of
between 300 and 500 million barrels of oil equivalent, while
recoverable resources at the Bressay field are estimated at
200 to 300 million barrels.
Statoil and Centrica – the parent company of British Gas – are
the dominant players in North Sea oil and gas. As partners
they also envisage joint exploitation of the Arctic’s vast energy
riches and cooperation on renewable energy and carbon
capture and storage (CCS), an experimental technology for
trapping exhausts from polluting power plants.
Norway, Europe’s second-biggest gas supplier behind
Russia, meets more than a third of British gas needs by way
of two dedicated subsea pipelines.
Automotive
Even as China’s car sales slow at
home, its low-priced exports to
emerging markets are surging
“Roads in countries like Algeria, Brazil, Iran, Russia, Saudi
Arabia and South Africa are increasingly dotted with cars from
manufacturers like Geely, Great Wall Motors and Chery.”
Chinese companies, all. Keith Bradsher, writing from Beijing
in the New York Times, was making the point that China’s
car exports to emerging markets are booming. These exports
were up 21 per cent in the first five months of this year; in
May, they were up 43 per cent from May 2011. But China is
shipping just a few thousand cars a year to the European
Union, and virtually none to the US.
Mr Bradsher, the Times’s Hong Kong bureau chief, noted
the irony that, for more than a decade, automakers around
the world have been nervously awaiting the day when China
would start exporting sizable numbers of cars to the West.
Now it seems they mistook the real threat. Less affluent
buyers from Santiago to Baghdad are starting to buy low-
priced Chinese cars as alternatives to used cars, motorcycles,
and low-end models sold by the multinationals. (“Chinese
Cars Make Valuable Gains in Emerging Markets.” 5 July)
No matter how you spin it -
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