Murphy Oil Corp said Monday it had encountered noncommercial quantities of hydrocarbons in the first of its three-well exploration campaign offshore Côte d’Ivoire. “A key outcome at Civette is that we confirmed the presence of hydrocarbons in this frontier play – a meaningful success in early-stage exploration”, president and chief executive Eric Hambly said in an online statement. “While Civette did not meet commercial thresholds, the well provided insights that strengthen our subsurface understanding for the potential of the [Tano] basin and inform the remaining prospectivity on the CI-502 Block”. The Houston, Texas-based oil and gas explorer and developer had placed a gross resource potential of 440-1,000 million barrels of oil equivalent (MMboe) on Civette, according to Murphy Oil’s investor presentation on January 7, 2026. The Civette well is in Block CI-502. The company said Monday it would continue with the Bubale prospect in Block CI-709 and the Caracal prospect in CI-102, “both targeting independent plays with significant resource potential”. According to the investor presentation, the gross resource potential for Bubale and Caracal is 340-850 MMboe and 150-360 MMboe respectively. They are scheduled to be spudded this year. The three blocks are among five held by Murphy Oil in the West African country. The five, all in deep waters, are co-owned with Société Nationale d’Opérations Pétrolières de la Côte d’Ivoire, the American company holding 85-90 percent operating interests. The licenses, acquired 2023, cover about 1.5 million gross acres in the Tano basin, according to Murphy Oil. Murphy Oil was scheduled to submit a development plan for the Paon discovery in Block CI-103 to Ivorian authorities by the end of 2025, according to the company’s annual report for 2024. Elsewhere, Murphy Oil has scheduled two more spuds in Vietnam this year, both appraisal wells for last year’s Hai Su Vang oil discovery.

In an EBW Analytics Group report sent to Rigzone by the EBW team on Tuesday, Eli Rubin, an energy analyst at the company, noted that “historic cold launche[d]… soaring NYMEX gas futures”. “Frigid weather is set to reshape the near-term natural gas outlook as Arctic air masses flash across the eastern U.S. and the huge weather demand gain over the MLK [Martin Luther King Jr.] weekend threatens severe market dislocation,” Rubin said in the report. “DTN’s 278 gHDDs for Week 2 presents chances for the coldest weekly gHDD total since February 2021,” he added. “Saturday may reach 45 gHDDs – threatening production freeze-offs as Marcellus temps drop toward 0°F and the Bakken reaches -25°F. Risks are high for Rockies, MidCon, and Texas, but the current outlook suggests limited regional supply losses,” he continued. “Still, spot prices are likely to spike into the weekend. Weather models often misjudge the magnitude and extent of severe cold – and any shifts colder could put more supply at risk,” he said. Rubin went on to state in the report that the “frigid weather pivot comes with speculator short positions at a 14-month high – suggesting further bullish risks as shorts are forced to buy back gas”. The EBW analyst warned in the report, however, that volatility will stay high, and said any weather model warming into mid-February could allow a near-term price spike to eventually soften. Rubin highlighted in the EBW report that, “fundamentally, the immediate-term consequences of cold may be to wipe out the 190 billion cubic foot natural gas storage surplus to five-year norms in mid-January”. “While subject to a broad range of uncertainty depending on the magnitude and expanse of cold – and resulting production freeze-offs – current projections suggest a huge storage draw above 750 billion cubic feet over Weeks

TotalEnergies SE and Bahrain’s state-owned Bapco Energies have launched an equally owned trading platform to sell output from the Bapco refinery in the kingdom to the domestic and international markets. “As a competitive new player in the Middle East, BxT Trading will support Bahrain’s oil industry by leveraging its downstream portfolio for maximizing value and broadening its access to global markets”, said a joint statement online. “Through this joint venture, Bapco Energies will benefit from TotalEnergies’ global expertise in trading and will develop advanced trading, pricing, analysis and risk management capabilities. “With BxT Trading, TotalEnergies is strengthening its trading position in the Middle East, where the company already has trading activities, in addition to its international hubs in Houston, Geneva and Singapore. “This new initiative enhances the trading teams’ responsiveness and agility, reinforcing their local footprint that enables them to better address regional specificities”. Bapco Energies chair Nasser bin Hamad Al Khalifa said, “Through this partnership with TotalEnergies, we are enhancing our global trading capabilities, strengthening our downstream value chain and reinforcing Bahrain’s position as a competitive and trusted player in the international energy markets”. The Bapco refinery has a capacity of 380,000 barrels per day (bpd), increased 42 percent under a “modernization program”, Bapco Energies says on its website. The upgrade included the installation of a hydrocracking unit designed to convert 78 percent of lower-grade feedstock into distillates, which are then refined into high-margin diesel and kerosene, according to Bapco Energies. In its trading and shipping segment, TotalEnergies last year sold 2.28 million bpd of petroleum products to external customers, up from 1.95 million bpd in 2023, according to the company’s annual report. “The activities of Trading & Shipping are focused primarily on serving the needs of TotalEnergies, and mainly include selling and marketing the TotalEnergies’ crude oil production; providing

India is now the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) largest customer of LNG, ADNOC Gas said in a release sent to Rigzone by the ADNOC Gas team on Monday. The company noted in the release that 20 percent of LNG operated by ADNOC Gas will be supplied to India by 2029, revealing that $20 billion worth of LNG contracts were signed in last 24 months between ADNOC Gas and Indian companies. In Monday’s release, ADNOC Gas announced the signing of a sales and purchase agreement valued at between $2.5 billion and $3 billion for a period of ten years with Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Limited (HPCL). The latest agreement was announced during a visit to India by President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, where he met with the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, the release noted. It added that, during the visit, Ahmed Al Jaber, UAE Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology and ADNOC Managing Director and Group CEO, and Vikas Kaushal, Chairman and Managing Director of Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Limited, exchanged the signed contract, “reiterating the importance of the growing relationship between ADNOC, its partners, and customers in India”. The deal converted a previously signed heads of agreement between the two companies into a long-term SPA, the release highlighted, pointing out that the agreement is for the export of 0.5 million tons per annum of LNG. “The milestone agreement represents a further step in strengthening the strategic partnership between the UAE and India, while reinforcing ADNOC Gas’ role as a reliable and trusted supplier of LNG to Asia’s fast-growing markets,” ADNOC Gas said in the release. “India is now the UAE’s largest customer and a very important part of ADNOC Gas’ LNG strategy. The company’s growth is tied to the continued success of India,” it added.   By 2029 ADNOC

JERA Nex BP Ltd is acquiring co-venturer EnBW Energie Baden-Württemberg AG’s (EnBW) stake in the Mona wind project in United Kingdom waters, while the partners dropped the Morgan offshore wind project. Planned to rise in the Irish Sea, the two projects had a potential combined capacity of three gigawatts (GW). Only up to half of that would be pursued under the joint venture between Japanese utility JERA Co Inc and British energy giant BP PLC through Mona, according to separate online statements by JERA Nex BP and German utility EnBW. EnBW said it no longer wanted to proceed with Mona and Morgan after the projects failed to win government support through contracts for difference in the recently completed allocation round held by the UK’s Energy Security and Net Zero Department. “At the same time, offshore wind energy remains an important business field for EnBW as it expands renewable energy capacity”, EnBW said. “By 2030, the installed output from renewable energies is set to be further expanded from the current figure of approximately seven GW to at least 10-11.5 GW. “The current focus is on completing the construction and commissioning of the 960-MW He Dreiht offshore wind farm in the German North Sea this summer. Furthermore, EnBW is developing its 1,000-MW Dreekant project in the German North Sea”. An earlier EnBW statement said that besides the failed bids for contracts for difference, other factors that rendered the projects “no longer economically viable as per EnBW’s standards” included “significant cost increases across the supply chain, higher interest rates and ongoing project implementation risks”. “EnBW is in the midst of the largest investment program in its corporate history”, EnBW said in the earlier statement. “The company plans to invest up to EUR 50 billion [$58.62 billion] by 2030. Due to the wide range of investment

In 2025, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) released a report that jarred many in the business and investment world. This much-discussed report states that, despite investments of between $30 billion and $40 billion in generative artificial intelligence (AI), 95% of organizations receive “zero return.”  While debate has surrounded the methodology and conclusions, the report itself focuses on the two broad typologies of generative AI applications: horizontal and vertical. “Horizontal” AI includes Chatbots, co-pilots that are meant to make me, as an individual contributor, quicker, better, and faster,” said Doug Croy, Data Advisory Lead for 1898 & Co. “The value driven by horizontal AI is going to reflect on only me and how I do my work.”  They are not integrated with work processes, nor are the processes changed or optimized to take advantage of generative AI. The transformative value and measurable ROI of AI, however, come from the implementation of vertical AI, process-aligned and industry-aware solutions that apply AI to workflows and patterns across an organization. Whereas horizontal AI has broad knowledge that can help you write recipes, vertical AI solutions are focused on specific industries, domains, with knowledge of terminology, relationships, processes, logic and accuracy. For example, generative AI can identify text in technical drawings, photos and scanned documents, as well as identify objects such as pumps, valves and other equipment found in a power plant. But reading text or identifying an object is not the same as understanding context, the business process and industry-specific language and challenges.  That’s what distinguishes vertical AI; it not only identifies the object with a name or type but also understands the object’s function, behavior and purpose in relation to other objects or assets in a diagram that represents a system, including equipment hierarchies, asset relationships, and safety considerations.  “What you need