With Brent crude oil trading near six-year lows, oil explorers have fallen out of favour with investors.

Parkmead, the UK and Netherlands focused independent oil and gas group, has been provisionally awarded three new licences covering three offshore blocks in the UK 28th Licensing Round.

The story of embattled oil producer Afren came to a sorry end today after the company called in the administrators, having been unable to agree a new funding deal with its lenders.

Repsol SA, Spain’s largest oil company, reported a 20 percent drop in second-quarter earnings as lower crude prices outweighed higher refining margins and led to a loss at its upstream operations.

WEIR Group has reiterated its appetite for acquisitions even as it upped its annualised savings target to £85 million and saw half-year profits plunge 40 per cent as a result of difficult oil and gas markets.

THE chief executive of Royal Dutch Shell, Ben van Beurden, has signalled the planned takeover of BG will be followed by a big sell off of North Sea assets as the company prepares to live with a long period of low oil prices.

Oil prices will get no lower, as demand is surging and production going down, said OPEC Secretary General Abdalla Salem El-Badri after meeting Russian Energy Minister Aleksandr Novak.

Iran needs around $100 billion to bring its oil industry back to the level it was five years ago, the country's Industry Minister Mohammad Reza Nematzadeh told Austrian newspaper Wiener Zeitung in an interview published on Thursday.

Pura Vida Energy, an Australia-based oil explorer, has drilled the MZ-1 exploration well in the Mazagan permit, offshore Morocco, to a depth of 4,653 metres within the Lower Cretaceous, without encountering oil.

Any attempt by Iran to sell to China millions of barrels of ultra light crude built up in tankers over the last 2-1/2 years of sanctions is likely to be thwarted by poor refining margins and an outage at a major importer of the oil.