Too Soon to Value Nexen / Shell Oil Strike in Eastern Gulf of Mexico

Zacks.com submits: Energy major Royal Dutch Shell Plc (RDS.A) informed Brazil’s oil and gas regulator about the discovery of a new offshore oil site in the country’s Santos Basin.

(Reuters) - Nexen Inc said it did not find oil or natural gas in commercial quantities at its Kakuna exploratory well in the Gulf of Mexico and was abandoning it. The company, which has operations in Canada, the Gulf of Mexico, the North Sea and offshore West Africa, said the well was drilled to a depth of 30,300 feet at a cost of about C$120 million ($120.7 million). The Kakuna well is on Green Canyon block 504 in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico, where Nexen has so far discovered more than 500 million barrels of resources in the Appomattox area. ...

China will almost certainly fail to meet its target of producing 6.5 billion cubic metres of shale gas per year by 2015. Even so, there can be no doubt it is set to become one of the world’s largest shale gas producers over the next decade.

By Stock Croc:Becoming a leaner, more efficient oil and gas company, Chesapeake Energy (CHK) is looking very attractive. The company has been selling off assets to pay down debt and build a considerable chunk of capital.

Royal Dutch/Shell is to go ahead with the world’s deepest offshore oil and gas production facility, pushing the boundaries of industry technology to drill almost three kilometres (1.9 miles) underwater in the Gulf of Mexico. The project go-ahead demonstrates Shell’s confidence in pricey offshore projects despite a recent downturn in oil prices and comes a day after Exxon Mobil Corp said it would be starting on a $4 billion project to develop the Julia oilfield, also in the Gulf of Mexico.

By Michael Fitzsimmons:ConocoPhillips (COP) announced a significant oil discovery yesterday. The discovery, from the recently drilled WR51-2 Shenandoah appraisal well in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico, encountered more than 1,000 feet of net pay in high-quality Lower Tertiary-aged reservoirs.

Trefis submits: BP’s (NYSE:BP) plans to get other parties involved in the Deepwater Horizon project to also pay up was side lined when Transocean (NYSE:RIG) reported that BP is to blame for the largest oil-spill in history. [1] Transocean was the owner and operator of the doomed oil rig in April 2010 and spewed nearly 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

This week, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar announced that the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement has