Oman is in the news this week with upcoming auction of 11 oil & gas blocks.  France’s Total and Portugal’s Partex both plan to bid. Total is already active in Oman with 4% stake in the country’s largest Oil firm, PDO. (AMEinfo)

Occidental Petroleum announced separately that it will boost production from Oman by 50% to 150,000 barrels per day by 2012.(Upstream Online)

The DME plans to introduce crude oil swaps and options against its benchmark Oman sour-crude in coming months. They are awaiting approval from the US’s CFTC (commodity regulators) before introducing the derivatives. This could give the nascent exchange a catalyst to ramp up trading volumes and potentially could attract other Gulf oil producers to price their Crude oil against DME benchmark. (Bloomberg)

• Clinton ask Saudi to reassure China that it will meet shortfall of Crude Oil from Iran if sanctions are toughened (ArabianOil&Gas)
• Oman increase its oil production by 7.4 % in 2009 to 812,000 bbl per day – beating expectations (largely due to IOCs such as Occidental)
• MDC, a subsidiary of Mubadala (Soverign Investment arm of Abu Dhabi Gov) has taken 75% interest in Malaysian block. (AME info)
• Taqa’s profit plummet by 90% as the company seeks to consolidate its global assets after acquisitive years under previous CEO (the National)

Oman is increasing its output to 900,000 bpd from 810,000 bpd for full year 2009.

ENOC is to start working on upgrading Jabal Ali refinery to convert naphtha to reformate (gasoline compnent) with capacity of 40,000 bpd.  On retail, ENOC is seeking to end petrol price limits in UAE. Currently, retail price is fixed at Dhs 1.37 per liter or Dhs 6.25 per gallon.

Saudi to maintain Feb Oil volumes to Asia in line with OPEC production quota.