French oil and gas major Total is still in discussions with Indonesia’s state-run oil and gas company Pertamina for the latter to take a stake in the country’s Mahakam gas block off Borneo Island, Total told Gas Matters Today on Thursday.

French engineering company Technip announced it has won a €35 million ($48.1 million) contract to supply four sub-sea tie-ins for the Nord Stream pipeline to deliver Russian gas to Germany under the Baltic Sea.

A total of 67 companies submitted more than $1 billion worth of bids for the latest US Minerals Management Service's (MMS) Gulf of Mexico oil and gas License Sale 213 held this week in New Orleans, a substantial increase over the 2009 sale. The sum of all bids received totalled $1.3 billion.

Turkmen president Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov said his government can meet Russian demands for gas imports, the Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said following a meeting in Ashgabat.

The Argentinean president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, will meet her Bolivian counterpart next week to update the natural gas contract signed between the two countries in 2006, and increase gas supplies to Argentina to 27.7 MMcm/d, up from around the 5-7 MMcm/d currently agreed.

French oil and gas major Total has launched the development of the Laggan and Tormore gas fields in the offshore frontier region of the West of Shetland, in the UK North Sea, the company said on Wednesday.

The idea that the Nord Stream pipeline is purely commercial is "complete nonsense", according to Dieter Helm, professor of energy policy at Oxford University.

The Gate terminal consortium is close to finalising its first LNG supply deal to feed its 12 Bcm/y import terminal currently under construction at the port of Rotterdam. Denmark’s DONG, one of the capacity holders, has committed to buy 1 Bcm/y (0.71 mtpa) of gas from Spain’s Iberdrola for ten years from the end of 2011.