Dana Petroleum profit rises

LONDON: Dana Petroleum said it had made a significant gas find off the North African coast as it posted a 34 percent rise in annual pretax profit to 191.4 million pounds yesterday. Dana said it estimated that reserves in a well at Anchois in the Tanger-Larache license, about 40 km from Morocco, would be about 100 billion cubic feet. It said it had decided to suspend the well while it decided whether to further explore Tanger Larache, in which it has a 15 percent stake. “This gas discovery is very important as it is the first well in this large under-explored area,” Dana said in a statement.

Output dives at Japan factories

TOKYO: Japan’s factory output and auto production have plunged for a fifth straight month, data showed yesterday, as the government pledged to revive the recession-hit economy with more stimulus spending. As demand for Japanese goods dried up at home and abroad, industrial output from the world’s number-two economy fell more than nine percent in February from a month earlier. The auto industry later released figures showing production had more than halved year on year. The data added to the gloom over Japan’s economy, which shrank at an annualized pace of 12.1 percent in the last quarter of 2008 and is widely believed to be headed for its worst recession since World War II.

SEC to split into 4 companies

ABU DHABI: Saudi Arabia plans to carve out four independent power generation companies from Saudi Electricity Co. (SEC) to encourage more competition, a senior regulatory official said on Monday. SEC, currently 80 percent owned by the government with a float of 20 percent on the Saudi stock market, manages 37,000 megawatts of power generation capacity from some 45 plants. “SEC currently owns generation, distribution and transmission and we would like to see this unbundled. Our requirement is by mid-2010,” Abdullah Al-Shehri, vice governor for regulatory affairs at Saudi Arabia’s Electricity and Cogeneration Authority, told Reuters. The government also plans to carve out two new companies for power transmission and distribution, he said.

ACWA gets $2bn for Rabigh plant

ABU DHABI: Saudi Arabia’s ACWA Power International has secured $2 billion financing for its Rabigh power plant projects, its chief executive told Reuters on Monday. ACWA, a developer of privately financed power generation and desalinated water plants, has secured $1.4 billion of that financing from Saudi banks and the remainder from abroad, Paddy Padmanathan said.” We are working to a financial close before the end of May this year,” Padmanathan said in an interview at a MEED conference in the United Arab Emirates’ capital Abu Dhabi. The Rabigh plant is planned to generate 1,200 megawatts of power per day.