Rosneft has closed a previously announced deal to sell a 5% stake in the Vostok Oil venture to Vitol and Mercantile & Maritime.

Analysts see Oxy's $750 million deal to sell its Ghana assets to Kosmos Energy and Ghana National Petroleum Corp. as a win-win.

Petrobras said it has received a high bid of $1.5 billion for a cluster of onshore assets in Bahia state.

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro said Thursday he wants to privatize state oil company Petrobras amid frustration over rising fuel prices.

Occidental Petroleum has agreed to sell its stakes in two oil fields offshore Ghana to Kosmos Energy and Ghana's GNPC.

Companies are seeking to develop new skill sets through investments — and maybe turn a profit in the process.

Russia's petrochemical leaders, Sibur and Taif, have completed their merger, while Sibur has also agreed on key terms for projects in Kazakhstan.

Lukoil aims to spend billions of dollars on an expansion of its Stavrolen petchems plant in Russia and an additional stake in the prolific Shah Deniz gas field offshore Azerbaijan.

Although big-ticket mergers are likely to slow over the remainder of the year, deal activity is set to remain robust.

For the first time in many quarters, US shale did not claim top billing in quarterly upstream M&A activity. High-value deals in the Australia region claim the top spots: Woodside’s acquisition of BHP’s oil and gas business and Santos’ acquisition of Oil Search. Those deals helped drive overall quarterly upstream M&A value to $43.1 billion. Yet, this quarter showed a slight reduction in US shale consolidation. Big-ticket takeovers were rarer, in favor of more modestly priced asset levels deals. The $9.5 billion cash deal by Conoco for Shell’s Permian Basin assets is the outlier. Our improved Brent oil price outlook to $70/bbl for 2021, close to $80 in 2022 and $75 through mid-2020s, is supportive of M&A.