Lebanon is scheduled to begin looking for oil and natural gas today in the eastern Mediterranean's Levant Basin, Lebanese Petroleum Administration Chairman Walid Nasr said. A consortium made up of Total, Eni and Novatek expects to get results from the first offshore exploration well in the next two months, Nasr said.

Halliburton says it has secured a contract to help oil and natural gas company Pertamina carry out a digital transformation aimed at improving drilling performance and production decisions. Pertamina is using Landmark's iEnergy cloud product to manage exploration and production, Halliburton says.

Apache, Apex International Energy, Cheiron and Pharos Energy are among the bidders for Royal Dutch Shell's onshore oil and natural gas assets in Egypt, sources say. Shell is trying to sell its Western Desert assets, which include stakes in 19 oil and gas leases, and instead focus on offshore Egyptian gas exploration.

South Sudan says it aims to increase oil exploration now that a peace agreement has been reached to end the country's civil war. South Sudan will offer 14 oil blocks in a licensing auction by the end of the quarter.

Russell Hardy, the CEO of trading house Vitol, sees US oil production maxing out in the next few years at around 14 million barrels per day. "It takes some 20,000 new wells every year to stand still at current production levels so we have oil production peaking in the new few years because it takes so much operationally just to maintain levels," Hardy said.

Private equity player Kimmeridge Energy Management is looking to spend between $500 million and $1 billion to acquire stakes in US oil and natural gas operators and pressure them to shake up their operations and change their business models to focus on value over growth. "The U.S. E&P industry is in crisis" and the shale sector has become "uninvestable," Kimmeridge said in a white paper.

Scientists say the Mediterranean may have lost much of its water after tectonic plate movement cut it off from the Atlantic Ocean about 6 million years ago, but then regained its levels when the Strait of Gibraltar reopened 5.3 million years ago and caused flooding. An erosion channel under the strait may have been carved during a two-year flood, suggest researchers, who say they found sediments that could have come from floodwaters.

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