Premier/Taipan, and Enteq Upstream

WTI $102.20 +18c ; Brent $110.97 -10c ; B/WTI Diff – $8.77 -38c ; Natural Gas $3.82 +4c

Good morning

It’s a quiet morning………………..

High level meetings on the hill last night culminating with a meeting with the President attended by top congressional leaders which made apparently ‘tremendous progress’. Markets are slightly muted as they now want confirmation of progress before they rally any further.

Oil Price

Virtually no movement in the oil price, as above, markets are uncertain about any deal being done and until that happens few big positions are likely to be taken. The Iran talks in Geneva start today but nothing is going to happen straight away.

In the UK as I mentioned last week, the Grangemouth refinery is preparing to shut down as a 48 hour strike is due to start which might restrict petrol and diesel supplies in Scotland and the North East of England.

Although there will be no EIA inventory stats until America reopens the API numbers will still come out later today giving commercial crude inventories, analysts’ consensus is for a build of 2.3m barrels of crude oil.

Premier/Taipan

In an interesting move in East Africa, Premier has acquired a 55% interest in Taipan’s Block 2B in Kenya, leaving them with 45% and the operatorship. Premier are paying Taipan’s working interest for the cost of drilling and testing the Pearl-1 prospect, capped at $13.275m plus its own costs. Premier will also be paying some back costs estimated at $1m and has the option to assume operatorship if there is a development in the future.

The block is a cretaceous rift basin with proven source rock and contains several prospects and leads, the Pearl prospect has an estimated gross prospective resource of 100m barrels of oil. It is believed that the remaining lead inventory is capable of delivering in excess of 500m bbls.

Drilling of the well on Block 2B is expected in 2014 and Taipan has done very well to get a good partner with a keen interest in developing its portfolio in Kenya.

Enteq Upstream

In what could be the shortest trading update on record Enteq has told the market that trading is in line with management expectations. Integration is progressing well and I expect the company to eventually reap the benefit of the investment that has been made recently to strengthen product lines as well as building market presence and develop incremental revenue channels.

We had Martin Perry in recently and whilst the company had a tricky start in the US market at the back end of last year and took time to recover this year I still have confidence that he and his team will eventually repay mine and investors’ confidence. A new broom on the communications front and a more proactive approach to investors mean that this stock is still one to watch.

And finally…

So it’s the final qualifying game ahead of the World Cup in Brazil, at least I hope it’s the last game, another one would be a play-off and we don’t want to go there do we? England can progress by beating Poland and the FA have done the best they can by giving the opponents as many tickets at they can. For Scotland their aim is to win a home game in the group for the first time…….and Wales go to Belgium which will be how you say, tricky and Northern Ireland go to Israel.

In club football, Carlton Cole has rejoinder West Ham on a three month contract so if he scores a goal a month that will be one more than he scored in the whole of last season…..

And it’s all going off at Gillingham as Martin ‘Mad Dog’ Allen was sacked after an awful start for the newly promoted side in unfamiliar Division 1. Continuing with the youth policy, 60 year old Peter Taylor has re-joined the club having previously been manager briefly in 1999.

Laura Robson has split up with coach Miles Maclagan after only four months and a bad run of form.

Neigh, neigh as Badminton and Burghley winning horse Clifton Promise failed a drug test and has been suspended.

And another sad one as Sean Edwards the British racing driver has been killed in an accident in Australia. Sean was the son of racing driver Guy Edwards whom I once met, he was famous for pulling Niki Lauda from his burning car at the Nurburgring in 1976. Sean was currently in the lead of the Porsche Supercup championship.