Located 200 miles south of New Orleans, Louisiana, the Julia field is believed to contain as much as six billion barrels of oil and gas. The agreement between the two companies will see $4 billion ploughed into the field’s development, which Exxon and Statoil claim has a 40 year life span.

On May 8 Canada Fluorspar Inc (CFI) announced the third set of results from the diamond drilling program at its Director Vein on the company's St Lawrence project in Newfoundland, saying it is encouraged by the data that validates the trenching results from last year. 

Few companies can provide a dedicated team-led approach to decommissioning like Optimus. The Aberdeen-based oil and gas engineering consultancy has gone from strength to strength since it launched Optimus Decom in 2010, a subsidiary established to meet growing demand for its engineering services for the decommissioning of on and offshore oil and gas facilities.

Tarcon is a private Harare-based company with operations throughout southern Africa, active in Mozambique and Zambia as well as its home market in Zimbabwe. It employs over 800 people. Although the company formally began operations in its present form in 2001, its foundations go back to 1981 and Tarcon was the result of the merger of a number of earthmoving, plant hire and later, civil contracting companies.

It was during the 1990s that professionals from Antofagasta Minerals Group made the discovery of a new deposit in the Sierra Gorda mining zone. Though it was accepted from the off that developing such an asset, located at the heart of the driest desert in the world, would be a hugely challenging undertaking, the work of thousands of people has contributed to the transformation of a geological resources into a new mining company called Minera Esperanza.

Based in Vancouver, Atico Mining Corporation focuses on finding and developing mid-size high-grade copper-gold deposits in Latin America. The company was floated on the Toronto Stock Exchange just over a year ago by a team that has long and successful experience in the region and includes several members of the Ganoza family which is very much involved in Fortuna Silver which has operations in Mexico as well as their home nation Peru.

The first several months of 2012 were optimistic times for the potash industry, with a recent acceleration in world demand for the product showing no initial signs of wavering. What we now know is that a number of combining factors in the latter half of 2012 would conspire to negatively impact upon the potash market.