Europe

Hotel and restaurant group Whitbread has announced it will create 10,000 new jobs in the UK over the next three years.

The new jobs will come as a result of Whitbread’s rapid expansion of its Premier Inn and Costa Coffee businesses, which already saw the creation of 2,500 jobs in the 2011/12 period.

Whitbread increased the number of Costa Coffee stores in the UK by 158 to 1,375 during the last year, and now has plans for an additional 10,000 Premier Inn rooms.

Premier Oil has awarded a contract to Wood Group PSN for the delivery of integrated operations and maintenance support services to the Balmoral floating production vessel (FPV).

The contract, estimated to be worth around £250 million, will see Wood Group PSN provide managed onshore and offshore operations and maintenance services, including the management of selected procurement and logistics support.

Norway’s Statoil and partner ExxonMobil have made a large gas discovery in the Zafarani exploration well offshore Tanzania. 

Logging results have shown what Statoil is calling a “high impact discovery”, so far proving up to five trillion cubic feet of gas in-place.

The well has encountered 120 metres of excellent quality reservoir with high porosity and high permeability, Statoil said. The gas-water contact has not been established and drilling operations are ongoing.

InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG), one of the world’s leading hotel companies, has announced it will create nearly 3,000 new jobs across its 275 UK hotels over the next three years, including over 1,100 new jobs this year.

IHG, which operates brands such as Holiday Inn and Crowne Plaza, is also launching a new hospitality training Academy in London.

Another tale of “are they or aren’t they” emerged today in relation to a possible alliance of some kind between General Motors and PSA Peugeot Citroen.

It has been widely reported that the two car makers are talking to each other, and have been for some time, but at the time of writing neither company has confirmed this.

Shell Exploration & Production (Shell Bidco) has made an offer of £992.4 million for East Africa-focused Cove Energy.

UK-based Cove's primary asset is its 8.5 per cent stake in the Rovuma Offshore Area 1 in Mozambique, where operator Anadarko has found over 30 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. The Rovuma offshore basin is a frontier exploration area, holding large resources of natural gas reserves suitable for LNG projects.

Wood Group PSN has been awarded a contract extension from Shell in the UK to deliver midstream engineering and construction services to the St Fergus and Mossmoran gas plants.

The £75 million, two-year contract is effective from April 2012 and includes an option for a further two-year extension. The award is a continuation of the previous contract awarded to Wood Group in 2007.

National Grid and ScottishPower Transmission have awarded a contract for construction of the first ever subsea electricity link between Scotland and England & Wales.

The £1 billion contract has been awarded to Germany’s Siemens and Italian cable manufacturer Prysmian.

The major grid upgrade will increase the capacity of electricity flowing between England and Scotland by more than 2,000 megawatts, allowing new renewable energy projects to be developed in Scotland that could power three million homes.

A revitalized General Motors Co. today announced profits of $7.6 billion for the year ending 31 December 2011 after a strong performance in the US, but its European and South American operations are still losing money.

This figure represents a 62 percent increase over 2010 profits of $4.7 billion, despite a loss of $700 million across its Vauxhall/Opel plants in the UK and Germany—although this was an improvement over the 2010 loss of $1.3 billion in Europe.