Europe

Process technology company Escher is building firm and long-standing relationships with the major oil and gas companies. Managing director Yvo Jansen talks to Andrew Pelis about the company’s drive to innovate and expand into new markets.

Exploration firm EnCore Oil has announced that its Catcher prospect, off the east coast of Scotland, may hold up to 300 million barrels of oil—about 150 million of which is extractable.

EnCore is the operator of the Catcher joint venture and holds a 15 per cent stake. Premier Oil holds 35 per cent; Wintershall (UK North Sea) holds 20 per cent; Nautical Petroleum has 15 per cent; and Agora Oil & Gas holds a 15 per cent stake.

The proposed acquisition will expand URS’s infrastructure capabilities in the UK across a range of markets, including rail and transit, transportation infrastructure, and ports and harbors.

Peel Airports owns Liverpool John Lennon Airport, Robin Hood Airport near Doncaster and a 75 per cent stake in Durham Tees Valley Airport (local borough councils own the remaining 25 per cent).

 Liverpool's John Lennon Airport is one of the UK's 10 busiest airports, serving almost five million passengers last year, while Robin Hood Airport, which opened in 2005, is its newest airport, serving more than 850,000 passengers in 2009.

Sixty-five kilometres south of Örebro, in sparsely populated forest land, lies one of Sweden’s oldest mining operations. For 152 years, Zinkgruvan has extracted zinc, lead and silver from this central Swedish location. These days, the business is 100 per cent owned by the Canadian company Lundin Mining, which controls mining operations in a number of European countries as well as a partnership in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

When you look at the list of completed projects on its website, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Technip Iberia (TPI) has single-handedly built the entire industrial part of Barcelona. When I put it like that to Jerónimo Farnós he demurred; but there’s no denying that Technip has had a hand in a very large number of developments over its 38-year history.TPI’s headquarters is in Barcelona where it employs some 250 people; there is a production office in Tarragona employing a further 100 staff; and a small commercial office in Madrid.

Technip Germany is part of the Paris-based Technip Group, a world leader in engineering, technologies, construction and project management for the oil and gas industry.

Blessed with great timing, investment funds and industry smarts, London-based Max Petroleum Plc jumped on a rare opportunity to buy a stake in the oil-rich Pre-Caspian Basin in 2005 and snapped up lucrative oil and gas licenses to 5,212 square miles of land—about the size of Connecticut—in Kazakhstan, a former Soviet republic bordering the Caspian Sea.

How many people realize how commonly airlines actually own just a few aircraft, holding 80 percent or more of their liveried fleet under a five- or ten-year operating lease? GOALis a joint venture company owned by KGAL GmbH & Co. (KGAL) and the German national airline, Deutsche Lufthansa AG (Lufthansa). These are a couple of the most experienced players in the airline industry; the Lufthansa group’s fleet of aircraft is the third-largest in the world, and KGAL has financed well over 300 aircraft in its time.

Germany-based BASF will buy Cognis from its owners—the US investment bank Goldman Sachs and the UK private equity group Permira—at an equity purchasing price of €700 million.

BASF said that it expects the household products additives maker to help it weather economic turbulence. BASF's core chemicals and plastics business currently relies on industries such as automotive and construction, both of which have been hit hard by the global economic crisis.