May 2017 – Page 5

Lebanon’s tender process for offshore
exploration and production stalled in 2013 because political deadlock
left the country with no president for 2-1/2 years and squabbling
between parties prevented the passage of necessary laws. But
late last year, a president and prime minister were chosen. A newly
formed government restarted the tender process in January by passing two
important hydrocarbon decrees and holding a pre-qualification round in
April.

Uncertainty reared its head again when
President Michel Aoun suspended parliament for a month in mid-April,
temporarily blocking plans to extend the assembly’s term with no popular
vote for a third time since 2013 to try to push for electoral law
reforms and to hold a parliamentary election.
But
oil and gas will no longer be subject to political deadlock, the
chairman of the board of directors of the Lebanese Petroleum
Administration, Wissam Chbat, told the third Lebanon International Oil
and Gas Summit in Beirut. “We are decoupled from
the political track, there has been a lot of consensus from all
political parties towards achieving a successful bid round. Everyone is
putting his effort towards achieving that,” Chbat said.

The
delay in development has come at a cost, Chbat told Reuters, as oil and
gas prices have fallen significantly and east Mediterranean neighbors
such as Egypt, Cyprus and Israel have been developing their sectors. “In 2013 we had better dynamics for the industry, better prices for oil and gas and better conditions,” Chbat said. The
Lebanese government has estimated with a probability of 50 percent it
has 96 trillion cubic feet of natural gas reserves and 865 million
barrels of oil offshore, but the true size of the reserves cannot be
known until exploration begins. “There is much more than the local market needs and a big portion of it would be for export,” Chbat said. Chbat said 60 targets had been identified as potential reservoirs.

Macron to become next French president after beating back Le Pen and her populist tide

adminMay 7, 2017UncategorisedComments are off for this post

Emmanuel Macron and Brigitte his Wife

By Griff Witte,, James McAuley and Isaac Stanley-Becker
May 7 PARIS — France on Sunday shrugged off the siren call of right-wing populism that enchanted voters in the United States and United Kingdom, rejecting anti-E.U. firebrand Marine Le Pen and choosing as its next president Emmanuel Macron, a centrist political neophyte who has pledged to revive both his struggling country and the flailing continent. The result brought to a close a tumultuous and polarized campaign that defied prediction at nearly every turn, though not at the end. Pre-election polls had forecast a sizable Macron victory, and he appeared to have delivered, with projections issued after polls closed showing him with around 65 percent of the vote. A downcast Le Pen conceded defeat, telling her demoralized supporters in Paris that the country had “chosen continuty.” Meanwhile, a raucous celebration of Macron backers was getting underway outside Paris’s Louvre Museum. The outcome will come as a major relief to Europe’s political establishment, which had feared a Le Pen victory would throw in reverse decades of efforts to forge continental integration. But it instantly puts pressure on Macron to deliver on promises made to an unhappy French electorate, including reform of two institutions notoriously resistant to change: the European Union and the French bureaucracy.

At 39, the trim, blue-eyed and square-jawed Macron will become France’s youngest leader since Napoleon when he is inaugurated this weekend, and his election caps an astonishing rise.

With a background in investment banking and a turn as economy minister under a historically unpopular president, he may have seemed an ill fit for the anti-establishment anger coursing through Western politics.

But by bucking France’s traditional parties and launching his own movement – En Marche, or Onward — Macron managed to cast himself as the outsider the country needs. And by unapologetically embracing the European Union, immigration and the multicultural tableau of modern France, he positioned himself as the optimistic and progressive antidote to the dark and reactionary vision of Le Pen’s National Front.

Le Pen, 48, has long sought to become the first far-right leader elected in Western Europe’s post-war history. Sunday’s vote frustrated those ambitions, but is unlikely to end them.

By winning around 35 percent of the vote, she nearly doubled the share won by her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, in the 2002 election, the only other time the National Front’s candidate has made it to the second round. The result seemed to cement the party’s long march from the political fringe to the center of the nation’s unhappy political discourse, if not the pinnacle of its power.