S/Arabia’s SEC raises $3.56bn to support Egypt electricity project
Saudi Electricity Company has raised about $3.56bn in financing to support the Saudi Arabia-Egypt electricity interconnection project. Covering a five-year tenor, the $3bn unsecured facility will be obtained from 15 regional and international lenders. It will be used to refinance an existing syndicated facility that was raised in 2017 and is scheduled to mature this month.
The 15-bank syndicate includes Standard Chartered, HSBC, Intesa Sanpaolo, Mizuho Bank, MUFG Bank, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, State Bank of India, Bank of China, Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank, Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank, First Abu Dhabi Bank and National Bank of Kuwait, among others.
Meanwhile, the ECA facility, covering a 14-year tenor, will be used to finance SEC’s Saudi Arabia-Egypt electricity interconnection project. Egypt, the Arab world’s most populous nation, and Saudi Arabia, the region’s biggest economy, signed $1.8bn worth of contracts in Cairo in October to build transmission plants and connect power grids.
The project will have a peak transmission capacity of 3,000 megawatts and will be enacted by three consortia made up of international and regional companies, an Egyptian Cabinet statement said at the time.
Gulf Of Mexico Oil Outages Balloon Beyond Shell
At least two other oil majors shuttered their Gulf of Mexico platforms on Friday following a leak in the Fourchon booster station, shutting down the flow of crude through the Amberjack Pipelines.
On Thursday, Shell halted production at its Mars, Ursa, and Olympus platforms, which can produce 410,000 bpd. Shell did not provide an estimate for when the platforms would resume production.
On Friday, Shell was joined by Chevron, which shuttered Jack/St. Malo (57,000 boepd), Tahiti, and Bigfoot (75,000 bpd) platforms, which also feed into the Amberjack lines. Equinor joined Shell and Chevron on Friday, shuttering its Titan platform—a minor platform in the Gulf of Mexico that typically produces just 2,000 boepd.
The shutdown, which now spans seven platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, comes at a time when the United States is battling high retail gasoline prices and tight crude oil and refined products markets. Already the United States has tapped into its Strategic Petroleum Reserve to the tune of 800,000 and 1 million barrels per day to alleviate the prices at the pump.
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