Energy Blast – Dec 8, 2009

India’s Atomic Energy Commission has signed a deal with Rosatom to increase future nuclear energy cooperation, with the possibility for the latter to build more nuclear reactors at India’s Kudankulam power plant.  Rosatom is the first company to sign such a deal with India since it lifted a ban on importing nuclear technology last year.  Total says that a final investment decision on Russia’s giant Shtokman gas field will not be made before the end of the year.  On the vested interests pressuring the delayed Rusal IPO: ‘One of the problems is that someone pretty powerful in Russia has been told it is going to happen, so they have been desperately trying to make it happen,‘ quotes the FT.  Gazprom says it is considering the possibility of supplying liquefied natural gas to the U.S. via Mexico.  Lukoil’s profits suffer from low crude prices.  Royal Dutch Shell has pulled out of a proposed $9bn refinery project in China’s Guangdong province due to ‘strategic and commercial considerations‘.  Russia ‘owns one of the largest stocks of credits to offset carbon emissions‘, but it is the country most unwilling to pay to combat climate change, according to data from The Economist, which is pessimistic on the prospects for the Copenhagen summit: ‘There is all but universal agreement that the negotiations will not end in a new protocol, or a binding extension of the old protocol. What they might provide is the outline of a deal on most of the important issues that could be turned into a legal protocol early next year; Copenhagen could, though, provide considerably less than that.‘