Houston. Abu Dhabi Oil Refining Co. (Takreer) let a $623 million contract to GS Engineering & Construction Corp. for a pipeline project that will connect Abu Dhabi's two refineries with various terminals in the emirate.

Bozoi.Tethys Petroleum Limited (TSX:TPL) today gave a brief update on its operations in Kazakhstan focused on its oil exploration and appraisal program. The AKD03 (Dione) exploration well is currently at a depth of 2,823 metres (in what is interpreted to be the middle Jurassic sequence) and casing has been run.

Hanoi. Hoang Long Joint Operating, operator of Block 16-1 in the Cuu Long Basin offshore Vietnam, announced that the Te Giac Den appraisal well, TGD-2X, encountered hydrocarbons in a clastics sequence at approximately 4,450 meters measured depth.

Houston. Engineering services company Halliburton announced it was awarded a contract from Italian energy company Eni to start work at the Zubair oil field in Iraq.Halliburton said it had started work on the multimillion-dollar contract at the southern Iraqi oil field already. The company said it would work on as many as 20 wells at the field.

Moscow. Russian companies will supply about 70 percent of the required oil at market prices for a joint refinery project involving China's CNPC and Russia's Rosneft, China's Energy Minister Zhang Guobao said on Tuesday.

Bagdah. Sterling provided the following update on its activities: Sangaw North Exploration Well. The repairs to the Sakson drilling rig have now been completed and the rig has resumed operations. Sterling's plan is to continue testing the prospectivity of the Sangaw North #1 exploration well previously identified from the wire-line log data and drilling shows over the open-hole interval of 1,450m to 2,395m.

Hyderabad. Hardy O&G announced its fourth successive gas discovery in the exploration block KG-DWN-2003/1 (D3) of NELP-V. The well KGV-D3-W1, the fourth exploration well in this block, was drilled by Transocean's semisub Discoverer 534 to a total measured depth of 3,501 m at a water depth of 1,653 m.

Jakarta. Indonesia has demanded 2.4 billion dollars in compensation from a Thai oil company for damages related to a spill off the northwestern coast of Australia last year, a minister said Tuesday.