By Associated Press, Published: May 11<\/p>\n
NICOSIA, Cyprus \u2014 Major oil and gas companies such as Russia\u2019s Novatec, Italy\u2019s ENI, France\u2019s Total, and Malaysia\u2019s Petronas are among 15 firms and consortiums that are seeking to carry out exploratory drilling for gas deposits off southern Cyprus, the island\u2019s commerce minister said Friday, despite Turkey\u2019s strong objections.<\/p>\n
The minister, Neoklis Sylikiotis, said the companies that applied for a license to drill by Friday\u2019s deadline also include ones from Canada, the UK, Norway, Israel, South Korea and the U.S., surpassing the government\u2019s hopes.<\/p>\n
The bids come as the small east Mediterranean island nation is reeling from Europe\u2019s financial crisis. It economy is projected to shrink by half a percentage point of GDP this year, and unemployment is hitting record highs.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve all had great expectations from this licensing round and I can tell you not only have the results not belied those expectations, they\u2019ve exceeded them by far,\u201d Sylikiotis told a news conference.<\/p>\n
via Russian, Italian, French companies among 15 bidding for oil and gas drilling rights off Cyprus – The Washington Post.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Associated Press, Published: May 11 NICOSIA, Cyprus \u2014 Major oil and gas companies such as Russia\u2019s Novatec, Italy\u2019s ENI, France\u2019s Total, and Malaysia\u2019s Petronas are among 15 firms and consortiums that are seeking to carry out exploratory drilling for gas deposits off southern Cyprus, the island\u2019s commerce minister said Friday, despite Turkey\u2019s strong objections. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":54926,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[846,15,211,48,679,42],"tags":[4015],"class_list":["post-53538","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","category-cyprus","category-cyprus-trnc","category-france","category-italy-eu-members-european-countries-english","category-russia","tag-oil-and-gas-exploration"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53538","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53538"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53538\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/54926"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53538"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53538"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53538"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}