Company news in brief

Petrobras wants a 40% stake in Galp’s mega oil block in Namibia, director saysBrazil’s Petrobras is expected to seek the entire 40% stake of Namibia’s Mopane oil and gas exploration block put up for sale by Portugal’s Galp, a director at the state-run oil firm said on Monday.



To operate the oil field, Petrobras would need the full 40% stake, said Exploration and Production Director Sylvia dos Anjos on the sidelines of the ROG.e oil and gas event in Rio de Janeiro.“Operating with less than 40% is very bad... (Galp) offered the operation, and no one operates with less than 40%,” Anjos told journalists.



In July, the executive told Reuters that Petrobras had made a non-binding offer in the bidding process opened by the Portuguese company that would make it the operator of the field.



But so far there has been “no progress” in the process, she said on Monday.



“We know Brazil very well, we also know Africa very well. So, naturally, if we go somewhere abroad, Africa is a good place,” she said.



-REUTERS







Italy’s Eni plans to start exploration in North Africa’s Ghadames basin in 2025Italy’s Eni considers Libya a key country for upstream activities and plans to start exploration in the Ghadames basin next year, the energy group’s head of North Africa and Levant said on Monday.



“We have never stopped looking at Libya as a crucial region for oil and gas production,” Martina Opizzi said during a panel discussion on Libya’s energy sector organised in Rome by Energy Capital & Power.“We estimate that there are still resources to be discovered and we are also planning offshore exploration in the near future,” Opizzi added.



Oil exports at major Libyan ports were halted last month and production curtailed across the country amid a standoff between rival political factions over control of the central bank and oil revenue.



Production started to recover in the first half of September, but the dispute on the central bank has not be resolved.



-REUTERS







Google, Volkswagen partner on smartphone AI assistantAlphabet’s Google is providing key capabilities for an artificial intelligence assistant for Volkswagen drivers in a smartphone app, part of Google’s strategy to win business by offering tools to build enterprise AI applications.



Consumers can ask Volkswagen’s in-app assistant questions like “How do I change a flat tire?” or point their phone cameras at vehicle dashboards to receive relevant information.The AI assistant draws on Google’s Gemini large language models, programs that can understand and generate predictive responses to human language, and cloud computing capacity.



The VW tool was designed by adding data such as Volkswagen owner’s manuals and YouTube videos on vehicle maintenance to Gemini.



Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian told Reuters that the product required overcoming technical hurdles to multimodality, the ability to process different data types such as text, images and videos.



“The problem looks superficially simple, but it’s technically very complex,” Kurian said. “Most people think what we built is a speech-to-text translation system that then looks up a manual. Absolutely not.”



The AI assistant is free and available to about 120,000 owners of Volkswagen’s Atlas and Atlas Cross Sport models. It will roll out by early next year to other cars from model year 2020 and later.



-REUTERS







Boeing expects disruption 2-3 weeks beyond end of strike, says RyanairBoeing has told major customer Ryanair tab that production is likely to be disrupted for two to three weeks after the end of the current strike, Ryanair Group Chief Executive Michael O’Leary said on Tuesday.



Furloughs at Boeing began on Friday for thousands of employees in Washington State and Oregon, after more than 32,000 workers went on strike the previous week, halting production of the U.S. planemaker’s best-selling 737 MAX and other jets.“Boeing are telling us that the strike will delay aircraft deliveries by the length of the strike plus two or three weeks,” O’Leary told a news conference, estimating the strike would last two to four weeks.



He said Ryanair had been assured by Boeing that the timing of the delivery of 30 737 MAX jets due by next June would not be affected if the strike ended within three to four weeks.



“We’re not sure, though, that we necessarily believe that but we have no choice other than to work with Boeing once the strike is over to help them to increase production and catch up the three, four, five, six weeks of delays.”







-REUTERS