TRADES: Petronas has sold a Miri cargo loading in end-September to a term buyer at parity to its original selling price (OSP). Petronas has also sold Bunga Kekwa to a trader at a premium of more than $1 a barrel to dated Brent.

PV Oil may have sold its Dai Hung cargo to a domestic buyer and its Bunga Orkid cargo to an end-user at a premium of more than $2 a barrel to dated Brent, a trader said.

VIETNAM: Vietnam's crude oil output in July fell 14.7 percent from a year earlier to 990,000 metric tonnes, government data released on Sunday showed.

For the first seven months of this year, crude oil output fell 11.3 percent from a year earlier to 7.16 million tonnes, the General Statistics Office (GSO) said in a statement.

The country exported 444,000 tonnes of crude oil in July, down 14.7 percent from a year earlier, the GSO said.

AUSTRALIA: Inpex Corp said on Monday it has begun producing gas at its giant Ichthys field off northern Australia, putting it a big step closer toward shipping its first liquefied natural gas (LNG) cargo from the long-delayed $40 billion project.

"The project expects to begin the shipment of products towards the end of the first half of the current fiscal year," Inpex said in a statement. The first half ends in September.

JAPAN: Japan's biggest electric utilities are firing up old fossil fuel power plants and ramping up others that are already operating, pushing to meet demand as power prices hit record highs amid a deadly heatwave.

Kansai Electric Power, which supplies Japan's western industrialized heartland where the heatwave has been most persistent, has started up two old oil-fired units, with total capacity of 1.2 gigawatts (GW), a spokesman told Reuters.

Tokyo Electric Power the country's biggest electricity provider and the operator of the wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant, has run oil, coal and gas plants at rates higher than their typical maximum capacity, a spokesman said.

Chubu Electric Power, the country's third-biggest utility, sees electricity demand in July and August potentially exceeding initial estimates, President Satoru Katsuno told reporters on July 20.

BRENT-DUBAI EFS

* September Brent's premium to Dubai swaps rebounded from 11-month low to $1.36 per barrel, up 40 cents from the previous session.

NEWS

A 12-hour strike at Total's offshore oil and gas platforms in the North Sea will go ahead as planned on July 30, a spokesman for Britain's Unite the Union said on Friday, adding that no further talks with Total were currently planned.

Japan's biggest electric utilities are firing up old fossil fuel power plants and ramping up others that are already operating, pushing to meet demand as power prices hit record highs amid a deadly heatwave.

French energy group Total said on Friday it had started production at the Kaombo project, which is currently the biggest, deep offshore development in Angola.

Kaombo Norte, the first 'Floating Production Storage and Offloading' (FPSO) unit, was successfully brought on stream and will produce an estimated 115,000 barrels of oil per day, while the second one - Kaombo Sul - is set to start up next year, said Total.