Occidental Petroleum is considering a sale of its $20 billion natural gas pipeline operator Western Midstream Partners, anonymous sources told Reuters on Tuesday. The move would ease Occidental’s substantial debt burden, which has reached $19 billion as of December 31, in part due to its costly acquisition of Anadarko. Occidental also has agreed to purchase CrownRock for $12 billion, although the FTC has recently delayed the approval of that acquisition. Currently, Occidental owns 49% of Western Midstream, a master limited partnership. Читать дальше...
Via Metal Miner After almost a year of sideways movement, the Global Precious Metals MMI (Monthly Metals Index) broke its trend, declining by 4.71%. Despite the break in sideways movement for precious metal prices as a whole, most individual commodities still lack strong bullish or bearish movement as they move through Q1. Most gold and other precious metals investors saw their hopes for the Fed lowering interest rates sooner than later dashed. This clearly impacted precious metals markets, particularly gold. Читать дальше...
Tajikistan’s existential project to build the colossal 335-meter-high Roghun hydropower dam is proceeding apace, but costs are spiraling, and to a level that is making it hard to see where the government is going to find the funds needed to finish the work. To complicate matters for Dushanbe, this is happening against the backdrop of calls from environmental watchdogs for international development lenders to pause the allocation of any future funds to Tajikistan pending a fresh assessment of the project. Читать дальше...
Ghana’s much-delayed natural gas import terminal is nearing the finish line and is expected to be complete by the end of this year, the country’s oil regulator said on Tuesday. The LNG pipeline and storage network and import terminal, owned by Tema LNG Terminal Co., is already years behind. Ghana’s National Petroleum Authority CEO Mustapha Abdul-Hamid said on the sidelines of an energy conference in Cairo that Ghana had signed a gas supply agreement with Equatorial Guinea LNG, majority-owned by Marathon Oil Corp... Читать дальше...
Rates for very large crude carriers (VLCCs) transporting oil from the Middle East to China have risen to a three-month high of $66,600 per day as insurance costs spike amid the Houthi attacks on Red Sea vessels. In the fourth-quarter of last year, rates for VLCCs, which carry around 2 million barrels of oil, were averaging around $21,000 per day, according to Freight Waves, citing data from Clarksons. In the third-quarter of last year, day rates averaged $8,700. For March, Bank of America says it... Читать дальше...
Iran's so-called axis of resistance is a loose network of proxies, Tehran-backed militant groups, and an allied state actor. The network is a key element of Tehran's strategy of deterrence against perceived threats from the United States, regional rivals, and primarily Israel. Active in the Palestinian Occupied Territories, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, the axis gives Iran the ability to hit its enemies outside its own borders while allowing it to maintain a position of plausible deniability, experts say. Читать дальше...
Russia has sent its first cargo of its flagship Urals crude grade to Venezuela in five years as tougher U.S. sanctions on Moscow’s oil exports and Red Sea shipping disruptions prompt Russians to seek “friendly” buyers of its crude further away from home. The supertanker Ligera has already arrived near Amuay Bay off Venezuela, after loading at least 1.7 million barrels of Urals crude in ship-to-ship transfers off the southern coasts of Greece in the Mediterranean in January, according to tanker-tracking... Читать дальше...
For some time now, we’ve seen the race to develop non-fossil energy technology heat up, most emphatically in the nuclear arena. Large engineering firms have declared their intent to build modular reactors and smaller start-ups have declared they would operate prototype fusion reactors within years, not decades. We would rather bet on other possibilities, three especially. All are seemingly far-fetched, but perhaps less so than convincing people to live next door to a first-of-a-kind nuclear reactor. Читать дальше...
The Amsterdam Court of Appeal rejected on Tuesday Russia’s final argument in an appeals case against an arbitration award in which Moscow has to pay $50 billion to the former shareholders of Yukos for deliberately bankrupting Russia’s biggest oil firm in the early 2000s and prosecuting its CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky. The former shareholders of Yukos and the Russian state have been dragging the case through various courts in the Netherlands for over a decade. Former Yukos owner and critic of the Kremlin... Читать дальше...
University of Edinburgh scientists have solved a decades-long puzzle and unveiled a near unbreakable substance that could rival diamond, as the hardest material on earth. Experts say the breakthrough opens doors for multifunctional materials to be used for industrial purposes including solar panels and photodetectors, protective coatings for cars and spaceships, and high-endurance cutting tools. The report about the successful production has been published in Advanced Materials. Researchers found... Читать дальше...
Russia appears to have complied in January with its pledge to reduce crude oil exports by 300,000 barrels per day (bpd) this quarter, anonymous sources with knowledge of Russian energy ministry data, which is not public, have told Bloomberg. At the latest OPEC+ meeting at the end of November, Russia said it would deepen the export cut to 500,000 bpd in the first quarter of 2024 – with May and June 2023 being the reference export levels for the cut. The cut this quarter will consist of reductions... Читать дальше...
The Biden Administration will soon allow year-round sales of E15, gasoline with higher ethanol content, but only from 2025, to avoid potential regional spikes in gas prices ahead of the presidential election in November, sources with knowledge of the talks have told Reuters. The Administration is prepared to approve by the end of March a request from Midwest governors – whose states are some of the battleground states in the presidential election – to allow year-round sales of E15, gasoline with 15% ethanol content. Читать дальше...
Global oil supply is sufficient now, but natural declines at oilfields mean that the world would need to find a Saudi Arabia every two years to offset these production drops, Saudi Aramco’s chief financial officer Ziad Al-Murshed has said. Due to the natural decline in operating fields, as many as 6 million barrels per day (bpd) of global oil production is being lost every year and needs to be replaced, Al-Murshed said at the Saudi Capital Market Forum 2024 in Riyadh. The world is down to 3%... Читать дальше...
Global oil demand rose by more than 500,000 barrels per day (bpd) in December from November, for the eighth monthly record in 2023, the latest data by the Joint Organizations Data Initiative (JODI) showed on Tuesday. Rising demand in Asia more than offset declines in the United States and Europe in the last month of 2023, said JODI, which collects figures reported by individual countries. According to JODI’s database, oil demand rose by 541,000 bpd in December compared to November. The month-on-month…
Goldman Sachs, Macquarie, and some hedge funds have boosted physical trading and options trades in uranium amid soaring prices, as many countries look to increase nuclear power generation to meet their climate goals while reducing the need of fossil fuel imports. Goldman has been increasing trade in physical uranium and has created a derivative of uranium trading by writing options on physical uranium for hedge funds, sources at hedge funds and the trading industry familiar with the deals have told Reuters. Читать дальше...
Exxon has warned the European Union that it will leave and take billions of dollars in climate investment with it unless Brussels makes it easier to spend those billions on transition-related projects. The Financial Times cited the company today as saying that there was way too much red tape in the EU and it took too long to get a project going, which prompted the supermajor to consider spending its $20 billion in decarbonization investments for 2022-2027 elsewhere. “When we make investments, we’ve... Читать дальше...
North Dakota oil companies are likely to increase their production modestly this year, the director of the state’s Department of Mineral Resources, Lynn Helms said this week, citing industry executives. According to these, production should grow by between 10,000 barrels daily and 30,000 bpd, local media reported. “We should see one more drilling rig, maybe two more drilling rigs, in 2024. Somewhere between 10,000, 15,000, maybe twice that much in terms of oil production, so we should hit that 1.3... Читать дальше...
A 3.8-million-ton liquefaction train at BP’s Tangguh LNG plant in Indonesia has been shut down for a week now due to technical problems. This is according to Upstream, which cited local media as saying the liquefaction train at the 11.4-million-ton facility had been shut down for a week now. This has not yet had an impact on global prices but if the shutdown extends, it will affect Indonesia’s exports. The train, which is the newest one at the Tangguh facility, entered into operation last year and... Читать дальше...
One of the warmest winters on record in the United States has created a natural gas glut, dragging benchmark gas prices to their lowest levels in three decades and prompting producers, who were pumping at record rates, to scale back drilling activity. The front-month U.S. benchmark price at the Henry Hub settled on Friday at its lowest level since 1995 – except for a few days during peak pandemic in 2020. Record domestic natural gas production has also added to the glut, but now some of the major... Читать дальше...
Earlier this month, French researchers reported the largest flow of natural hydrogen in a mine in Albania. One of them referred to it as “a Jacuzzi.” New Scientist, which carried a report on the discovery, said the deposit could give scientists a clue about where to look for more natural hydrogen. Because it is urgently needed. “Most hydrogen is likely inaccessible, but a few per cent recovery would still supply all projected demand — 500mn tonnes a year — for hundreds of years.” This is according... Читать дальше...
From the moment the U.S. unilaterally withdrew from the ‘nuclear deal’ (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) with Iran on 8 May 2018, it has been on the defensive in the Middle East, as analysed in full in my new book on the new global oil market order. The withdrawal, rather than a renegotiation of the deal from a position of power as it was still in force and keeping Iran at least vaguely in check, opened the way for a dramatic expansion of Chinese and Russian influence across the region. This... Читать дальше...
Last week, the International Energy Agency reported that global oil demand growth is losing momentum, with demand growth clocking in at 1.4 mb/d in January, down from 2.8 mb/d in 3Q23 to 1.8 mb/d in 4Q23. According to the IEA, the expansive post-pandemic demand growth phase has largely run its course. Thankfully, falling supply is expected to counter slowing demand growth with non-OPEC supply by the U.S., Brazil, Guyana, and Canada expected to come in at 1.6 mb/d this year compared to 2.4 mb/d in 2023. Читать дальше...
A state environmental agency in Kazakhstan has fined an oil company in the west of the country $780,000 over a prolonged fire at one of its fields last year that caused one of the largest emissions of methane in history. The ecology department of the Mangystau regional government said on February 19 that methane concentrations at the Buzachi Neft-operated Karaturun field exceeded permissible levels by 480 times. The alarm over the leak was raised by geo-monitoring firm Kayrros SAS, which reported... Читать дальше...
