Crude oil inventories in the United States fell this week by 1.519 million barrels for the week ending March 15, according to The American Petroleum Institute (API), after analysts had predicted a 77,000 barrel build. The API reported a large 5.521-million-barrel rise in crude inventories in the week prior. On Tuesday, the Department of Energy (DoE) reported that crude oil inventories in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) rose by 0.7 million barrels as of March 8. Inventories are now at 362.3 million barrels. Читать дальше...
Pylon-haters beware – the National Grid has unveiled a multi-billion pound plan to overhaul the UK’s energy and electricity framework. The ‘Beyond 2030’ report outlines the need for a £60bn injection to fortify the UK’s embattled offshore wind sector and how it can be used to power the country. It sets out an ambitious target of 86GW of offshore wind by 2035 – more than exists today in the world as a whole. For many, this will mean using electricity generated from the current and planned stock of... Читать дальше...
Pohang University of Science & Technology scientists have developed a catalyst for the urea oxidation reaction, enhancing hydrogen generation efficiency. Professor Kangwoo Cho and PhD candidate Jiseon Kim from the Division of Environmental Science & Engineering at Pohang University (POSTECH) collaborated with the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) to devise a novel catalyst aimed at enhancing the efficiency of reactions using contaminated municipal sewage to produce hydrogen — a noteworthy green energy source. Читать дальше...
In what can only be described as an I-told-you-so moment, a shadow fleet oil tanker carrying sanctioned Russian crude oil was involved in a collision at sea near Denmark, the Danish Maritime Authority said in a Tuesday statement. 15-year-old Andromeda Star, an oil tanker set bound for Russia to load Russian Urals crude oil at the Primorsk port, had the capacity to carry 700,000 barrels of crude oil. The tanker was not carrying oil at the time of the collision. Unlike other countries, Denmark does... Читать дальше...
Via Metal Miner Market sources report that hot rolled coil steel prices in northern and southern Europe continued to decline in recent weeks due to slowing economies in Europe as well as overcapacity. “I’m a little scared about Germany,” one trader told MetalMiner, referring to that country’s current economic situation. Germany’s economy is the largest in the European Union (EU), but projections state the country will grow just 0.2% in 2024. This is a significant decline from an earlier outlook... Читать дальше...
Markets are in the thick of a busy week for central banks with decisions from the US Federal Reserve and Bank of England still to come after the Bank of Japan ended its experiment with negative interest rates. The Japanese central bank hiked rates for the first time in 18 years, bringing its key rate to 0.1 per cent. It also ended its policy of yield curve control. The widely anticipated decision was made following substantial salary increases obtained by employees at several of Japan’s leading firms... Читать дальше...
U.S. oil and gas exploration and production companies spent as much as $234 billion on mergers and acquisitions (M&A) last year—the highest such spend in real dollar terms since 2012, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) said in an analysis on Tuesday. The deal-making of the past year marks a return to the consolidation trend from before 2020, the EIA noted. Between 2020 and 2022, heightened market volatility and uncertainties in demand and supply led to a decline in transactions. But... Читать дальше...
India is set to import in April its highest oil volumes from the United States in 11 months as the stricter enforcement of the U.S. sanctions against Russia are slowing Russian crude flows to the world’s third-largest crude importer. So far this month, three Indian refiners – state-held Bharat Petroleum and Indian Oil Corporation and private refining giant Reliance Industries – have already bought around 7 million barrels of U.S. crude for loading in April, unnamed traders have told Bloomberg. The... Читать дальше...
Supermajor TotalEnergies, another French energy giant, Engie, and U.S. Sempra Infrastructure have announced plans to create a global coalition to support the production and use of e-natural gas (e-NG), a synthetic natural gas produced from renewable hydrogen and CO2. A total of eight major companies from three continents – TotalEnergies and Engie of France, Belgium’s TES, U.S. firm Sempra Infrastructure, and Japan’s Mitsubishi Corporation, Osaka Gas, Tokyo Gas, and Toho Gas – are joining forces to... Читать дальше...
Natural gas prices in the United States plunged 62% last year compared to a year earlier. Prices were driven lower by booming production, where growth substantially outpaced demand growth. The low prices for gas stimulated a surge in U.S. LNG exports, and at home, they prompted a palpable decline in household heating bills—leaving people with a bit more money to spend on other things. It is this last fact, as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in its latest consumer price index, that, according to Bloomberg... Читать дальше...
The biggest power producer in Japan, JERA, is starting this month the world’s first trial of co-firing 20% ammonia in a coal power plant in the first such trial using large volumes of ammonia at an operational electricity generating facility. JERA has been betting on ammonia to decarbonize the Japanese grid, which is heavily reliant on fossil fuels that need to be imported in resource-poor Japan. The power giant said in January that it would conduct demonstration testing of thermal power generation... Читать дальше...
Many crypto skeptics laughed over a month ago when, back on February 5, Standard Chartered analyst Geoff Kendrick predicted that Ether (which was then trading in the low $2000s) would hit $4,000 by May, around the time the Ethereum ETF was to be approved. They weren't laughing when we got there just one month later, and more than two months ahead of schedule. They also laughed when back in January, Kendrick laid out his "high" case for bitcoin ETF accumulation - one which would justify a 2024 year-end... Читать дальше...
National Grid ESO, the UK’s power systems operator, is proposing a plan of $73.6 billion (£58 billion) in investment in the grid to meet growing demand and the rise of renewable power sources. The Electricity System Operator (ESO) published a report, ‘Beyond 2030,’ on Tuesday, which says that the UK would need these investments to accommodate the rise in wind and solar power and an overall rise in electricity demand amid growing electrification and decarbonization in many sectors, including transportation. Читать дальше...
The Biden Administration aims to have crude in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) back up to the levels before the massive sales of 180 million barrels in the past two years, U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said at the CERAWeek energy conference in Houston. The U.S. saw the stockpiles of crude oil in the SPR fall from 638 million barrels at President Joe Biden’s inauguration to just 347 million barrels by the summer of 2023 as the Administration tried to bring down gasoline prices for consumers. Читать дальше...
TerraPower, a company working on small-scale nuclear reactor development backed by Bill Gates, plans to begin construction on its next-generation nuclear reactor in the United States as soon as June, TerraPower’s president and chief executive officer Chris Levesque has told the Financial Times. TerraPower has been developing the Natrium technology for advanced reactors, which features a sodium-cooled fast reactor with a molten salt-based energy storage system. The Natrium demonstration plant will... Читать дальше...
Exxon should be eligible for IRA incentives for a low-carbon hydrogen project expected to be the largest in the world. If it isn’t, the company will probably scrap it, chief executive Darren Woods told Bloomberg. The current IRA distribution eligibility criteria single out only green hydrogen as eligible for federal financial support. Exxon’s project will produce so-called blue hydrogen, which is made from natural gas but involves carbon capture. “If we find the regulation gets heavily influenced... Читать дальше...
Enel has decided to hold off the sale of a power distribution company it operates in Argentina, as it expects the country’s new president to deregulate the electricity market, making the company, Edesur, more valuable. Libertarian Javier Milei has bet on a shock therapy in his attempt to turn Argentina’s economy around and that therapy includes deregulating the electricity market and removing subsidies and price controls that kept electricity affordable for Argentinians but produced losses for Edesur. Читать дальше...
It is not surprising that profits in 2023 at Saudi Arabia’s flagship company Saudi Aramco were lower than in 2022. After all, the average price per barrel of the Brent crude oil benchmark dropped just over 18% over the year – from US$100.93 to US$82.49. The fact that Aramco’s profit drop was nearly 25%, rather than 18%, is also not that uprising, given standard operational variances over and above the straight drop in oil price. What may surprise many is that the company not only continues to pay... Читать дальше...
Riding on the heels of Austria’s largest gas discovery in 40 years by Austrian OMV, junior explorer MCF Energy (TSXV:MCF; OTC:MCFNF) announced on Monday morning another potentially significant find in their maiden drill in the Austrian Alps. On Monday, just days into its first drill in Austria, MCF Energy and partner ADX encountered 115 meters of rich gas shows between 1,452 and 1,567 meters deep at Welchau-1, “with strong evidence of natural fracturing, essential for gas production performance,”... Читать дальше...
Europe’s major oil companies have started to scale back interim emission reduction targets, acknowledging that their priorities now lie with returning more cash to shareholders. And these returns come from the fossil fuel business, not from renewables. The latest supermajor to ease emission targets was UK-based Shell, following in the footsteps of UK peer BP, which had already reduced emission reduction targets in early 2023. Both oil and gas giants reaffirm their commitments to become net-zero energy businesses by 2050... Читать дальше...
Historical data show that to date, a reduction in energy availability has mostly affected the US, European countries, Japan, and other advanced economies. I expect this situation to continue as energy limits become more of a problem. Advanced economies will start looking and acting more like today’s less-advanced economies. The world economy will face a bumpy path in a generally downward direction. In this post, I give an overview of our current predicament. All economies are subject to the laws of physics. Читать дальше...
