The oil subsidy 2
Discounted Russian crude oil keeps flowing to India: “It’s amazing that India is buying at these levels because the summer months – June-July – are the lowest in terms of overall demand due to the monsoon. But it seems the…
Winterings in Trans-Scythia
The Dilettante abides
Winterings in Trans-Scythia
The Dilettante abides
Tag crude
The oil subsidy
The Soviet Union subsidized the economies of some developing nations if they leaned politically towards Moscow and were considered strategically important. Supplying raw materials at discounted prices is one way to provide a subsidy to the buyer. Today, if Indian…
A recognition of reality, not a show of strength
Clara Ferreira Marques wrote yesterday in Bloomberg Elements: Russia’s plan to cut oil production by 500,000 barrels a day next month — roughly 5% of its January output and 0.5% of global supply — was a show of strength. Sorry but no. It was another…
Sanctions on Russian oil: more feasible now than in 2014
At the beginning of 2014, the US was producing about 8 mmbpd of crude, not including natural gas liquids (NGLs). By the end of the year, crude production had surpassed 9,5 mmbpd. When the MH-17 flight was downed over Ukraine…
Oil and algae in California
From time to time, Google Photos sends out “Rediscover This Day” messages, showing users their pictures from the same day a year or years earlier. When you’re grounded and the coronavirus outlook is uncertain, these reminders can be disconcerting: “Will…
Pretend it’s voluntary
News from S&P Global Platts on the upcoming OPEC+ meeting (online): Saudi Arabia and Russia… have insisted that they will only participate [in an agreement to reduce oil output] if the US also agrees to production cuts. A condition unlikely…
An orderly reduction now or panic shutdowns later?
Bloomberg ran this column by Julian Lee on Sunday: Here’s what Saudi Arabia needs to do. At the virtual meeting of oil producers… it should give its counterparts — including those who don’t show up — a clear binary choice…
Nothing like slamming the door on a good deal
A fund manager running a private equity fund out of Luxembourg writes: Regarding what happened on the ground, one can assume that Saudi Arabia had prepared a plan A and a contingency plan before entering the talks. Plan A was…
“At the appropriate time, I will get involved, yes.”
Excerpts from a piece in the Wall Street Journal published on Thursday: Administration and industry officials see diplomatic action as necessary to get Russia and Saudi Arabia to back down from flooding the markets with supply… The U.S. would ask…
Will this glut dry up anytime soon?
How deep has the drop in oil demand been so far? How much deeper can it sink? When and how fast is it expected to recover? Bloomberg quotes various authorities on this: “This global pandemic is something the world hasn’t…
Contamination 3
Reuters sheds a new light on the Druzhba contamination case: The substance that brought one of Russia’s longest oil pipelines to a halt in April was carbon tetrachloride, a lethal chemical meant to be tightly controlled by an international agreement,…
Contamination 2
In the previous post, I said I couldn’t recall anything like the recent contamination incident at Transneft in the past twenty-plus years. I wasn’t exaggerating, it turns out – according to Vitaly Yermakov of the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies…