Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
Last Sunday, Forbes wrote about Russian oil producers being forced to cut production, not because of the OPEC+ deal but due to an unforeseen disruption: After buyers in Europe discovered that $2.7 billion worth of oil they had purchased from…
As mentioned in this comment thread on White Sun of the Desert, the question, “Was the Iraq war about oil?” deserves to be answered in the negative if “about oil” means “about unprecedentedly lucrative contracts for Exxon and Halliburton.” It’s not the…