The Dilettante abides
The Dilettante abides
Emmanuel Macron reportedly said this to Joe Biden a couple of days ago: I had a call with MbZ [UAE leader Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan]… He told me two things. I’m at a maximum, maximum (production capacity). This is…
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…
Saudi Arabia has responded to Russia’s refusal to cooperate by cutting prices and threatening (credibly, it seems) to raise output: The kingdom plans to pump more than 10m [million, not thousand] barrels a day next month while announcing unprecedented discounts…
Ronald Smith, also known as Ron Smith, Citigroup’s oil and gas analyst covering Russia and the CIS, argues in the Financial Times (if you cannot access it, try googling the title and reading Google’s cache) that Russia is likely to…
Almost two months ago, in October 2016, I wrote that Russian oil companies could reduce their daily oil output by slowing down production growth at newly launched fields and by reinvesting less in mature fields, increasing their decline rate to…
OPEC expects Russia to produce at the same average rate in 2017 as in 2016, which means a slight decrease from the current daily output. The IEA acknowledges that, if Russia can continue pumping at the same rate as in October,…
OPEC has updated its forecast for Russia’s 2016 output, raising it by 0.05 mmbpd to 11.04 mmbpd, implying 1.7% growth y-o-y. (OPEC seems to be using a conversion rate of 7.4 barrels per ton while most Russia-watchers use 7.3.) This…
Bloomberg cites Putin supporting a universal oil freeze: “Russia is ready to join in joint measures to limit output and calls on other oil exporters to do the same,” Putin said on Monday at the World Energy Congress in Istanbul.…
On Sept. 15, three days after OPEC published its latest monthly report, I suggested that the cartel’s forecasters might be underestimating Russia’s output and overestimating Kashagan’s in the fourth quarter. From Russian preliminary data, September output looks close to 11.1 mmbpd, up…
One of the field launches I mentioned in the final paragraphs of this post: President Vladimir Putin will watch the launch of the Vostochno-Messoyakha field, jointly developed by Rosneft and Gazprom Neft, via a video link… Russia’s oil output is…