Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei approved the attacks on Saudi oil infrastructure, a U.S. government official told CBS, adding that the approval had been granted on the condition that Iran’s involvement could be denied. If what other U.S. officials are saying is accurate, this condition has not been met, however. Earlier this week, a te...
Saudi Arabia has approached Baghdad with a request to buy crude oil from OPEC’s number-two to compensate for its production outage caused by the Saturday attacks, sources who declined to be named told S&P Global Platts. According to one of the sources, Aramco had asked Iraq’s State Oil Marketing Organization, or SOMO, for some 10 million barrel...
The much-touted conversion from coal- and oil-fired power generation to natural gas actually raises the greenhouse effect of energy consumption by around 40 percent because of alarming methane emissions from gas, Berlin-based Energy Watch Group (EWG) said in new study. According to the authors of the study published this week, natural gas has often...
OPEC admitted that demand for its oil over the next few years could be drastically weaker than it previously thought, due to a combination of a weakening economy, rising supply elsewhere, and pressure from climate activists. In its World Oil Outlook, OPEC said that demand for its oil may only reach 32.8 million barrels per day (mb/d) by 2024, a fig...
A Reuters investigation has concluded that an Iranian coalition was behind the September 14 attack on the oil facilities of oil giant Saudi Aramco, with Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei giving the order to attack, according to Arab News, citing the Reuters report released on Monday. The attack came after several secret meetings, startin...
New energy investment in emerging economies slipped last year to US$133 billion, far from the 2017 record of US$169 billion, mostly due to a slowdown in China, BloombergNEF said in its annual Climatescope report on Monday. China, because of is massive share in new clean energy investments globally, was responsible for the majority of the dec...
A reawakened Russian bear is seeking to reassert the former superpower’s clout by extending influence in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Latin America. This has seen Putin’s administration support an assortment of pariah regimes and separatist movements as it pushes to extend its international influence. While much of this has been portrayed by...
An agreement to deepen oil production cuts by 500,000 bpd has put OPEC members at odds with each other as they try to hammer out the individual production quotas. The additional cuts were announced yesterday, after a meeting of the monitoring committee that supervises the cuts. Yet at the time they were only a recommendation, and details had yet to...
As the new sulfur emission rules of the International Maritime Organization are about to come into effect in January, a shortage of refueling barges is causing delays in compliance, Reuters reports. Analysts had expected disruptions ahead of the IMO 2020 rules, but the general opinion was that these would be caused by shippers' slowness in equippin...
There hasn’t been much Permian-centric M&A follow-through from last spring’s buy-out of Anadarko Petroleum by Occidental, (NYSE: OXY). At the time, the sages and pundits were widely predicting an M&A frenzy to carve up the turf. It didn’t happen. The likely reason being that there was so much fall-out from that deal for OXY, that “fear of g...
The Mining Association of Canada (MAC) released its annual Facts & Figures report on Tuesday, saying it is time is for the industry to fulfill its potential as a dominant mining nation. The resource-rich country ranks among the top five countries in the global production of 15 minerals and metals. The industry was valued at $105 ...
With ESG here, and on the minds of boardroom executives in every industry, especially those in energy company boardrooms, what should they be doing? In the growing area of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG), every energy company, right or wrong, good or bad, seems to get lumped in as uncaring about the environment at best, or pegged as envi...
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