Oil to petchems — flavour of the month
You’re an oil refinery manager, somewhere in Europe. You can sell diesel for $570/t, or ethylene for $1,120/t. Even given higher costs for ethylene, petrochemical margins are looking a lot stronger...
View ArticleOpec losing the Latin beat
Don’t be surprised to find an idle Spanish language interpreter or two along Vienna’s Helferstorferstrasse this week, as Latin America’s sole Opec members are preoccupied with their rocky home fronts....
View ArticleCaracas outruns the barrel counters
Back in the 1990s, Venezuela, like some other Opec countries, used to fudge its crude production numbers to avoid accusations of breaching its Opec quota. Until recently, Caracas was still blurring the...
View ArticleThe ghost of Chinguetti
Whatever your take was on the recent paper on peak oil demand and long-run oil prices, co-authored by BP chief economist Spencer Dale and Oxford Institute for Energy Studies director Bassam Fattouh, it...
View ArticleWaiting for Sverdrup
Whichever way you slice it, the giant Johan Sverdrup field in the Norwegian North Sea is proving a major success for its operator, state-controlled Statoil. The firm now expects the project’s 440,000...
View ArticleHard exit, soft exit
Hard Brexit, Soft Brexit, fudged Brexit – the UK population daily endures the obfuscations and mutual denunciations of a political class unable or unwilling to formulate an exit strategy from the EU....
View ArticleBoom time for scenarios
Any oil-related news must strain to be heard above the tumult of IP Week. It is a distracting few days of networking, back-slapping and conspicuous entertainment. BP’s Energy Outlook rose above the...
View ArticleVaro’s IPO provides no pointers
Varo Energy’s plan to partially list on the Amsterdam stock exchange is an interesting marker for how far the European refining industry has come in the six years since Swiss refiner Petroplus filed...
View ArticleOpec, non-Opec — time to grasp the nettle
Opec and the IEA last week concurred that OECD commercial stocks are closing in on the five-year moving average adopted as a proxy for market balance by participants in the Opec and non-Opec output...
View ArticleTaking back control
Opec used the Joint Ministerial Monitoring Committee (JMMC) meeting in Jeddah today to make a few things clear. It took back control, in the parlance of our time, of the message. An observer this week...
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