This interview (Arabic video; English audio above) was recorded the evening of 29nov22 as the EU struggled over how low to set the price cap.
Soon, it will be agreed, and will gradually become devastating for Russia.
As new non-Russian oil resources are developed (e.g., in Guyana, Suriname, UAE, Iraqi and other fields) and/or oil fields come back online (e.g., Venezuela, Libya, …), the EU and G7 will feel confident to further lower the price further and further below the price of Brent and WTI crude.
My thanks to Al Jazeera’s Katya Bohdan, producer, and the digital team in Doha (English) for this well done “documentary” featuring my point of view on: “What does Russia’s gaas cur mean for Europe?” I think it is self-explanatory (and its short). Watch it below or directly at the AJ link here. Tom OD.
Here’s an English transcript of my Al Jazeera comments on OPEC+ negotiations and some further remarks on the group’s agreement to raise production. Good evening from Berlin. Answer 1. Well, OPEC-Plus is faced with maintaining a very delicate balance. On the one hand, demand in the Western world is down, its weak, while in the Eastern world, in Asia – in China and India – demand is relatively strong. And this is a complicating matter. At the same time, in supply, in Libya, for example, the oil production is not under the [OPEC+] agreement and has been coming back on the market. OPEC has been doing relatively well, in the last few months or so, of balancing the market. The question is, how to maintain this going forward, with its exports, how to balance supply with demand. But what is appearing is not the big split between Russia and Saudi Arabia that we saw last year in the Oil Price War. Now we have differences … such as we see with the UAE [i.e., versus the Saudis]. The UAE would like, as we have seen, also Russia has said, an increase in production. That would be very difficult for other, more expensive producers to do at this point. Answer 2: Yes. It does. I mean, of course the UAE has been getting a lot of press [about its demand to increase production], … so it is a matter of how serious the UAE is, and how serious the Russians are to want to raise production in some way.
The 24.04 video: Aljazeera asked me about negative prices and we got into storage, Putin’s huge blunder in launching the price war, the fate of US shale, and the dilemma faced by Trump and the Texas Railway Commission on cutting US production: there’s no way to please both the independent US producers and the big US international oil companies. One or the other is going will be very upset. (Note: English audio record replaces original Arabic here. Thanks to AlJazeera for the clip.)
Let me expand a bit on this point I made at the end of the interview: Trump is dithering as the day of reckoning approaches – the day when US oil’s physical storage is full. Then it won’t be just the WTI Nymex futures price going negative overnight, the physical, spot market would go negative and freeze up.
So, either Trump has to invoke national security and use federal powers to order proportional, across-the-board cuts nationally, or the Texas Railway Commission and itsContinue reading →
The Global Barrel 