Category:

Oil Futures Slide; Nymex Drops Below $100/Bbl

Crude-oil futures extended overnight losses in Asian trade Thursday on bearish U.S. inventory data that sent the U.S. oil benchmark below the $100 a barrel mark. On the New York Mercantile Exchange, light, sweet crude futures for delivery in September traded at $99.67 a barrel at 0430 GMT, down $0.60 in the Globex electronic session. September Brent crude on London’s ICE Futures exchange fell $0.22 to $106.29 a barrel. Overnight, Nymex lost 70 cents a barrel and Brent lost $1.21 a barrel. U.S. oil stockpiles fell by 3.7 million barrels in the week ended July 25, compared to market estimates of a 1.8 million-barrel decline, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said Wednesday. U.S. refineries continue to operate at peak summer levels, but poor U.S. refining margins especially on the Gulf coast may soon lead to run cuts or early maintenance by end-August, Societe Generale said. Lower […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
Category:

WTI Drops Below $100 as U.S. Fuel Supplies Rise

West Texas Intermediate dropped for a fourth day, slipping below $100 a barrel, as the dollar headed for its biggest monthly gain against the euro since last February, curbing the appeal of the commodity. Brent decreased in London. Futures fell as much as 1.2 percent in New York to the lowest since July 15. A stronger U.S. currency often dims the appeal of using dollar-priced commodities such as crude for protecting against inflation. WTI also fell after data yesterday showed U.S. gasoline supplies rose to the highest level in four months. The U.S. is considering further punitive measures on Russian business to deter President Vladimir Putin’s support for separatists in east Ukraine. “The U.S. dollar is starting to push higher, that weighs on commodity prices including oil,” Jens Pedersen, an analyst at Bank A/S in Copenhagen, said by e-mail. “Sanctions on Russia have not had an effect on current […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
Category:

Natural-Gas Prices Fall Again as Supply Overwhelms Demand

Natural-gas prices dropped slightly Wednesday as weather forecasts show little potential for demand growth into mid-August. Prices for the front-month September contract settled down 3.8 cents, or 1%, at $3.786 a million British thermal units on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Prices closed within 4 cents of the eight-month low closing price the market set on Monday. Natural gas has now lost value in eight of the past 10 sessions, resuming a fall that took a brief respite Tuesday in the hour before the August contract expired. Analysts had warned that Tuesday’s rally might be short-lived, tied to expiration, and that traders would return to focusing on a bearish supply-demand dynamic. Weather forecasts have been unseasonably cool for weeks, showing little potential for demand to keep up with record supply. Without air conditioners running and using gas-fire electricity, producers have turned record production from unconventional […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
Category:

Kurds react to U.S. oil cargo

The federal government of Iraq can’t win its claims in the U.S. court system against Kurdish oil exports, the Kurdish natural resources minister said Wednesday. "The federal government cannot win, because our crude is legally produced, shipped, exported, and sold in accordance with the rights of the Kurdistan region as set forth in the Iraqi constitution," Minister Ashti Hawrami said in a statement . The Iraqi federal government filed a petition in a U.S. court in Texas against a shipment of Kurdish crude oil parked off the coast of Texas. The court in turn called on U.S. Marshals to seize the oil should it enter U.S. territorial waters. U.S. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said the vessel containing about 1 million barrels of Kurdish oil, United Kalavyrta, is anchored outside U.S. jurisdiction. "Our policy position remains the same, which is that we believe that oil should be transferred through […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
Category:

Kurds Rebut Iraq’s Claim to Crude Oil Cargo Off Texas Coastline

Iraq ’s semi-autonomous Kurds reasserted their right to sell $100 million of crude on board a tanker off the Texas coastline after the government in Baghdad persuaded a U.S. judge to order the cargo’s seizure. The Kurdistan Regional Government wrote to the U.S. court claiming “misrepresentations” by the central government, it said in an e-mailed statement. The letter was written after Iraq’s government filed a complaint in a Houston federal court alleging that the Kurds “misappropriated” more than 1 million barrels of oil from northern Iraq. Magistrate Judge Nancy Johnson yesterday authorized marshals to seize the cargo on the tanker while the dispute is resolved. The ship, the United Kalavryta, is about 60 miles from Galveston, Texas and can only be seized should it enter U.S. territorial waters, she said. The KRG will seek compensation in any court where Kurdish oil sales are challenged, Ashti Hawrami , KRG minister […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
Category:

Fighting in Libya threatens Western efforts to help its democracy

Three years after Western powers helped Libyan rebels overthrow dictator Moammar Gaddafi, they have at least temporarily abandoned efforts on the ground to bolster Libya’s foundering democracy. On Wednesday, France evacuated its embassy in Tripoli, where warring militias have traded rocket and artillery fire over the past two weeks in the worst violence in the capital since Gaddafi’s ouster. French ships moved diplomats and French and other European citizens across the Mediterranean to Toulon, just days after U.S. diplomats left by road for Tunisia and then traveled to Malta, where they have set up an embassy-in-absentia. Although Britain has not formally suspended operations at its Tripoli mission, it has removed all but essential personnel and advised all citizens to leave the country. The growing turmoil marks a major setback for a country that just two years ago held its first free elections in four decades. What many Western officials […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
Category:

Armed men blow up Yemen's oil pipeline halting crude flows

Armed men blew up Yemen’s main oil export pipeline on Wednesday, a local official said, halting crude flows and disrupting an important source of revenue for the impoverished state. Yemen’s oil and gas pipelines have repeatedly been sabotaged by insurgents or tribesmen since anti-government protests led to a power vacuum in 2011, causing fuel shortages and slashing export earnings. Earlier on Wednesday, Yemen raised fuel prices in an attempt to ease the burden of energy subsidies on its state finances. Sanaa earned just $671 million from exporting crude oil in January-May, down nearly 40 percent from a year earlier, as a result of the frequent bombings. The latest attack happened in the Wady Obaida area of the central oil-producing province of Maarib, halting the flow of crude to the Ras Isa oil terminal on the Red Sea, the local official said. The Maarib pipeline carries around […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
Category:

Armed men blow up Yemen’s oil pipeline halting crude flows

Armed men blew up Yemen’s main oil export pipeline on Wednesday, a local official said, halting crude flows and disrupting an important source of revenue for the impoverished state. Yemen’s oil and gas pipelines have repeatedly been sabotaged by insurgents or tribesmen since anti-government protests led to a power vacuum in 2011, causing fuel shortages and slashing export earnings. Earlier on Wednesday, Yemen raised fuel prices in an attempt to ease the burden of energy subsidies on its state finances. Sanaa earned just $671 million from exporting crude oil in January-May, down nearly 40 percent from a year earlier, as a result of the frequent bombings. The latest attack happened in the Wady Obaida area of the central oil-producing province of Maarib, halting the flow of crude to the Ras Isa oil terminal on the Red Sea, the local official said. The Maarib pipeline carries around […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
Category:

Oil prices drive projected enhanced oil recovery using carbon dioxide

The injection of CO2 gas into oil reservoirs at high pressure forces the CO2 to mix with oil. This reduces the oil’s viscosity and causes the oil to increase in volume (swell). The result is an increase in the total cumulative volume of oil produced and in the percentage of oil-in-place that is recovered. The decision by a producer whether or not to employ this technique depends on a number of factors, including the geophysical properties of the reservoir, the oil within that reservoir, the cost of applying CO2 EOR, and the revenue received from additional production. The injection of miscible (capable of […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
Category:

Arab Leaders, Viewing Hamas as Worse Than Israel, Stay Silent

Battling Palestinian militants in Gaza two years ago, Israel found itself pressed from all sides by unfriendly Arab neighbors to end the fighting. Not this time. After the military ouster of the Islamist government in Cairo last year, Egypt has led a new coalition of Arab states — including Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — that has effectively lined up with Israel in its fight against Hamas, the Islamist movement that controls the Gaza Strip. That, in turn, may have contributed to the failure of the antagonists to reach a negotiated cease-fire even after more than three weeks of bloodshed. “The Arab states’ loathing and fear of political Islam is so strong that it outweighs their allergy to Benjamin Netanyahu,” the prime minister of Israel, said Aaron David Miller, a scholar at the Wilson Center in Washington and a former Middle East negotiator under […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple