The Trump administration has two assessments of the impact of the IMO 2020 marine fuel sulfur regulation to consider. The first was issued in January by the Energy Information Administration (EIA), a division of the Department of Energy (DOE). The second was released by the president’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) last week as part of the 2019 Economic Report of the President . The two analyses are, shall we say, a bit different. The EIA summarized its view of the impact in a January 15 “ Today in Energy ” post. The key paragraphs read as follows: “EIA forecasts that the implementation of the new IMO fuel specification will widen discounts between light-sweet crude oil and heavy-sour crude oil, while also widening the price spreads between high- and low-sulfur petroleum products. In the January STEO [ Short-Term Energy Outlook ] forecast, Brent crude oil spot prices increase from […]