Petroleum

“Never Seen a Decline of this Magnitude” – ExxonMobil, Crashed by Covid, gets taste of looming Electric Vehicle Crisis

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Ashton Nichols at The Dallas Morning News reports that ExxonMobil lost over $1 billion in the second quarter, up from a $600 million lost in the first. Year on year, its revenues are down 33% for the first half of this year. It has been forced to close down half […]

Houthi

Yemen: Houthi Stonewalling on Leaking Oil Supertanker endangers Red Sea Ecology, 30 Million Livelihoods

Human Rights Watch

( Human Rights Watch) – Houthi authorities in Yemen should immediately permit United Nations experts access to a supertanker moored off Yemen’s coast that risks spilling over a million barrels of crude oil into the Red Sea, Human Rights Watch said today. The UN says a spill would have catastrophic environmental and humanitarian consequences, including […]

Featured

Was February ’20 Peak Oil Demand? Petroleum might never Recover From Covid-19 and EVs

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Julien Mieville at AFP asks the big question: Has global demand for petroleum peaked? The meme of “peak oil” once referred to the notion that production would at some point peak and then fall, driving prices sky high, but that theory developed before the fracking revolution and was never very […]

Libya

Libya: Is the Russia-Turkey Conflict Heightening over Oil-Rich Sirte?

Nikola Mikovic

Belgrade (Special to Informed Comment) – The Libya’s civil war intensifies as Russia and Turkey are expected to negotiate the fate of strategically important coastal city of Sirte. The control of the oil rich province, as well as Jufra airbase, seems to be a top priority for both, Moscow and Ankara. Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip […]

Libya

The Turko-Russian War for Oil and Gas in Libya Intensifies

Nikola Mikovic

Belgrade (Special to Informed Comment) – Frenemies Russia and Turkey have put their conflict in Syria on hold, but they have intensified their rivalry in another proxy conflict. In Libya, clashes between Moscow-backed Libyan National Army (LNA) and Ankara-backed Government of National Accord (GNA) escalated, as the US Africa Command accused Kremlin of deploying military […]

Climate Crisis

Frankenfuel: The Market is done with Big Oil and Coal, but will they Lumber on with Gov’t Subsidies?

John Buell

Southwest Harbor, Maine (Special to Informed Comment) – Are the big oil stocks headed for collapse? Citizens as diverse as climate activist and 350.org founder Bill McKibben and CNBC finance guru Jim Cramer seem to think so. Here is Cramer as reported by Axios in early February even before the historic plunge in crude prices.\ […]

Climate Crisis

Oil’s Götterdämmerung: Why Covid-19 could Hasten the end of Fossil Fuels

Sustainability Times

( Sustainability Times) – Last week the oil market took another plunge that saw the price of one barrel of West Texas Intermediate (WTI) fall 8 percent to $10.45 on Tuesday.. Last Monday, WTI crashed by 25 percent and rocked the market, yet the decline was relatively minor compared to what happened two weeks ago […]

Epidemics

Russia: Could the Coronavirus Crisis Loosen Vladimir Putin’s Grip on Power?

Nikola Mikovic

Belgrade (Special to Informed Comment) – The COVID-19 pandemic has already opened the gates for a huge global economic crisis. Russia will not be spared, and its economy is expected to suffer at least until the world oil market stabilizes. How will that affect Vladimir Putin’s popularity? The geographically largest country in the world already […]

Epidemics

In Age of Pandemic, is Mismanagement driving Saudi Arabia toward Bankruptcy?

Middle East Monitor

By Motasem A Dalloul | @abujomaaGaza | – ( Middle East Monitor ) – On 6 March, the OPEC+ cartel failed to agree on a cut in oil production in the light of reduced demand due to the coronavirus pandemic affecting almost every country in the world. All of this came in the middle of […]