Month: May 2020

Qatar is forging ahead with the expansion of the world’s largest liquefied natural gasproject and eyeing investment opportunities overseas despite a slump in global energydemand and the collapse of oil prices.Saad al-Kaabi, the country’s energy minister and chief executive of Qatar Petroleum,said commercial bids for the project in the North Field, the planet’s biggest naturalgasfield, would be delayed because of the Covid-19 pandemic but insisted that allcontracts would be awarded by the end of the year.“The North Field expansion project is moving full steam ahead, no delay there. Theonly issue…

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The United States has turned into the world’s swing producer of liquefied natural gas (LNG) as liquefaction capacity has tumbled in recent months amid an LNG glut, low prices, and weak demand in the pandemic, IHS Markit said in a recent analysis. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the LNG market was already oversupplied because of gushing new liquefaction capacity from the United States, Australia, and Russia. The weak demand and record-low natural gas and LNG prices in major markets, including Asia and Europe, have led to cancellations of at least 20…

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Little-known Chinese hedge funds are betting big on an oil price recovery on the Shanghai-traded yuan-denominated oil futures and are set to fill up all available storage for delivery of those futures by the end of next month, industry sources told Reuters on Monday. The financial investors—hedge funds backed by rich individuals—are dubbed ‘hermit’ investors by a state oil official, who spoke to Reuters. According to the Reuters’ sources, those investors have been betting on rising oil prices since early April, pushing the Shanghai yuan oil futures above the international…

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An Iranian tanker carrying 43 million liters (11.3 million gallolns) of gasoline to fuel-starved Venezuela has arrived at El Palito, Venezuela, TankerTrackers reported on Monday. In a tweet on Monday morning TankerTrackers.com said Fortune which loaded 43 million liters of gasoline in mid-March at Shahid Rajaee Port in the Persian Gulf had docked at the refinery of El Palito, Venezuela, in the west of the capital city Caracas. The shipment can fill around one-third of cars in the country. TankerTrackers.com is an independent online service that tracks and reports shipments…

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A coal power plant in North Dakota wants to build the largest ever carbon recapture facility as a way to try to keep its plant viable. Could the plan really work? Minnkota Power Cooperative in Grand Forks, North Dakota owns both the plant, the Milton R. Young Station, and the new facility, Project Tundra. Minnkota says its efforts to sequester and recapture waste carbon are motivated both by keeping its plant running and the amount of carbon it can save from reentering the environment. “To sequester CO₂ from the Young…

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