Day: October 20, 2021

The American Petroleum Institute (API) on Tuesday reported its fourth straight week of crude oil inventory builds. The week, according to the API, the build was 3.294 million barrels-strong. U.S. crude inventories are still 63 million barrels below where they were at the beginning of the year. Analyst expectations for the week were for a build of 2.233-million barrels for the week. In the previous week, the API reported a surprise build in oil inventories of 5.213-million barrels, compared to the 140,000 barrel build that analysts had predicted. Oil prices…

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Recovering fuel demand and additional demand for oil products amid record-high coal and natural gas prices have pushed up global oil refining margins to their pre-pandemic levels. For the first time since COVID crippled fuel demand and margins in early 2020, refining margins in the key regions Asia, Europe, and North America have rebounded strongly in recent weeks, according to analysts and company officials who spoke to Reuters. Globally, refinery activity continued to disappoint in the third quarter, with lower throughputs in China and India in August only partially offset…

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Kazakhstan’s national grid operator has begun rationing electricity to the country’s biggest consumers, likely targeting cryptocurrency mining farms. Facing a sudden energy shortage, officials must be regretting their recent embrace of the crypto industry. Nur-Sultan has struggled to land on a consistent policy toward cryptocurrencies and mining – the series of electricity-hungry calculations made by networked computers to verify and record cryptocurrency transactions. Only three years ago, the National Bank called for a ban on trading cryptocurrencies and mining them. Then, in 2020, parliament passed a law legalizing mining and creating welcoming conditions for…

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Ever since the arrival of the ESG craze, we have discussed the change in “optics” that Exxon has been trying to pull off in order to placate some of the most vocal activist shareholders, some of whom now happen to be on the company’s board. But now, instead of just purely superficial changes, Exxon may be on the cusp of making fundamental changes as well as the oil and gas major is considering whether or not to shutter “several major oil and gas projects”, according to a new report from…

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