Category: Highlights

At the moment, the energy news out of China is a deluge of reports and think pieces about the government’s recently unveiled an extremely ambitious plan to become carbon neutral by 2060 – very big news from the nation that is responsible for a quarter of the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions. Beijing’s lofty rhetoric is backed up by the nation’s assertive investment and development of large-scale solar energy projects and what will soon be the world’s largest nuclear fleet. But at the same time that China is talking about getting its…

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Despite promises to keep in line with the OPEC+ pact, Iraq – OPEC’s second-largest producer and biggest laggard in implementing the cuts – slightly raised its crude oil exports in September compared to August. Iraq exported a total of 78,388,619 barrels of crude last month, according to data from Iraq’s ministry of oil cited by Iraq Business News. This means Iraq’s average crude oil exports stood at 2.613 million barrels per day (bpd) for September, slightly up from the 2.597 million bpd crude the country exported in August. Iraq received…

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Hurricane Laura, which stormed through the U.S. Gulf of Mexico at the end of August, forced shut-ins of an estimated 14.4 million barrels of crude oil during the two weeks of shut-down rigs—the largest production loss from a hurricane in the Gulf since Hurricanes Gustav and Ike in 2008, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) said on Friday. According to data from the U.S. Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE), Hurricane Laura, which made landfall near Cameron in southwestern Louisiana on August 27, had at its peak forced the evacuation…

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A month before the U.S. presidential election, the oil industry’s most powerful lobbying group, the American Petroleum Institute (API), is launching ads in a number of swing states, saying in one ad that “extreme environmental proposals” like a ban on new leases on federal land – a proposal of Joe Biden – could cause hundreds of thousands of Americans to lose their jobs. According to Axios, the ad is part of several 30-minute spots that the API is launching in key swing states, including Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Colorado, Arizona,…

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Both the President and First Lady of the United States have tested positive for COVID-19 on a day when Brent oil prices crash below $40 and the U.S. rig count climbed. Crude prices fell on Friday following news that President Donald Trump tested positive for the coronavirus. Broader equities also tumbled. As of midday trading, Brent was down more than 4 percent, dipping below $40 per barrel. Shale companies did poorly, but executives got paid. A Wall Street Journal analysis found that the median pay for executives of U.S. oil…

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