Oil prices ease as Opec opens tap
Oil prices eased further below $40 a barrel yesterday as an Opec deal to pump more crude outweighed underlying fears of political instability in top producer Saudi Arabia.
Oil prices eased further below $40 a barrel yesterday as an Opec deal to pump more crude outweighed underlying fears of political instability in top producer Saudi Arabia.
A bomb blast has ripped through an oil storage depot in the town of Neftekumsk in Russia’s Stavropol region.
A US defence official says the US navy is planning an unusual task force deployment off the West African coast.
The U.S. animosity toward the Islamic Republic of Iran became evident again when a top U.S. diplomat underlined Tuesday Washington’s opposition to a French-backed plan which, if realized, would see a pipeline built from Kazakhstan to Iran to export the massive oil reserves underneath the Caspian Sea.
Russia’s oil production will probably stay flat or even drop in 2005, a top Russian energy official said Friday.
Iraq’s new Oil Minister Thamer Ghadban welcomed yesterday the injection of $800 million from the US-led coalition to achieve his main goal of hiking production.
It now appears that world oil production, about 80 million barrels a day, will soon peak. In fact, conventional oil production has already peaked and is declining.
THERMAL coal spot prices, which smashed records earlier this year, are expected to remain high as Chinese demand increases.
Syria continues to sell oil to U.S. companies and encourage U.S. investment in its energy sector, despite Washington’s unilateral sanctions, Oil Minister Ibrahim Haddad told Reuters.
Libya has cemented its return to the international mainstream by resuming its former role as a supplier of oil to the US.
Official figures published in Jakarta last month show Indonesia became a net importer of crude oil for the first time in February and March.
The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting
Countries agreed on Thursday to increase its production quotas by two million barrels a day, or 8.5 percent, effective July 1. Analysts said the problem with OPEC’s move was that it would not add
any new oil to the market.