Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Scrambling to control high oil prices, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries will meet this weekend in Beirut before its official conference there next week and may pursue a plan to raise quotas sharply or do away with them entirely, an OPEC spokesman said yesterday.
Indonesia is a net oil importer, and as such, should leave OPEC, says its former energy minister. Meanwhile, the high oil prices are have a damaging effect on the nation’s economy.
PetroChina, China’s largest oil producer, has made the nation’s biggest oil discovery in a decade, bolstering its reserves by at least a third at a time when oil prices are at a record and the country’s demand is soaring, the company said Thursday.
Kazakhstan would like to construct a pipeline through Iran to the Persian Gulf as the main outlet for its natural resources, the country’s president said.
Royal Dutch/Shell Group of Cos. reduced its 2003 earnings by $203 million Friday, in an annual report delayed by two months due to the scandal arising from the company’s downgrading of its oil and gas reserves.
With demand high, supplies squeezed, prices climbing and refineries already running flat out, what if something really went wrong? Something like a terror attack on crucial oil installations in Saudi Arabia or in the United States, or something less sinister but just as disruptive, like a fire or accident at a major refinery or port or a flare-up of civil or labor turmoil in Nigeria or Venezuela?
The oil industry faces more reserves downgrade shocks unless disclosure regulations are radically overhauled, said Matthew Simmons, chief executive and chairman of investment bank Simmons & Co.
WHEN Hu Jintao, the president of China, went half way round the world in February to see President Omar Bongo of Gabon, he was not merely paying a courtesy visit to the African ruler of a population one-thousandth the size of China’s. Hu was after oil.
The most negative theorists believe that a worldwide crisis of war and famine will be triggered not when we run out of oil, but when demand outstrips supply in a few years.
A round up of various OPEC countries’ statements on their ability to increase production.
WITH heavy investment fund buying driving oil prices up 27 per cent this year to a 21-year high, opinion is divided on whether large funds are buying on the basis of solid market fundamentals or creating a bubble, the Financial Times said.
The U.S. Agriculture Department’s chief economist, Keith Collins, said rising energy and fertilizer costs could add $1 billion to U.S. crop production costs.
