Tag Archives: Oil

Something Stunning Is Taking Place Off The Coast Of Singapore, by Tyler Durden

Posted on May 22, 2016 | 1 comment

Ernest Hemingway had his moveable feast. World oil markets have a moveable glut. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

“I’ve been coming to Singapore once a year for the last 15 years, and flying in I have never seen the waters so full of idle tankers,”

– Senior European oil trader a day after arriving in the city-state.

Back in November, when the world-record crude inventory glut was still in its early innings, we showed what we then thought was a disturbing image of dozens of oil tankers on anchor near the US oil hub of Galveston, TX, unwilling to unload their cargo at what the owners of the oil thought was too low prices.

Little did we know that just a few months later this seemingly unprecedented sight of clustered VLCCs would be a daily occurrence as oil producers, concerned by Cushing hitting its operating capacity, would take advantage of oil curve contango to store their oil offshore indefinitely.

However, while the “parking lot” off Galveston has since normalized, something shocking has emerged and continued to grow half way around the world, just off the coat of Singapore. This.

The red dots show ships either at anchor or barely moving, either oil tankers or cargo, which have made the Straits of Malacca, one of the world’s most important shipping lanes which carries about a quarter of all seaborne oil primarily from the Persian Gulf headed to China, into a “bumper to bumper” parking lots of ships with tens of millions of barrels in combustible cargo.

it is also the topic of the latest Reuters expose on the historic physical crude oil glut which continues to build behind the scenes, and which so far has proven totally immune to dissipation as a result of the sharp increase in oil prices over the past three months.

Indeed, as Reuters notes, prices for oil futures have jumped by almost a quarter since April, lifted by severe supply disruptions caused by triggers such as Canadian wildfires, acts of sabotage in Nigeria, and civil war in Libya. And yet flying into Singapore, the oil trading hub for the world’s biggest consumer region, Asia, reveals another picture: that a global glut that pulled down prices by over 70 percent between 2014 and early 2016 is nowhere near over, and that financial traders betting on higher crude oil futures may be in for a surprise from the physical market.

“I’ve been coming to Singapore once a year for the last 15 years, and flying in I have never seen the waters so full of idle tankers,” said a senior European oil trader a day after arriving in the city-state.

As Asia’s main physical oil trading hub, the number of parked tankers sitting off Singapore’s coast or in nearby Malaysian waters is seen by many as a gauge of the industry’s health. Judging by this, oil markets are still sickly: a fleet of 40 supertankers is currently anchored in the region’s coastal waters for use as floating storage facilities.

To continue reading: Something Stunning Is Taking Place Off The Coast Of Singapore

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Taking the petro out of the dollar, by Alasdair MacLeod

Posted on May 1, 2016 | Leave a comment

The petrodollar may be going the way of flip phones. From Alasdair MacLeod at gold money.com:

Saudi Arabia has been in the news recently for several interconnected reasons. Underlying it all is a spendthrift country that is rapidly becoming insolvent.

While the House of Saud remains strongly resistant to change, a mixture of reality and power-play is likely to dominate domestic politics in the coming years, following the ascendency of King Salman to the Saudi throne. This has important implications for the dollar, given its historic role in the region.

Last year’s collapse in the oil price has forced financial reality upon the House of Saud. The young deputy crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, possibly inspired by a McKinsey report, aims to diversify the state rapidly from oil dependency into a mixture of industries, healthcare and tourism. The McKinsey report looks like a wish-list, rather than reality, particularly when it comes to tourism. The religious police are unlikely to take kindly to bikinis on the Red Sea’s beeches, or to foreign women in mini-shorts wandering around Jeddah.

It is hard to imagine Saudi Arabia, culturally stuck in the middle ages, embracing the changes recommended by McKinsey, without fundamentally reforming the House of Saud, or even without a full-scale revolution. Nearly all properties and businesses are personally owned or controlled by members of the extended royal family, not the state, nor by lesser mortals. The principal exception is Aramco, estimated to be worth $2 trillion.

The state is subservient to the House of Saud. It is therefore hard to see how, as McKinsey recommends, the country can “shift from its current government-led economic model to a more market-based approach”. The country is barely government led: a puppet of the Saudis is more like it. But the state’s lack of funds is making it increasingly desperate.

It was for this reason the Kingdom recently placed a $10bn five-year syndicated loan, the first time it has entered capital markets since Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. It proposes to raise a further $100bn by selling a 5% stake in Aramco. The financial plan appears to be a combination of this short-term money-raising, contributions from oil revenue, and sales of US Treasuries (thought to total as much as $750bn). The government has, according to informed sources, been secretly selling gold, mainly to Asian central banks and sovereign wealth funds. Will it see the Kingdom through this sticky patch?

Maybe. Much more likely, buying time is a substitute for ducking fundamental reform. But one can see how stories coming out of Washington, implicating Saudi interests in the 9/11 twin-towers tragedy, could easily have pulled the trigger on all those Treasuries.

Whatever else was discussed, it seems likely that this topic will have been addressed at the two special FOMC meetings “under expedited measures” at the Fed earlier this month, and then at Janet Yellen’s meeting with the President at the White House. Yesterday’s holding pattern on interest rates would lend support to this theory.

 

To continue reading: Taking the petro out of the dollar

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Iraq Is Latest To Announce Record Oil Production: Why This Is Just The Beginning Of The Supply Glut, by Tyler Durden

Posted on April 11, 2016 | Leave a comment

Just what the world needs, more oil! From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

First it was the Saudis; then Russia announced another month of record oil production.

And now it is Iraq’s turn. According to the state-run Oil Marketing Co., Iraq increased crude output to a record level in March, ahead of the long-awaited April 17 meeting in Qatar where OPEC members and other producers may or may not (they won’t) agree to cap production to curb a global glut.

As Bloomberg reports, crude output in OPEC’s second-biggest producer rose to 4.55 million barrels a day last month from 4.46 million barrels in February, while exports increased to 3.81 million barrels a day in March from 3.23 million the previous month, the company, known as Somo, said in an e-mailed statement. The 500,000 barrel increase in monthly barrels has made up almost entirely for the 600,000 barrel decline in US shale output.

Ahead of the Doha meeting, Iraq – which is clearly pumping at full power – supports an agreement reached in February between Saudi Arabia, Russia, Venezuela and Qatar to cap output at January levels. Well maybe: this is what the Iraqi Oil Ministry Spokesman Asim Jihad said on March 23, without confirming if the country agrees to freeze its own production.

Iraq’s unprecedented oil production has been duly documented here. Recall just on Friday we showed a line of oil tankers caught in a traffic jam near the Iraqi port of Basra, causing delays in loading. The culprit is high oil production in Iraq. The port at Basra is struggling to load up all the oil tankers fast enough, forcing some to sit and wait. Iraq exported about 3.26 million barrels per day (mb/d) in March from its southern coast, which is up from just 2.5 mb/d in 2010.

To continue reading: Iraq Is Latest To Announce Record Oil Production: Why This Is Just The Beginning Of The Supply Glut

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19 Facts That Prove Things In America Are Worse Than They Were Six Months Ago, by Michael Snyder

Posted on April 8, 2016 | Leave a comment

The more pessimistic among us might be inclined to see a recession in the offing. SLL rejects such pessimism. It’s going to be a depression. From Michael Snyder at theeconomiccollapseblog.com:

Has the U.S. economy gotten better over the past six months or has it gotten worse? In this article, you will find solid proof that the U.S. economy has continued to get worse over the past six months. Unfortunately, most people seem to think that since the stock market has rebounded significantly in recent weeks that everything must be okay, but of course that is not true at all. If you look at a chart of the Dow, a very ominous head and shoulders pattern is forming, and all of the economic fundamentals are screaming that big trouble is ahead. When Donald Trump told the Washington Post that we are heading for a “very massive recession“, he wasn’t just making stuff up. We are already seeing lots of things happen that never take place outside of a recession, and the U.S. economy has already been sliding downhill fairly rapidly over the past several months. With all that being said, the following are 19 facts that prove things in America are worse than they were six months ago…

#1 U.S. factory orders have now declined on a year over year basis for 16 months in a row. As Zero Hedge has noted, in the post-World War II era this has never happened outside of a recession…

In 60 years, the US economy has not suffered a 16-month continuous YoY drop in Factory orders without being in recession. Moments ago the Department of Commerce confirmed that this is precisely what the US economy did, when factory orders not only dropped for the 16th consecutive month Y/Y, after declining 1.7% from last month

#2 Factory orders have now reached the lowest level that we have seen since the summer of 2011.

#3 It is being projected that corporate earnings will be down 8.5 percent for the first quarter of 2016 compared to one year ago. This will be the fourth quarter in a row that we have seen year over year declines, and the last time that happened was during the last recession.

#4 Total business sales have fallen 5 percent since the peak in mid-2014.

#5 S&P 500 earnings have now fallen a total of 18.5 percent from their peak in late 2014.

#6 Corporate debt defaults have soared to the highest level that we have seen since 2009.

#7 The average rating on U.S. corporate debt has fallen to “BB”, which is lower than it has been at any point since the last financial crisis.

#8 The U.S. oil rig count just hit a 41 year low.

To continue reading: 19 Facts That Prove Things In America Are Worse Than They Were Six Months Ago

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The Terrible Oil News Nobody Noticed, by Matt Badiali

Posted on March 17, 2016 | Leave a comment

From Matt Badiali at growthstockwire.com:

A terrible bit of news went unnoticed in the commotion amid the modest rebound in oil prices over the past two weeks.

While every news outlet shouted about Iran and OPEC, a U.S. energy icon quietly announced news that could potentially shatter the industry.

As I’ve explained recently, many oil companies are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. But news out of Alaska could lead to disaster.

BP Prudhoe Bay Royalty Trust (BPT) – operated by the Alaskan division of oil giant British Petroleum (BP) – sells oil from the Prudhoe Bay oilfield. It just announced a 65% drop in its economic oil reserves.

We’ll explain exactly what that means in a moment… but you can expect the numbers that the other area shale explorers release in the coming weeks will be even worse…

From 1968 to 2015, Prudhoe Bay was the most prolific oilfield in the country, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). Today, Prudhoe Bay ranks third in the U.S. behind Texas’ Eagle Ford and Spraberry Shales.

Prudhoe was so large, three major oil companies – BP, Arco, and Humble Oil – spent $8 billion in 1977 constructing the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS) to bring its oil to market. That’s more than $31 billion in today’s dollars.

For a while, that investment paid off. By 1988, the field produced nearly 2 million barrels per day – almost as much oil as the entire state of Texas. From 1985 to 1995, the field produced as much as 25% of the entire U.S. oil output.

In 2013, the North Slope fields still produced more than 479,000 barrels per day, though that accounts for only about 5% of U.S. production. In 2014, more than 12.5 billion barrels of oil remained in the area, according to the Alaska Oil and Gas Commission. But that’s actual barrels… not “economic reserves.”

Even though an oilfield can hold a tremendous amount of oil, only some of that oil is profitable at certain prices. Those barrels are called economic reserves. And that’s where the problem lies…

You see, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission requires publicly traded oil companies to calculate economic reserves using an average oil price from the previous year. Here’s what BP Prudhoe Bay Royalty Trust’s price and reserve calculation look like…

As you can see, from 2014 to 2015, the average price per barrel fell 47%… but the reserves fell 65%. That’s a huge change from 2013 to 2014, when reserves fell just 10%.

Prudhoe Bay is a giant legacy field, with a vast network of pipes and wells already in place. So production costs are lower there than in most shale fields. So if Prudhoe Bay’s economic reserves fall 65%, the rest of the industry is in big trouble.

Reserve calculations will be a big problem for most U.S. oil companies as they report over the next few weeks. Using the new $50.28-per-barrel price is going to result in a massive reduction in U.S. oil reserves.

To continue reading: The Terrible Oil News Nobody Noticed

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Big-Oil Bailout Begins as Debt Spirals Down, by Don Quijones

Posted on March 16, 2016 | Leave a comment

From Don Quijones at wolfstreet.com:

Mexico’s proud sugar daddy becomes giant financial sinkhole.

Pemex, Mexico’s state-owned oil giant, cannot seem to get a break these days. It notched up 13 straight quarters of rising losses. It now owes over $80 billion to international investors and banks. It needs to raise $23 billion this year to stay afloat. The cost of servicing that gargantuan debt mountain continues to rise. So it tries desperately to rein in its spending, without tackling — or even discussing — its endemic culture of corruption.

In recent days, Pemex received a 15 billion peso ($840 million) lifeline from three of Mexico’s homegrown development banks, Banobras, Bancomext and Nafinsa, to help the firm pay back some of its smallest providers, consisting mainly of domestic SMEs.

The loan was part of an arrangement cobbled together between the banks and the Mexican government. By today’s standards the amount involved is pretty meager, but the operation was about more than just raising funds: it was meant to restore confidence among both investors and suppliers in the firm’s ability to repay its debts.

“This sends a sign of stability and confidence to the sector, which has been very nervous” payments would not be made, explained Erik Legorreta, President of the Mexican Oil Industry Association, which represents around 3,000 service providers. “Members of the industry now have the confidence and certainty that the payments will be honored.”

Not everyone agrees. Last week the U.S. credit rating agency Moody’s flagged concerns that the loan will significantly increase the three banks’ combined exposure to Pemex’s debt, calculated to grow from 44% to 62%. “The three lenders now have high concentration risks with their 20 biggest creditors,” cautioned Moody’s, which already downgraded Pemex’s debt in November to Baa1, with a negative outlook. In its report last week, the agency piled on the pressure by warning that there’s “a high likelihood” that it will downgrade Pemex’s rating another notch in the coming weeks.

What this all means is that rather than restoring investor confidence in Pemex, the loan operation has merely served to reinforce investors’ fears that lending to the debt-laden oil giant is fast becoming a very dangerous risk. It has also raised serious concerns about the ability of Pemex to honor its new managing director’s pledge to promptly pay back the over 100 billion pesos ($5.6 billion) of outstanding debt to its larger suppliers.

To continue reading: Big-Oil Bailout Begins as Debt Spirals Down

 

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“They Spent It All On Hookers, Blow And Fancy Toys” – Hedge Fund Manager Predicts Lower Oil For Longer, Quantitative Easing For The People, And A Gold Bull Market

Posted on March 8, 2016 | Leave a comment

From Mac Slavo at shtfplan.com:

In 2011, as gold prices rocketed to $1900 and oil was trading above $120 a barrel, there were few analysts who saw anything but further gains. But Marin Katusa of Katusa Research had a different opinion. At a major commodity conference Katusa, to boos and jeers from the audience, held strong to his analysis that an imminent deflationary collapse in commodity prices was on the horizon. And collapse they did.

According to Katusa, who is closely involved in the Canadian resource sector, most people simply assumed the good times would go on forever… because it was different this time. But like any uninhibited party fueled by unlimited cash, the hangover was sure to follow.

There’s no doubt you had massive high paying jobs. In Canada, the province that benefited the most is Alberta… In the last twelve months they’ve had 70,000 layoffs of jobs paying over a hundred grand a year.

…when I’d go to these oil towns you’d sit down at the casinos with them and these guys were all about the hookers and blow… they were all about their toys… big fancy trucks… snow mobiles… and they’re in the field for two weeks and they make $20,000 and blow it all at the casinos.

You knew it couldn’t last.

As Katusa notes in his latest interview with Future Money Trends, though the crash has been brutal for the sector, it’s not over yet and it’s going lower for longer.

They [OPEC] can survive at $20 oil…

For two years everyone’s been saying, “OPEC’s going to cut back.”

They reality here is, why would OPEC cut production? That would only prop up the Russians and the shale sector.

And while most will argue that low oil prices will wipe out most of America’s shale industry, Katusa has a contrarian view, suggesting that shale sector debt, while significant, is not necessarily going to cause these companies to go under in the immediate future.

Why?

Because what banker in their right mind wants to get dirty and actually operate an oil field?

So the debt will be amended, extended and then they’ll pretend.

… Because you can’t just shut down an oil field. You have to reclaim those wells, which means you have to shut them down and environmentally reclaim them… and it costs more to do that today than what the actual value is.

The bankers know that.

… With innovation, in the Western world, costs will decrease and the bankers have no choice but to amend, extend and pretend the debt.

So they’re going to go lower for longer.

In short, going forward we should expect widespread manipulation from the producers and the banks themselves to keep the bankruptcies at bay.

To continue reading: “They Spent It All On Hookers, Blow And Fancy Toys” – Hedge Fund Manager Predicts Lower Oil For Longer, Quantitative Easing For The People, And A Gold Bull Market

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Will Russia End Up Controlling 73% of Global Oil Supply? by Rakesh Upadhyay

Posted on March 8, 2016 | Leave a comment

From Rakesh Upadhyay at oilprice.com:

Russia has played a master stroke in the current oil crisis by taking the lead in forming a new cartel, but it’s a move that could spell geopolitical disaster.

The meeting between Russia, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela on 16 February 2016 was the first step. During the next meeting in mid-March, which is with a larger group of participants, if Russia manages to build a consensus—however small—it will further strengthen its leadership position.

Until the current oil crisis, Saudi Arabia called the crude oil price shots; however, its clout has been weakening in the aftermath of the massive price drop with the emergence of US shale. The smaller OPEC nations have been calling for a production cut to support prices, but the last OPEC meeting in December 2015 ended without any agreement.

Now, with Russia stepping in to negotiate with OPEC nations, a new picture is emerging. With its military might, Russia can assume de facto leadership of the oil-producing nations in the name of stabilizing oil prices.

Saudi Arabia has been a long-time U.S. ally, but that, too, is changing. Charles W. Freeman Jr., a former U.S. ambassador to Riyadh, recently noted that “We’ve seen a long deterioration in the U.S.-Saudi relationship, and it started well before the Obama Administration.”

U.S.-Saudi relations further soured due to the Iran nuclear deal that ended in January with the U.S. lifting sanctions—a move the Saudis vehemently opposed. The Saudis had to look for a new ally to safeguard their interests in the Gulf, considering the threats they face from the Islamic State (ISIS) and Iran. Though both Russia and Saudi Arabia are on opposing ends in Syria, with Russia supporting Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad and the Saudis supporting the Sunni rebels, the large drop in prices seems to have opened a window of opportunity for Russia to ally with Saudi Arabia.

This is not the first time that Russia and Saudi Arabia have sought a close partnership. Even in 2013, The Telegraph had reported an attempt to form a secret deal, which did not go through. Iran has been a trusted ally of Russia for a long time, and if Russia can broker a deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia, it can also push through some sort of secret OPEC deal.

To continue reading: Will Russia End Up Controlling 73% of Global Oil Supply?

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In Biggest Victory For Saudi Arabia, North Dakota’s Largest Oil Producer Suspends All Fracking, by Tyler Durden

Posted on February 25, 2016 | Leave a comment

From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

Yesterday, during his speech at CERAWeek in Houston, Saudi oil minister Ali al-Naimi made it explicitly clear that Saudi Arabia would not cut production, instead saying that it is high-cost producers that would need to either “lower costs, borrow cash or liquidate” adding that there is “no need for cuts as marginal barrel will get out of the market.” He was right.

Today his wish is slowly coming true after news that North Dakota’s largest producer, Whiting Petroleum, would suspend all fracking, and that Continental Resources has effectively done the same after reporting that it no longer has any fracking crews working in the Bakken shale.

As Reuters reports, Whiting said it would “suspend all fracking and spend 80 percent less this year, the biggest cutback to date by a major U.S. shale company reacting to the plunge in crude prices.”

It was also confirmation that the Saudi plan to put high-cost producers on ice is working, if only temporarily.

After sliding 5.6% to $3.72, Whiting stock jumped 8% to over $4 per share in after-hours trading as investors cheered the decision to preserve capital, even if it means generating far less revenue.

Whiting’s cut is one of the largest so far this year in an energy industry crippled by oil prices at 10-year lows. The cuts will have a big impact in North Dakota, where Whiting is the largest producer.

The Denver-based company said it would stop fracking and completing wells as of April 1. Most of its $500 million budget will be spent to mothball drilling and fracking operations in the first half of the year. After June, Whiting said it plans to spend only $160 million, mostly on maintenance.

Rival producers Hess Corp and Continental Resources Inc have also slashed their budgets for the year, though neither has cut as much as Whiting.

As noted above, during its earnings report, Continental said that in 2016, the Bakken drilling program will continue to focus on high rate-of-return areas in McKenzie and Mountrail counties, targeting wells with an average EUR of 900,000 Boe per well. Based on the higher EUR and a lower targeted completed well cost of $6.7 million per well, the Company expects capital efficiency to increase 17% and finding cost to decrease 15% in 2016.

Given its plans to defer most Bakken completions in 2016, Continental expects to increase its Bakken DUC inventory to approximately 195 gross operated DUCs at year-end 2016. However, Continental also said that while the Company currently has four operated drilling rigs in the North Dakota Bakken and plans to maintain this level through year end, it noted that it currently has no fracking crews deployed in the Bakken, which led some, including Bloomberg to believe, that Continental too has halted Bakken shale fracking.

One thing is certain: the cuts will drag down production and likely reverberate in the economy of North Dakota, the second-largest U.S. oil producing state after Texas, which currently pumps 1.1 million barrels per day. It means that after the 250,000 oil workers already laid off (according to Credit Suisse estimates), tens of thousands of new pink slips to highly paid workers are about to be handed out.

And another thing: as of this moment, Saudi’s oil minister is taking a victory lap in his Lamborghini – after all his plan to push the price of oil so low that marginal oil producers have no choice but to mothball production is starting to bear fruit.

There is just one problem. Whiting Chief Executive Officer Jim Volker said that “we believe this conservative strategy should help us to maintain our liquidity position and leave us well positioned to capitalize on a rebound in oil prices.”

In other words, the moment oil prices rebound even modestly, and according to many the new breakeven shale prices are as low at $40-$50/barrel, the Whitings and Continentals will immediately resume production, forcing Saudi Arabia to go back to square one, boosting supply even higher, and repeat the entire charade from scratch.

And so on.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-02-24/saudi-arabia-wins-now-north-dakotas-largest-oil-producer-suspends-all-fracking

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After Messy Price War, OPEC Gets the Blues, Can’t Figure Out How “to Live Together” with US Shale Oil, by Wolf Richter

Posted on February 23, 2016 | Leave a comment

From Wolf Richter at wolfstreet.com:

El-Badri’s nightmare.

OPEC Secretary General Abdalla Salem El-Badri admitted on Monday that the price war has backfired.

While it still controls about 40% of global oil production, OPEC has been losing market share to US and Canadian producers. So to escape the dreary fate of becoming an irrelevant cartel, it unleashed a price war at its Thanksgiving 2014 meeting by refusing to cut production. And oil fell off the chart.

The casualties are piling up everywhere. Countries like Venezuela and Nigeria are teetering. Russia and Brazil have plunged into deep recessions. Petro-currencies have swooned. State-controlled oil companies like Pemex or Petrobras are hoping for a bailout. The sovereign wealth funds of Norway, Saudi Arabia, and other oil-producing nations have had to dump stocks and bonds to fill budget holes. Dozens of smaller US shale-oil and offshore drillers either have already defaulted or filed for bankruptcy. Investors have lost their shirts. Even the “smart money” got cleaned out.

The price of WTI hit $26.19 a barrel on February 11, the lowest since May 2003. And OPEC was not amused. So Secretary General Abdalla Salem El-Badri blamed US shale oil drillers for mucking up OPEC’s elegant price-war strategy.

“Shale oil in the United States, I don’t know how we are going to live together,” he told energy executives at the annual IHS CERAWeek in Houston on Monday, according to Bloomberg:

OPEC has never had to deal with an oil supply source that can respond as rapidly to price changes as U.S. shale, El-Badri said. That complicates the cartel’s ability to prop up prices by reducing output.

“Any increase in price, shale will come immediately and cover any reduction,” he said.

In a rare admission that the policy hasn’t worked out as planned, El-Badri said that OPEC didn’t expect oil prices to drop this much when it decided to keep pumping near flat-out.

So last week, cracks emerged in OPEC’s elegant price-war strategy when a group of countries, including Saudi Arabia and Russia, agreed in principle to freeze oil production, hilariously, at current balls-to-the-wall levels, provided that other oil-rich countries, particularly Iran, which is just now starting to ramp up production, join in as well. But, as we pointed out, “political baloney doesn’t fix the fundamental issue” [read The Saudi/Russia Oil Deal “Just a Bunch of Bull”].

“This is the first step to see what we can achieve,” is what El-Badri said about this oil deal. “If this is successful, we will take other steps in the future.”

He refused to specify what these “other steps” might be, and alternatively what OPEC might do if this deal is not “successful.”

To continue reading: After Messy Price War, OPEC Gets the Blues, Can’t Figure Out How “to Live Together” with US Shale Oil

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