Oil edged higher after a volatile session as US President Donald Trump’s tariffs on Mexico were delayed by a month and investors assessed the levies’ potential to slow global economic growth, undercutting concerns about short-term supply constraints.
Iraq quickly extinguished the blaze that erupted at a storage tank at the Rumaila oil field on Jan. 24, but said the incident knocked out about 300,000 barrels a day — or 25 percent of the field’s capacity — during the following week. The country’s production averaged just over 4 million barrels a day last month, in line with its OPEC quota.
NMDC Group won the contract for the chemicals port of the project. “When the port is complete, it will facilitate the export of chemicals and transition fuels, ensuring operational connectivity to regional and global markets and enhancing access to imported supplies”, TA’ZIZ said.
“TA’ZIZ will produce a range of chemicals, many of which have not previously been manufactured in the UAE, enabling the local manufacture of many new construction, agriculture and healthcare products”, ADNOC said in a statement. “In its initial phase, TA’ZIZ will produce six chemicals: caustic, ethylene dichloride, vinyl chloride monomer, polyvinyl chloride, low-carbon ammonia and methanol”.
“The first reason prices are higher is the 10 percent tariff President Trump put in place on Canadian energy imports,” David Seduski, the head of North American gas at Energy Aspects, told Rigzone. “The U.S. imports approximately five to seven percent of its daily gas supply from Canada (depending on the time of year). A 10 percent tariff raises the cost of those imports by about $0.20 per million British thermal units (MMBtu),” he added.
Pakistan has been experiencing an economic crisis since 2022, characterized by high inflation, high debt, job cuts, and a struggling fiscal position. At some point the country was facing a severe shortage of foreign exchange reserves and risked defaulting on its debt obligations. Three years ago, Pakistan set a target for cheap Russian crude to make up two-thirds of its oil imports, but has been unable to achieve it hampered by a shortage of foreign currency and limitations at its refineries and ports. The cash-strapped South Asian nation became Russia’s latest customer after Russia started offering discounted urals following sanctions by the west.
StanChart has pointed out that such a switch would create a significant loss of optimization in the highly expensive cracking units that require feed from vacuum distillation of the heavy residual obtained by simple distillation. Canada has supplied 99.89% of all heavy imports into Midwest refineries over the past decade; the low substitutability of this flow implies that a tariff would largely feed through to local retail prices.
On a more pragmatic note, Nuttall suggested that “And from an energy perspective, it makes it a necessity to make it a national priority to build out more pipelines both to the east coast and west coast, to diversify the customer base. If we had the ability to circumvent the U.S. refineries, we would not be in this situation as a country.”
Canada is the biggest supplier of heavy crude to American refiners, exporting it at a rate of close to 4 million barrels daily, which makes it the biggest exporter of crude oil to the U.S. in general. Mexican crude oil exports north of the border are much smaller, at less than half a million barrels daily, but they still comprise the second-largest share of foreign oil in U.S. refiners’ mix. That fact may have played a role in Trump’s willingness to negotiate new trade deals quickly before the tariffs kick in and retaliation begins.
TotalEnergies SE has signed a “physical” power purchase agreement (PPA) with STMicroelectronics, a semiconductor specialist, for a renewable energy supply. TotalEnergies said in a media release that in January it started delivering renewable electricity to STMicroelectronics sites in France under a 15-year contract. The overall volume to be delivered under the contract is 1.5 terawatt hours (TWh).