Oil
Global oil prices search for direction brent hovers around $63 per barrel
Oil prices continue to search for direction as a supply scare from Iraq turned out to be short-lived, with most market speculation centred around Ukraine peace talks and US Federal Reserve policy.
With ICE Brent still hovering around $63 per barrel, the Fed’s last gathering in 2025 could provide some temporary upside to prices, however, it is unlikely to fundamentally break the current stalemate, OilPrice.com reports.
The European Union agreed to scale back its corporate sustainability laws after both the United States and Qatar threatened to halt energy exports in case its CSDDD rules aren’t eased, however, US firms complained that changes didn’t go far enough’.
G7 countries and the European Union are reportedly in talks to replace their December 2022 price cap on Russian oil exports, having failed to restrict flows to India and China even after it was lowered to $47.60 per barrel, with a full maritime services ban.
China’s crude oil imports soared to their highest since August 2023 last month, according to the country’s Administration of Customs, with Chinese refiners taking in 12.38 million b/d, up 5% month-over-month on higher flows of Iranian and Russian crude.
The government of Congo has set new conditions for cobalt exporters, tightening its 96,000 tonne per year quota system with requirements to pre-pay 10% of royalty fees within 48 hours of filling their export declarations and receiving a compliance certificate.
Indian state-owned refiners have ramped up their purchases of Russian crude, with Indian Oil Corp and Bharat Petroleum buying up to 10 January-arrival cargoes last week, benefitting from lower delivered prices as Urals now trades $6 per barrel below Brent.
Brazil’s national oil firm Petrobras (NYSE:PBR) has cut its 5-year spending plan by $2 billion to $109 billion but raised its exploration budget by $1 billion to a total of $78 billion, aiming to reach 2.7 million b/d in oil output by 2028, up 10% from now.
The European Union is reportedly preparing a major push to improve cross-border grid connections, warning of billions lost from bottlenecks and failures to meet power demand with supply as Brussels intends to double down on its 2050 net zero target.
Italy’s ENI (BIT:ENI) and UK oil major BP (NYSE:BP) plan to drill Libya’s most-anticipated deepwater exploration well in Q1 2026, expecting that the Sirte Basin’s gas reserves extend offshore as Tripoli aims to boost gas output to 4 Bcf/d by end-decade.
Tristan Abbey, the administrator of the US Energy Information Administration (lost 100 of its 350 full-time staff), pledged to work ‘aggressively’ to revise EIA reports with redundant information, saying the agency now publishes ‘too many reports’.
India is considering a major expansion in coal power capacity with plans to build new plants until at least 2047, a policy change compared to previous projections peaking by 2035, with Delhi potentially adding 420 GW of new capacity, a 87% increase from now.
Iraq shut down production for a day at the West Qurna-2 oil field operated by Russian firm Lukoil (MCX:LKOH) due to a reported leak in the pipeline connecting it to the port of Basrah, temporarily halting some 460,000 b/d of output or 0.5% of global oil supply.
Less than a month after Shell and Equinor merged their UK North Sea assets, the French and Spanish oil majors TotalEnergies (NYSE:TTE) and Repsol (BME:REP) announced they would merge their assets under NEO NEXT+, producing some 250,000 boe/d.
Italian oil major ENI (BIT:ENI) has reported a huge natural gas discovery offshore Indonesia, some 30 miles off the coast of East Kalimantan, with its Konta-1 exploration well confirming commercial reserves of more than 600 BCf.
A US District Judge ruled that the Trump administration’s move to halt federal approvals for new wind energy projects was ‘unlawful and arbitrary’, failing to provide adequate reasoning for why the 1946 Administrative Procedure Act couldn’t be followed.
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