The American Petroleum Institute (API) estimated that crude oil inventories in the United States rose by 2.69 million barrels in the week ending July 30, despite analyst expectations for a 2 million barrel draw. In the week prior, US crude oil inventories fell by 3.3 million barrels. Commercial crude oil inventories excluding the SPR have lost just over 58 million barrels over the last sixteen weeks, with US crude inventories down just 7.2 million for the year, according to API data, kept in check by draws from the SPR. For the week ending July…

The conventional view of the Hormuz crisis is that China has been caught in an energy trap. It is the world’s largest crude importer, the Gulf remains one of its most important sources of supply, and an estimated 45–50% of Chinese crude imports normally transit the Strait of Hormuz. When traffic through the strait slows, Beijing cannot simply replace all those barrels overnight. That vulnerability is real. But it is also incomplete. China entered this crisis with large strategic and commercial inventories, diversified suppliers and…

Pakistan has played a key role as a mediator in the U.S./Israel war on Iran. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Field Marshal Asim Munir, Chief of Army Staff and Chief of Defence Forces, have raised Pakistan’s profile so much that Foreign Affairs gushed “Pakistan Won the War in Iran.” Pakistan’s leaders are practical men with working relations with Washington and Tehran and are not performing good works to save their immortal souls, but because Pakistan and Iran are “neighbors forever” and they are looking to…

Oil prices tumbled Tuesday as traders once again priced in a U.S.-Iran agreement before anyone had actually signed one. West Texas Intermediate was trading at $75.64 per barrel shortly before 2 p.m. ET, down $4.70, or 5.85%, while Brent had fallen $4.61 to $79.16. Both benchmarks touched three-week lows as hopes rose that an agreement could reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said a deal could come Tuesday or Wednesday, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio said talks involving Iran and Oman had made progress. Qatar also…

The leaders of the five Central Asian states and Azerbaijan, meeting on the shores of Lake Issyk Kul in Kyrgyzstan on July 31, signaled an intent to deepen trans-Caspian connections. The meeting’s final document, known as the Cholpon-Ata Declaration, was perhaps more symbolic than substantive, reaffirming participants’ desire to expand trade and maintain regional security. The document “reflects the high level of trust among Central Asian states and the Republic of Azerbaijan, their commitment to the principles…

The emergence of bloodthirsty right-wing paramilitary death squads in Colombia is often attributed to the rise of powerful vertically integrated cocaine cartels during the early 1980s. That interpretation, however, overlooks the deeper forces behind their emergence in a country shaped by decades of conflict and the world's longest-running multi-party low-intensity asymmetric war. Colombia's right-wing death squads, responsible for the majority of the modern conflict’s victims, predate Pablo Escobar, the Medellin Cartel and the cocaine boom.…

Venezuela exported 1.16 million barrels of crude oil daily last month, a slight decline from June’s 1.2 million barrels daily, on lower withdrawals from storage, Reuters has reported, noting that exports to the United States during that month increased. July exports to Venezuela’s biggest oil destination averaged 786,000 barrels daily, which was the highest since early 2019, Reuters noted in its report. U.S. imports from Venezuela following Washington’s toppling of President Nicolas Maduro in January have been on a steady climb,…

Namibia is rapidly emerging as Africa’s next major oil producer while neighboring South Africa, which controls roughly two-thirds of the same Orange Basin petroleum province, remains years behind in developing essentially the same petroleum system. The Orange Basin, an offshore deepwater petroleum province spanning the Atlantic maritime border between the two countries, is estimated to contain more than 20 billion barrels of oil equivalent. Yet while Namibia has attracted a succession of world-class discoveries and moved rapidly toward commercial…

The world is running short on fuels—the warning was first issued by some analysts who were watching the physical market rather than futures charts. Now, Big Oil is joining the chorus of warnings, with Shell, Exxon and Chevron all saying that prices at the pump are set to stay higher, regardless of where crude oil prices go. “The constraint pain point in the energy system is refining," Exxon’s chief financial officer Neil Hansen told Bloomberg in an interview last week. This, according to him, is “something that perhaps the…