Headlines

South Korea and the United States have agreed on the size of Seoul's planned investment in a gas project in Texas at around $22.3 billion, Korean media outlet Edaily reported on Monday, citing unidentified officials and politicians. The project, which would be Seoul's first U.S. investment under last year's trade agreement, aims to build a 6.3-gigawatt gas plant in Encinal, Texas, to meet rising power demand for AI data centres, according to the media reports. The investment would be part of [Read more]

Iran threatened on Monday to retaliate against any new U.S. attacks on its assets, warning that the energy production chain in the region was "sprawling, accessible and exposed" and that U.S. oil and gas companies there shared that exposure. "Strike our assets and you get struck," Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf said after U.S. and Iranian strikes on shipping at the weekend that pushed oil prices up to six-week highs at one point on Monday. On Sunday, senior Iranian security [Read more]

Goldman Sachs said oil prices may rally to as much as $120 a barrel if attacks on shipping in the Middle East rise and it recommended bets on natural gas and diesel as a way to capture gains, Bloomberg News reported on Sunday. “Events over the last few days do suggest that the risk of shipping disruptions broadening and intensifying is an important one," Daan Struyven, co-head of global commodities research, said in an interview on Bloomberg TV. In addition, the bank said oil could fall to $80 [Read more]

Oil prices extended gains on Monday as tit-for-tat strikes between the U.S. and Iran on vessels sailing in the Strait of Hormuz and other areas heightened concerns of a prolonged supply disruption from the Middle East. Brent crude futures climbed 52 cents, or 0.54%, to $96.80 a barrel by 2354 GMT while U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude was at $92.14 a barrel, up 66 cents, or 0.72%. Brent rose 7.8% last week while WTI gained nearly 10% after the U.S. and Iran resumed attacks and caused a [Read more]

China's seaborne imports of crude oil ticked up in August from July but remained nearly 40% below levels before the start of the Iran conflict. China, the world's biggest oil importer, saw seaborne arrivals of 7.14 million barrels per day (bpd) in August, from July's 6.93 million bpd, according to data compiled by commodity analysts Kpler. August's imports were 4.27 million bpd below the average of 11.41 million bpd in the three months leading up to the U.S. and Israeli attack on Iran on [Read more]

An average of 10 commodity ships transited the Strait of Hormuz per day over the past 10 days, the lowest since May, according to shipping data on Monday, after U.S. and Iranian strikes on tankers. The 10-day moving average was 10 on Sunday, down from more than 15 on Friday and nearly 13 on Saturday, data from analytics firm Kpler found. Only two vessels passed through the strait on Saturday while six went through on Sunday, mostly using the Iranian route. U.S. forces struck three Iranian oil [Read more]

U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) said U.S. forces struck and disabled three Iranian crude oil tankers on Sept. 5 after Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps fired ballistic missiles toward two U.S. Navy warships in regional waters. The U.S. military said the attacks caused no American casualties and described the tanker strikes as retaliation aimed at imposing an economic cost on the IRGC. “Let the message to the IRGC be clear: If you shoot at two of our ships, we will impose an even higher [Read more]

The billionaire who helped broker the Trump administration’s sweeping long-term oil deal with Venezuela was until recently a target of U.S. money-laundering investigations involving funds embezzled from the state-owned oil company PDVSA. Now, after assisting U.S. authorities ahead of the capture of authoritarian leader Nicolas Maduro, Alejandro Betancourt is Washington’s key partner in an unusual oil agreement with Caracas. According to last week’s announcement, the U.S. gains access to about [Read more]