Iran’s ominous rhetoric about making the OPEC+ countries “pay” for their “treachery” to it and hinting at taking action to stop Gulf exports has had its desired effect in raising the oil price, and similar such statements in the run-up to the November reimposition of US sanctions against the country’s energy industry should also be…
Oil realities in 2018 Donald Trump has Tweeted about a phone call to Saudi Arabia’s King Salman where the elderly monarch is said to have agreed to increase the production of oil to 2 million barrels per day so as to lower fuel prices in the United States, the world’s second largest energy consumer. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1013023608040513537…
History may have registered stranger geoeconomic bedfellows. But in the current OPEC-plus world, the rules of the game are now de facto controlled by OPEC powerhouse Saudi Arabia in concert with non-OPEC Russia. Russia may even join OPEC as an associate member. There’s a key clause in the bilateral Riyadh-Moscow agreement stipulating that joint interventions…
As TV channel Al Arabiya has reported, Jordan withdrew its ambassador Abdullah Suleyman Abu Rumman from Iran. Amman presented a very interesting interpretation to justify its actions. This decision was adopted by the Council of Ministers of the Kingdom in relation Tehran’s policy of interference into affairs of the countries of the Middle East. It…
The reported details of the forthcoming peace deal that’s expected to be signed shortly prove that the very concept of an independent South Sudan has failed. South Sudan defied all expectations and surprised the world by agreeing to a peace deal for its five-year-long civil war during international talks in the neighboring Sudanese capital of…
April 24 marks the 15th anniversary of my initial entry into Baghdad as the senior oil advisor to retired Lieutenant General Jay Garner, our US government civilian leader in Iraq. It was the beginning of my six plus years in Iraq working on the oil sector and denying the allegation that the Iraq war had…
