📈 WTI crude oil futures climbed more than 3% from Friday, after not closing Monday due to the US holiday, to $94 a barrel
📈 Gold touched an eight-month high
How Japan ignored climate critics and built a global natural gas empire
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Every six hours, somewhere in the world, an LNG shipment controlled by a Japanese company leaves a port. However, these tankers are only the tip of the iceberg
Japan began importing LNG in 1969 (see attached thread about that)
Over the last 50+ years, the Japanese government and its companies have worked together to unlock new supplies from Brunei and Malaysia to Indonesia and Russia
An LNG tanker docked at a sanctioned Russian facility has no insurer, is managed by a little known Indian company and is pretending to be somewhere else
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This is how Russia is trying to circumvent US measures against its new Arctic LNG project 🧵 bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Russian gas/LNG had largely avoided sanctions since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine
That changed in Nov 2023, when the US imposed sanctions against the new Arctic LNG 2 project
While the facility began production in December, no LNG has been shipped as restrictions kept foreign companies away and stopped delivery of the specialized, ice-ready carriers
This was a key area where Western sanctions actually had a tangible impact on Russia
🚢 Russia has long sought to increase its share of the global LNG market, but the war and the subsequent sharp drop in pipeline gas Europe have reinforced the importance of these ambitions
Moscow wants to expand LNG output three-fold by 2030
Enter Arctic LNG 2, a massive complex which would boost Russia’s LNG exports by 60%
The primary mission was to develop new LNG customers in East Asia by sending fuel across the Northern Sea Route, using enormous icebreaker vessels to traverse the frozen waters
The Gulf nation of Qatar is setting itself up to control about a quarter of all liquefied natural gas production by the end of the decade -- and with it, a growing share of the world's wealth and influence
Qatar unveiled last week plans to boost LNG export capacity another 13% on top of previously announced projects, together lifting production from 77 million tons/year to 142 million tons by 2030
This will make the rich nation (with a population of just 2.7 million) much richer
So how did Qatar even get here?
Time for a (simplified) history lesson…
Fifty years ago, Qatar was largely seen as a fossil-fuel backwater compared with its Persian Gulf neighbors Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the UAE