Surgutneftegaz, one of Russia’s largest oil producers, has sold four cargoes of ESPO Blend crude at premiums above $7 a barrel to Dubai quotes, the highest level seen since late 2013, several trade sources told Reuters on Wednesday. Premiums were about $7.20 a barrel in the Surgut tender that closed late on Tuesday, three of the sources said, up more than $2 a barrel, about 50%, from previous trades for ESPO crude cargoes loading in late October. Trading house Glencore bought three of the cargoes, while one went to China’s ...

Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF) said it received no offers for feed-quality wheat or barley in a simultaneous buy and sell (SBS) auction that closed late on Wednesday. The ministry had sought 120,000 tonnes of feed wheat and 200,000 tonnes of feed barley to be loaded by Dec. 31 and arrive in Japan by Feb. 27, 2020, in what is usually a weekly tender. It is seeking the same amounts for each grain to be loaded and shipped during the same period in a similar tender that ...

Algeria’s state grains agency OAIC bought about 420,000 to 600,000 tonnes of milling wheat in a tender which closed on Tuesday, European traders said on Wednesday. It was bought at about $211 a tonne c&f, traders said. Some traders put the price at $211-$213 a tonne. The wheat can be sourced from optional origins but traders suspected the grain may well be sourced in France and the Baltic Sea region. Algeria does not disclose the results of its tenders and purchase reports are based on trade assessments. The wheat was ...

Vietnam will remove the import duty on crude oil for domestic refiner Binh Son Refining and Petrochemical Co. effective November 1, the government said in a statement Tuesday. Under the decision signed by Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc on September 16, the import duty will be cut to 0% from the current 5%, the statement said. The government’s decision follows numerous requests from BSR, the operator of the 148,000 b/d Dung Quat refinery, for the 5% duty to be removed. BSR has said the duty negatively affects its profit and ...

Niger’s president this week launched construction work on a new oil pipeline running from the landlocked country into neighboring Benin, which is set to help Niger achieve its ambitions of becoming a crude exporter. President Mahamadou Issoufou lay the first stone for the commencement of pipeline construction works Monday, along with officials from Niger’s petroleum ministry and China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), as well as independent oil operator Savannah Petroleum. The 90,000 b/d route is expected to be in place by 2021. The 1,829 km pipeline will transport crude oil ...

India is looking at raising oil imports from Russia, its oil minister said, at a time of surging oil prices after an attack on Saudi Arabian facilities halved the kingdom’s production. Dharmendra Pradhan said he had met the chief executive of Russian oil major Rosneft, Igor Sechin, and that four Indian companies planned to increase their investment in Russia’s oilfields. The oil minister also attempted to calm nerves on supplies, saying he was confident that India, the world’s third-largest oil consumer, had a diverse crude basket. Saudi Arabia is the ...

The UAE and Saudi Arabia confirmed that the third batch comprising 200,000 tonnes of wheat has been dispatched to Sudan, meeting the needs of the population for this strategic commodity. In April, the UAE and Saudi Arabia announced their commitment to providing 540,000 tonnes of wheat to enhance food security in Sudan. Last month, both countries shipped two batches of wheat totalling 140,000 tonnes. Mohammad Saif Al Suwaidi, Director-General, Abu Dhabi Fund for Development (ADFD), said: “The food aid is a result of the wise guidance of the leaderships of ...

Saudi Aramco informed PetroChina that some of its loadings of light crude oil for October will be delayed by up to about 10 days, in the wake of Saturday’s attacks on the kingdom’s key oil facilities, according to a senior Chinese state oil source with knowledge of the matter. However, Aramco, the state oil company of Saudi Arabia, will still supply the same grades and volumes of light crude oil requested for October nominations, the source said. The Chinese state refiner was also told that some of its September-loading light ...

Indonesia took in a total of 1.106 million mt of gasoline in July, a stark fall of 21.4% on the month and the smallest volume year to date, detailed figures from Statistics Indonesia showed this week. The drop had, however, been widely anticipated by Asian gasoline market participants, who attributed the reduction in July imports to high domestic stock levels. This comes after several months of heavy buying by state-owned Pertamina, they said. Indonesia bought 3.504 million mt of gasoline in the first quarter of this year, and 4.09 million ...

Japan’s naphtha imports for the petrochemical sector rose 10% in August from a year earlier, government figures showed on Tuesday. Imports of naphtha for ethylene production totalled 1.14 million tonnes last month, up from 1.04 million tonnes in the same month a year earlier, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry said. Following is a table of naphtha import volume. Following is a table of naphtha import volume. Name Aug 2019 Jul 2019 Aug 2018 Total import (kilolitres) 1,673,362 1,653,502 1,520,279 Total import (tonnes) 1,139,965 1,132,619 1,039,552 Total import value ...

Exports of Russian Urals crude oil from Baltic Sea ports is seen rising by 26% quarter-on-quarter in the October-December quarter to 20 million tonnes as a contamination crisis gradually subsides, a supply schedule showed. Exports from Ust-Luga – the port hit hardest by the tainted oil crisis – are set to rise to 8.2 million tonnes from 2.8 million tonnes, it showed. Russian crude export flows were disrupted in April and following months after high levels of organic chloride were found in crude pumped via the Druzhba pipeline to Ust-Luga. ...

Saudi Aramco informed PetroChina that some of its loadings of light crude oil for October will be delayed by up to about 10 days after Saturday’s attacks on the kingdom’s oil facilities, according to a senior Chinese state oil source with knowledge of the matter. However, Aramco, the state oil company of Saudi Arabia, will still supply the same grades and volumes requested for October nominations, the source said. The weekend attack on oil processing facilities at Abqaiq and Khurais knocked out half of the oil output from the world’s ...

SB&B Foods Inc., a large-scale family-owned agriculture company in North Dakota, is looking to triple its soybean exports to the Philippines over the next five years on growing demand for soy-based products in the Southeast Asian nation. Robert Sinner, President of SB&B, said his company is capable of supplying more soybeans to the Philippines moving forward despite the challenges faced by United States’ farm sector in terms of prices and production of the commodity. “We export a thousand metric tons a year to the Philippines,” Sinner told participants of the ...

China’s Unipec, the trading arm of Asia’s top oil refiner Sinopec, chartered at least four crude tankers this week from the United States, ramping up shipments after attacks on Saudi Arabia’s oil facilities and as trade tensions between the world’s two largest economies cool, sources said. Three Aframax vessels that can carry about 750,000 barrels, and one supertanker that can hold about 2 million barrels of crude, have been chartered by Unipec tentatively, according to a shipping source and Refinitiv Eikon data. The attack on Saudi oil facilities on Saturday ...

Amid a flurry of Twitter posts on Monday morning, U.S. President Donald Trump turned to the weekend attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil facilities and assured his audience the United States had become such a big producer it no longer needed oil from the Middle East here U.S. government data tells a different story: The technology-driven U.S. drilling boom that started more than a decade ago has made the United States a massive producer, but imports of crude oil and petroleum products from the Gulf region last year still flowed in ...