The Dragon, a massive oil tanker flying the Liberian flag, is supposed to be floating somewhere off the coast of France, according to its last GPS signal. Instead, it’s currently thousands of miles away in Venezuela where, under contract for the Russian state-oil giant Rosneft Oil Co PJSC, it loaded 2 million barrels of oil, according to data compiled by Bloomberg and shipping reports. How’s that possible? Because the ship’s transponders were turned off before it slipped into Venezuelan waters, the data shows. The practice of oil tankers turning off ...

The Ministry of Petroleum aims to increase the revenues of Egypt’s oil exports by the end of the current fiscal year (FY) to $8.5bn compared to $7.7bn FY 2018/19. Senior government sources told Daily News Egypt that the total quantities targeted for exports of crude oil, gas, petroleum products, and petrochemicals amount to 17.7m tonnes. They added that the value of exports includes the foreign partner’s share of crude oil by calculating the average price of the Gulf of Suez crude oil at $55 per barrel due to the lower ...

Azerbaijan’s declared oil exports amounted to 26.85 million tons worth $12.96 billion in January-October 2019, the State Customs Committee has told local media. In the same period of 2018, the declared oil export from Azerbaijan amounted to 24.2 million tons worth $12.9 billion. Thus, over the reporting period of 2019, oil export increased in quantitative terms by 11 percent, while in value terms by 0.3 percent. The Committee’s data says the export of gas volumes declared by customs from Azerbaijan for indicated period of 2019 made up 9.6 billion cubic ...

India’s palm oil imports climbed 8% in the marketing year ended Oct. 31 compared with the same period a year earlier as buying of refined palm oil from Malaysia surged after New Delhi reduced import tax on the oil, a leading trade body said. The higher palm oil purchases, hitting 9.4 million tonnes, lifted India’s total vegetable oil imports by 3.5% for the 12 months to 15.5 million tonnes, the Solvent Extractors’ Association (SEA) said in a statement. New Delhi’s refined palm oil imports in the 2018/19 marketing year jumped ...

Malaysia signed a pact on Thursday for exports of palm oil to south Asia next year, amid uncertainty over trade with India after its dealers last month urged a boycott of palm oil from the southeast Asian nation. In October, India’s top vegetable oil trade body told members to stop buying palm oil from the world’s second largest producer and exporter of the commodity, after remarks by Malaysia’s prime minister on disputed Kashmir stirred anger. Malaysia has signed a preliminary pact with Dubai-based Hakan Agro DMCC, which is confident of ...

U.S. crude oil imports decreased while exports increased during the week ending Friday, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) said. U.S. crude oil imports averaged 5.75 million barrels per day (b/d) last week, down by 327,000 b/d from the previous week, while crude oil exports averaged about 2.63 million b/d, up by about 262,000 b/d from the previous week, according to the Weekly Petroleum Status Report. Over the past four weeks, crude oil imports averaged about 6.10 million b/d, down by 1.41 million b/d year on year, while crude oil ...

South Korea’s U.S. crude oil imports jumped 57.8% in October, while its crude imports from Iran remained at zero for a six straight month due to U.S. sanctions, customs data showed on Friday. South Korea imported around 1.8 million tonnes of crude oil from the United States last month, or 424,832 barrels per day (bpd), versus 1.14 million tonnes a year earlier, according to the customs data. The United States was South Korea’s No.2 crude oil supplier after Saudi Arabia last month. The jump in U.S. crude oil comes as ...

Russia reduced exports of crude oil to Germany in the year to September by 17.8%, still reflecting a halt in the Druzhba pipeline between April and June due to contamination, official data showed. Russia accounted for 30.7% of Germany’s oil receipts in January-September, but at 19.6 million tonnes delivered less than the 23.9 million recorded in the same 2018 period, according to statistics from the BAFA foreign trade office. A drop in shipments by a quarter in January-June had shown how much the contamination affected Russia’s role as top crude ...

Argentine oil company YPF SA has sold its first commercial liquefied natural gas (LNG) cargo to Brazilian state energy firm Petroleo Brasileiro SA, known as Petrobras, three industry sources said. YPF closed on Nov. 6 a tender to sell 2.1 trillion British thermal units (Tbtu) of LNG for loading from FLNG Tango, the liquefaction vessel off Bahia Blanca. The cargo loaded from the facility on Oct. 26 on the LNG tanker Excalibur. The vessel is now on the move, Refinitiv shipping data showed. Argentina, typically an importer of LNG, started ...

Britain’s Grain liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal exported the highest ever daily amount of gas to the UK grid this week , marking record daily exports from a European LNG terminal, operator National Grid said. The terminal on the Isle of Grain, in south-east England, exported 698 gigawatt hours (GWh) of gas into the country’s network on Wednesday, over 100 GWh more than its previous record and representing around a quarter of UK gas demand. “The record activity is due to a global LNG oversupply, which has seen significantly more ...

South Korean state-owned Korea Gas Corporation’s LNG imports decreased 12.4% for the first nine months of 2019 amid declining LNG demand for power generation, a company official said Thursday. The state utility, one of the world’s biggest LNG buyers, imported 24.324 million mt over January-September, compared with 27.774 million mt in the same period last year. The source did not disclose how much it imported in the third quarter alone. But given its January-June imports of 16.995 million mt, Q3 imports would be 7.329 million mt, down 4% from 7.634 ...

Aluminum Corp of China Ltd, known as Chalco, is set to make its first shipment from Boffa’s bauxite mine in Guinea by early-December, an official from parent and state-owned company Chinalco said on Thursday. A Chinalco official said last month at the China Mining conference in Tianjin that the Boffa launch had been delayed until 2020. Operations at the mine are now expected to be underway by early-December and it will eventually produce 12 million tonnes of bauxite a year. “The mining operation has already started and the first output ...

Brazilian corn exporters are enjoying a banner year thanks to a big crop and improved logistics, burnishing the country’s status as a top global corn supplier and threatening the United States’ traditional dominance in the arena. The United States is likely to remain the leading exporter for now, but Brazilian corn has recently been capturing more business from traditional U.S. customers than before. Some of that is due to this year’s circumstances, but some of the gains could be more permanent. Through October, Brazil had exported 34.7 million tonnes of ...

India’s palm oil imports in October probably retreated from a one-year high as traders and refiners trimmed buying after overseas supplies became more expensive. Shipments dropped about 12% from a month earlier to 775,000 tons, according to the median of five estimates in a Bloomberg survey of processors, brokers and analysts. That’s the lowest since June. Imports were 879,947 tons in September. The Solvent Extractors’ Association may release its data this week. The decline in purchases by India, the world’s biggest importer, may boost inventories in top producers Indonesia and ...

Taiwan’s CPC Corp closed a tender earlier this week to buy liquefied natural gas (LNG) cargoes for delivery over 2020, three industry sources said. The company was looking for one cargo a month through the tender which closed on Nov. 11, one of them said. It has likely awarded the tender, a second source said, though details of seller and price were not immediately clear. Source: Reuters (Reporting by Jessica Jaganathan)