Month: March 2022

European leaders have grown quite fond of bandying about the notion of liberating their economies from their dependence on Russian oil and gas. Unfortunately, the numbers just don’t make sense.

On Tuesday, the FT highlighted how Washington’s pledge to wean Europe off of Russian gas by boosting LNG exports simply doesn’t add up.

As a reminder, the US plan is supposed to work in three steps: first, it will help the EU secure short-term liquefied natural gas supplies to begin displacing Russian gas. Second, Europe will work “toward the goal of ensuring” a bigger market for US gas by 2030. Third, the US would help Europe accelerate its transition to clean energy.

But how much more gas can the US even export? Limits on both exporters’ capacity and Europe’s infrastructure and ability to absorb gas imports by boat suggest that, for the foreseeable future, the notion of offsetting Russian energy exports is pretty much a pipe dream.

The US says it aims to add 15 billion cubic meters of LNG to the EU this year, with more in the years to come. It didn’t specify the origins of the gas, noting it would “work with international partners”. By comparison, Russia currently exports 155 billion cubic meters a year of gas to the EU.

However, the baseline for this 15 billion pledge isn’t clear. While the US shipped about 22 billion cubic meters of gas to Europe in 2021, it has already sent about 10 billion in the first quarter of this year. All of it is in the form of LNG, which is much more expensive to ship than gas that flows through a pipeline (as most of the Russian gas arriving in the bloc does).

Since October, America’s LNG exports to Europe have already more than doubled.

Source: FT

Looking ahead, a team of analysts at Goldman Sachs warned clients in a recent research note that there’s little scope for the US to boost LNG exports between now and 2025.

Another major obstacle to replacing Russian gas with American (or Qatari, or Saudi or Australian) LNG is the lack of necessary infrastructure available in Europe. LNG must be carefully offloaded and “regasified” from its liquid state after arriving at its destination. And most European countries simply don’t have the necessary infrastructure to accomplish this. Perhaps this is why European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has called on the EU to “pool its resources”, while Germany has suggested renting floating “regasification” vessels.

And even though the bloc’s energy situation is more precarious than it has been in years, the clean-energy partisans are have vehemently opposed the construction of more of this LNG infrastructure for fear that it could undermine their agenda of renewables-first.

This is a U-turn from previous EU purchasing decisions as many buyers had stopped negotiating with US developers for LNG due to ESG [environmental, social and governance] concerns,” said Sindre Knutsson at Rystad Energy, a consultancy.

Environmentalists were scathing. “Allowing for the expansion of new and expanded gas export facilities would lock in decades of reliance on risky, volatile fossil fuels and spell disaster for our climate,” said Kelly Sheehan at the Sierra Club.

Even if Europe did manage to rapidly build out the infrastructure (which is unlikely, given the opposition from the ESG fanatics), they would likely have trouble convincing exporters to cut them in. After all, why would the Saudis (who have so far steadfastly refused to boost production in the face of the Ukraine conflict), or the UAE reroute their oil and gas from rapidly growing Asian markets (where demand is expected to remain robust for years to come) to Europe (where any short-term increase in demand is expected to be quickly offset by the bloc’s pivot to renewables?).

That’s a question President Biden and his European compatriots have been struggling to answer.

Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

Federal health minister Karl Lauterbach has expressed fears about a wave of unvaccinated Ukrainian refugees entering Germany.

Lauterbach joined other public officials in voicing concern over “huge vaccination gaps” amongst Ukrainians.

Only around 35 per cent of Ukrainians have had a COVID-19 jab and many were given the Chinese Sinovac version, which isn’t recognized in Germany.

“We will talk about how we can provide health care to the people who have fled to us from Ukraine,” Lauterbach told public broadcaster ZDF. “This includes the Vaccination.”

“We will look at what role vaccination centres can play in this,” he added.

Lauterbach’s suggestion that vaccination may become a condition of providing asylum would correlate with his previous support for mandatory vaccinations for Germans.

“We now have to vaccinate the children, but also the adults, very quickly,” he said. “And we are working hard on that.”

Part of the concerns appear to relate to the agenda to force a mandatory vax on Germans, a process that would possibly be derailed by a large influx of unjabbed Ukrainians.

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As the Bank of England scrambles to try and tame inflation with aggressive rate hikes, Bank of England Gov. Andrew Bailey warned during a speech this week that the British economy is sliding into stagflationary hell as the energy price crunch spurs inflation that’s hotter than at any point during the 1970s.

While HMG has sought to alleviate the impact of higher energy prices with direct fiscal transfers to millions of British families (perhaps they should ask the San Francisco Fed how that might turn out), Bailey warned that the British economy is already on the cusp of slipping into stagflation.

According to Bailey, surging energy costs have forced the BoE’s Monetary Policy Committee to confront the biggest challenge in its short history (it was former in 1997): how can a central bank tackle inflation without driving the economy into recession?

Assuming the war in Ukraine drags on (the latest headlines point to a breakthrough in peace talks, but whether progress actually materializes remains to be seen),  Bailey expects the UK’s consumer-price inflation to top 8% during the second quarter (it’s already higher than 6%, more than 3x the central bank’s inflationary target).

These inflationary pressure represent a “historic shock” to incomes.

Bailey said Britons were facing a “very large shock to aggregate real income and spending” from rising prices of energy and imported goods. He told an event organised by Bruegel, the think-tank, in Brussels: “This is really an historic shock to real incomes.”

One of the main differences between today and the 1970s is that the oil shock back then lingered for years, while Bailey said he and his fellow policymakers hope that this latest bout of inflation will start to ease before the end of the year.

“The shock from energy prices this year will be larger than any single year in the 1970s. The caveat is that the 1970s had a succession of years and we very much hope that would not be the case now. But as a single year, this is a very, very big shock.”

To further underscore the difficulty of the situation, the British Office for Budget Responsibility predicted that UK household real income this year would contract at the sharpest rate since records began in the 1950s. Meanwhile, the OBR cut its UK growth forecast for 2022 from 6% to 3.8%.

Bailey said: “We expect it to cause growth and demand to slow. We’re beginning to see the evidence of that in both consumer and business surveys.”

With its inflation and growth forecasts pulling the central bank in different directions, Bailey suggested that the BoE is now caught between a rock and a hard place.

“This is a big trade-off,” he added. “I think it’s the biggest trade-off the Monetary Policy Committee has faced in its now approaching 25 years life.”

The prescription, of course, is QT and rate hikes. And with the conservative government reluctant to embrace the level of fiscal expansion seen abroad (most notably in the US), Britons should probably brace for hard times ahead, as the only cure for runaway inflation is demand destruction.

Authored by Nicholas Delinger via The Epoch Times,

The European Commission has called for EU members to cease the practice of selling citizenship to investors and to suspend the sale of immigration visas to citizens of Russia and Belarus.

On Monday, the European Commission issued a recommendation to member states of the European Union, urging these nations to limit access to such so-called “golden passport” programs to individuals connected with the Russian and Belarusian governments, in response to the former nation’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

“Some Russian or Belarusian nationals who are subject to sanctions or are significantly supporting the war in Ukraine might have acquired EU citizenship or privileged access to the EU, including to travel freely in the Schengen area, under these schemes,” the European Commission said.

For years, the sale of EU visas has been a multi-billion dollar industry and a valuable source of income for the nations participating. However, this practice has been the bane of regulators in the European Parliament, many of whom consider such programs a security risk for the visa-free zone of the Schengen Area, which encompasses most the the EU.

Presently, only three EU states have programs for the direct sale of passports: Bulgaria, Cyprus, and Malta, all of which have committed to ending such programs.

However, golden visa schemes remain somewhat more widespread. Like golden passport programs, these schemes allow for investors to receive immigration benefits from significant investment in the country sponsoring them, with little or no expectation that they must reside in the country.

The new push may be interpreted as the EU’s latest effort to undermine Putin’s grip on power by punishing the Russian oligarchs, many of whom enjoy time spent abroad in Western Europe with their lavish fortunes.

Previously, European officials have targeted the Russian oligarchy with measures such as freezing Russian assets, impounding the private jets, and seizing the summer homes of the nation’s wealthiest expatriates. In so doing, policymakers hope to stir discontent among the keys to power in the Russian Federation, placing pressure on Putin to walk back the war in Ukraine.

However, with the suspension of golden passport programs, there is an additional benefit: such a policy would close the door to potential security risks, as oligarchs sympathetic to Putin’s Russia could possibly use their security as citizens of European countries to undermine the EU.

The European Commission urged members to review carefully Russian and Belarussian beneficiaries of such program, cautioning nations to withdraw the naturalization of any individual blacklisted by EU members or who “supports by any means the war in Ukraine or other related activities of the Russian government or Lukashenko regime breaching international law.”

It said some Russians or Belarusians are among 877 individuals listed for asset freezes and travel bans imposed since 2014 who might have acquired EU citizenship and had access to the Schengen area.

Authored by John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours…. When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.”

– Professor Neil Postman

Once again, the programming has changed.

Like clockwork, the wall-to-wall news coverage of the latest crisis has shifted gears.

We have gone from COVID-19 lockdowns to Trump-Biden election drama to the Russia-Ukraine crisis to the Ketanji Brown Jackson confirmation hearings to Will Smith’s on-camera assault of comedian Chris Rock at the Academy Awards Ceremony.

The distractions, distortions, and political theater just keep coming.

The ongoing reality show that is life in the American police state feeds the citizenry’s voracious appetite for titillating, soap opera drama.

Much like the fabricated universe in Peter Weir’s 1998 film The Truman Show, in which a man’s life is the basis for an elaborately staged television show aimed at selling products and procuring ratings, the political scene in the United States has devolved over the years into a carefully calibrated exercise in how to manipulate, polarize, propagandize and control a population.

This is the magic of the reality TV programming that passes for politics today: as long as we are distracted, entertained, occasionally outraged, always polarized but largely uninvolved and content to remain in the viewer’s seat, we’ll never manage to present a unified front against tyranny (or government corruption and ineptitude) in any form.

The more that is beamed at us, the more inclined we are to settle back in our comfy recliners and become passive viewers rather than active participants as unsettling, frightening events unfold.

We don’t even have to change the channel when the subject matter becomes too monotonous. That’s taken care of for us by the programmers (the corporate media).

“Living is easy with eyes closed,” observed John Lennon, and that’s exactly what reality TV that masquerades as American politics programs the citizenry to do: navigate the world with their eyes shut.

As long as we’re viewers, we’ll never be doers.

Studies suggest that the more reality TV people watch—and I would posit that it’s all reality TV, entertainment news included—the more difficult it becomes to distinguish between what is real and what is carefully crafted farce.

“We the people” are watching a lot of TV.

On average, Americans spend five hours a day watching television. By the time we reach age 65, we’re watching more than 50 hours of television a week, and that number increases as we get older. And reality TV programming consistently captures the largest percentage of TV watchers every season by an almost 2-1 ratio.

This doesn’t bode well for a citizenry able to sift through masterfully-produced propaganda in order to think critically about the issues of the day, whether it’s fake news peddled by government agencies or foreign entities.

Those who watch reality shows tend to view what they see as the “norm.” Thus, those who watch shows characterized by lying, aggression and meanness not only come to see such behavior as acceptable and entertaining but also mimic the medium.

This holds true whether the reality programming is about the antics of celebrities in the White House, in the board room, or in the bedroom.

It’s a phenomenon called “humilitainment.”

A term coined by media scholars Brad Waite and Sara Booker, “humilitainment” refers to the tendency for viewers to take pleasure in someone else’s humiliation, suffering and pain.

“Humilitainment” largely explains not only why American TV watchers are so fixated on reality TV programming but how American citizens, largely insulated from what is really happening in the world around them by layers of technology, entertainment, and other distractions, are being programmed to accept the government’s brutality, surveillance and dehumanizing treatment as things happening to other people.

The ramifications for the future of civic engagement, political discourse and self-government are incredibly depressing and demoralizing.

This explains how we keep getting saddled with leaders in government who are clueless about the Constitution and out-of-touch with the needs of the people they were appointed to represent.

This is also what happens when an entire nation—bombarded by reality TV programming, government propaganda and entertainment news—becomes systematically desensitized and acclimated to the trappings of a government that operates by fiat and speaks in a language of force.

Ultimately, the reality shows, the entertainment news, the surveillance society, the militarized police, and the political spectacles have one common objective: to keep us divided, distracted, imprisoned, and incapable of taking an active role in the business of self-government.

Look behind the political spectacles, the reality TV theatrics, the sleight-of-hand distractions and diversions, and the stomach-churning, nail-biting drama, and you will find there is a method to the madness.

We have become guinea pigs in a ruthlessly calculated, carefully orchestrated, chillingly cold-blooded experiment in how to control a population and advance a political agenda without much opposition from the citizenry.

This is mind-control in its most sinister form.

How do you change the way people think? You start by changing the words they use.

In totalitarian regimes where conformity and compliance are enforced at the end of a loaded gun, the government dictates what words can and cannot be used.

In countries where tyranny hides behind a benevolent mask and disguises itself as tolerance, the citizens censor themselves, policing their words and thoughts to conform to the dictates of the mass mind.

Even when the motives behind this rigidly calibrated reorientation of societal language appear well-intentioned—discouraging racism, condemning violence, denouncing discrimination and hatred—inevitably, the end result is the same: intolerance, indoctrination, infantilism, the chilling of free speech and the demonizing of viewpoints that run counter to the cultural elite.

As George Orwell recognized, “In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

Orwell understood only too well the power of language to manipulate the masses.

In Orwell’s 1984, Big Brother does away with all undesirable and unnecessary words and meanings, even going so far as to routinely rewrite history and punish “thoughtcrimes.” In this dystopian vision of the future, the Thought Police serve as the eyes and ears of Big Brother, while the Ministry of Peace deals with war and defense, the Ministry of Plenty deals with economic affairs (rationing and starvation), the Ministry of Love deals with law and order (torture and brainwashing), and the Ministry of Truth deals with news, entertainment, education and art (propaganda). The mottos of Oceania: WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

Orwell’s Big Brother relied on Newspeak to eliminate undesirable words, strip such words as remained of unorthodox meanings and make independent, non-government-approved thought altogether unnecessary.

Where we stand now is at the juncture of Oldspeak (where words have meanings, and ideas can be dangerous) and Newspeak (where only that which is “safe” and “accepted” by the majority is permitted).

Truth is often lost when we fail to distinguish between opinion and fact, and that is the danger we now face as a society. Anyone who relies exclusively on television/cable news hosts and political commentators for actual knowledge of the world is making a serious mistake.

Unfortunately, since Americans have by and large become non-readers, television has become their prime source of so-called “news.” This reliance on TV news has given rise to such popular news personalities who draw in vast audiences that virtually hang on their every word.

In our media age, these are the new powers-that-be.

Yet while these personalities often dispense the news like preachers used to dispense religion, with power and certainty, they are little more than conduits for propaganda and advertisements delivered in the guise of entertainment and news.

Given the preponderance of news-as-entertainment programming, it’s no wonder that viewers have largely lost the ability to think critically and analytically and differentiate between truth and propaganda, especially when delivered by way of fake news criers and politicians.

While television news cannot—and should not—be completely avoided, the following suggestions will help you better understand the nature of TV news.

1. TV news is not what happened. Rather, it is what someone thinks is worth reporting. Although there are still some good TV journalists, the old art of investigative reporting has largely been lost. While viewers are often inclined to take what is reported by television “news” hosts at face value, it is your responsibility to judge and analyze what is reported.

2. TV news is entertainment. There is a reason why the programs you watch are called news “shows.” It’s a signal that the so-called news is being delivered as a form of entertainment. “In the case of most news shows,” write Neil Postman and Steve Powers in their insightful book, How to Watch TV News (1992), “the package includes attractive anchors, an exciting musical theme, comic relief, stories placed to hold the audience, the creation of the illusion of intimacy, and so on.”

Of course, the point of all this glitz and glamour is to keep you glued to the set so that a product can be sold to you. (Even the TV news hosts get in on the action by peddling their own products, everything from their latest books to mugs and bathrobes.) Although the news items spoon-fed to you may have some value, they are primarily a commodity to gather an audience, which will in turn be sold to advertisers.

3. Never underestimate the power of commercials, especially to news audiences. In an average household, the television set is on over seven hours a day. Most people, believing themselves to be in control of their media consumption, are not really bothered by this. But TV is a two-way attack: it not only delivers programming to your home, it also delivers you (the consumer) to a sponsor.

People who watch the news tend to be more attentive, educated and have more money to spend. They are, thus, a prime market for advertisers. And sponsors spend millions on well-produced commercials. Such commercials are often longer in length than most news stories and cost more to produce than the news stories themselves. Moreover, the content of many commercials, which often contradicts the messages of the news stories, cannot be ignored. Most commercials are aimed at prurient interests in advocating sex, overindulgence, drugs, etc., which has a demoralizing effect on viewers, especially children.

4. It is vitally important to learn about the economic and political interests of those who own the “corporate” media.

There are few independent news sources anymore. The major news outlets are owned by corporate empires.

5. Pay special attention to the language of newscasts. Because film footage and other visual imagery are so engaging on TV news shows, viewers are apt to allow language—what the reporter is saying about the images—to go unexamined. A TV news host’s language frames the pictures, and, therefore, the meaning we derive from the picture is often determined by the host’s commentary. TV by its very nature manipulates viewers. One must never forget that every television minute has been edited. The viewer does not see the actual event but the edited form of the event. For example, presenting a one- to two-minute segment from a two-hour political speech and having a TV talk show host critique may be disingenuous, but such edited footage is a regular staple on news shows. Add to that the fact that the reporters editing the film have a subjective view—sometimes determined by their corporate bosses—that enters in.

6. Reduce by at least one-half the amount of TV news you watch. TV news generally consists of “bad” news—wars, torture, murders, scandals and so forth. It cannot possibly do you any harm to excuse yourself each week from much of the mayhem projected at you on the news. Do not form your concept of reality based on television. TV news, it must be remembered, does not reflect normal everyday life. Studies indicate that a heavy viewing of TV news makes people think the world is much more dangerous than it actually is.

7. One of the reasons many people are addicted to watching TV news is that they feel they must have an opinion on almost everything, which gives the illusion of participation in American life. But an “opinion” is all that we can gain from TV news because it only presents the most rudimentary and fragmented information on anything. Thus, on most issues we don’t really know much about what is actually going on. And, of course, we are expected to take what the TV news host says on an issue as gospel truth. But isn’t it better to think for yourself? Add to this that we need to realize that we often don’t have enough information from the “news” source to form a true opinion. How can that be done? Study a broad variety of sources, carefully analyze issues in order to be better informed, and question everything.

The bottom line is simply this: Americans should beware of letting others—whether they be television news hosts, political commentators or media corporations—do their thinking for them.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, a populace that cannot think for themselves is a populace with its backs to the walls: mute in the face of elected officials who refuse to represent us, helpless in the face of police brutality, powerless in the face of militarized tactics and technology that treat us like enemy combatants on a battlefield, and naked in the face of government surveillance that sees and hears all.

It’s time to change the channel, tune out the reality TV show, and push back against the real menace of the police state.

If not, if we continue to sit back and lose ourselves in political programming, we will remain a captive audience to a farce that grows more absurd by the minute.

Pipelines are the primary method of transporting crude oil around the world, delivering oil and its derivative products swiftly to refineries and empowering reliant businesses.

And, as Visual Capitalist’s Christina Kostandi and Niccolo Conte detail below, North America is a major oil hub, with the U.S. and Canada alone are home to more than 90,000 miles of crude oil and petroleum product pipelines, along with more than 140 refineries that can process around 20 million barrels of oil every day.

This interactive graphic uses data from Rextag to map out crude oil pipelines and refineries across the U.S. and Canada, showcasing individual pipeline diameter and daily refinery throughput.

The Longest Crude Oil Pipeline Networks in North America

Since 2010, U.S. crude oil production has more than doubled from 5.4 million barrels a day to more than 11.5 million. Meanwhile, the pipeline networks needed to transport this newly produced oil have only expanded by roughly 56%.

Today, the largest pipeline network across the U.S. and Canada (with a diameter of at least 10 inches) is the 14,919 mile network managed by Plains, which spans from the northwestern tip of Alberta all the way down to the southern coasts of Texas and Louisiana.

Enbridge owns the next largest crude oil pipeline network, with 12,974 miles of crude oil pipelines that are at least 10 inches in diameter. The Canadian company, one of the world’s largest oil companies, transports about 30% of the crude oil produced in North America.

Following the networks of Plains and Enbridge, there’s a steep drop off in the length of pipeline networks, with Sunoco’s crude oil pipeline network spanning about half the length of Enbridge’s at 6,409 miles.

The Largest Crude Oil Refineries in North America

These various sprawling pipeline networks initially carry crude oil to refineries, where it is processed into gasoline, diesel fuel, and other petroleum products.

The refineries with the largest throughput in North America are all located in the Gulf Coast (PADD 3), with the five refineries that process more than 500,000 barrels per day all located in the states of Louisiana and Texas.

While Texas and Louisiana have six refineries that process more than 400,000 barrels per day, there are only two other facilities outside of these states with the same kind of throughput, located in Whiting, Indiana (435,000 barrels per day) and Fort McMurray, Alberta (465,000 barrels per day).

Fort McMurray’s facility is an upgrader, which differs from refineries as it upgrades heavy oils like bitumen into lighter synthetic crude oil which flows through pipelines more easily. Many oil refineries aren’t able to directly convert bitumen, which is extracted from oil sands like those found in Alberta, making upgraders a necessary part in the production and processing of crude oil from oil sands.

The Uncertain Future of New Pipelines in North America

The development of new pipelines remains a contentious issue in Canada and the U.S., with the cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline emblematic of growing anti-pipeline sentiment. In 2021, only 14 petroleum liquids pipeline projects were completed in the U.S., which was the lowest amount of new pipelines and expansions since 2013.

But domestic energy production is once again in the spotlight due to the U.S. ban on Russian oil imports and Russia’s impending export ban on raw materials. North American consumers are now facing surging gasoline and energy prices as foreign oil is proving to be far less reliable in times of geopolitical turmoil.

It’s important to note that pipelines are not a perfect solution, as leaks and spills in just the last decade have resulted in billions of dollars of damages. From 2010 to 2020, the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration recorded 983 incidents that resulted in 149,000 spilled and unrecovered barrels of oil, five fatalities, 27 injuries, and more than $2.5B in damages.

But over the past five years, liquid pipeline incidents have fallen by 21% while pipeline mileage and barrels delivered have increased by more than 27%. Along with these infrastructure improvements, pipeline developers and operators emphasize the lack of better alternatives, as freight and seaborne transportation are both far less efficient and result in more carbon emissions.

Currently, pipelines remain key components of energy consumption across the U.S. and Canada, and as global energy markets face supply squeezes, international sanctions, and geopolitical turbulence, the focus on them has grown.

By Tsvetana Paraskova of OilPrice.com

Asian refiners and traders expect top crude exporter Saudi Arabia to once again hike significantly the prices of its crude going to Asia in May to a record premium over the Middle Eastern benchmarks, a Bloomberg survey showed on Tuesday.

The soaring oil prices and the “buyers’ strike” over purchasing Russian crude could be an opportunity for Russia’s key ally in the OPEC+ pact, OPEC’s de facto leader Saudi Arabia, to hike its official selling prices (OSPs) to another all-time high over the Oman/Dubai benchmark, off which Middle Eastern crude is priced in Asia.

Per the Bloomberg survey of five traders and refiners, Saudi Arabia’s oil giant Aramco could increase its OSP for May for Asia for Arab Light—the Kingdom’s flagship grade—by a massive $5 per barrel to a premium of nearly $10 a barrel over the Oman/Dubai benchmark.

Earlier in March, Saudi Aramco lifted its April price to Asia for its flagship grade to $4.95 a barrel premium over Oman/Dubai, which was the largest ever premium of Arab Light to the Middle East benchmark.

If in early April Saudi Aramco raises the price of Arab Light for May by as much as traders and refiners in the Bloomberg poll expect, Arab Light will be sold in Asia in May at a premium of $9.95 per barrel over the Oman-Dubai benchmark. This would be a new record differential for the Saudi crude prices to Asia.

Saudi Arabia generally sets the pricing trends of the other major Middle Eastern oil producers, and it usually sets the OSPs of its crude for the following month around the fifth of each month, typically after the monthly OPEC+ meeting.

The meeting of the OPEC+ group is scheduled for March 31, and producers have signaled they would keep the production plan as-is, that is, raising the OPEC+ collective production quota by 400,000 barrels per day (bpd) for May.