Oil & Gas Corner

Thursday, 2026-09-17 · covering the last 24h

Market signal

Crude pulls back as Saudi Arabia's Oman workaround eases supply fears. Brent settled down $1.01 at $104.82/bbl and WTI fell 52 cents to $101.91 on Thursday as Aramco's ship-to-ship transfers off Oman's Sohar port — giving Asian refiners crude access outside the Strait — convinced traders the East-West pipeline outage won't cut global supply as sharply as first feared; WTI is still up roughly 18% for the month. CNBC · Rigzone (Reuters wire)

US diesel sets yet another record: $6.39 a gallon. AAA's national average climbed further Thursday, up from Wednesday's $6.31 and more than $2.60 above year-ago levels, as refiners already flat-out have no spare distillate capacity to add into the shortage. AAA · Fox Business

Upstream — exploration & production

Aramco starts canceling and delaying European crude cargoes as the pipeline stays shut. At least three European refiners have had late-September liftings canceled or pushed out as far as November, and every Saudi cargo scheduled for the month's final ten days is now at risk, market sources told Argus; no crude has loaded from Yanbu since September 11. Argus (paywall) · OilPrice.com

Congress sends Trump a bill authorizing up to 100% tariffs on Russian oil buyers. The House passed the Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act 262–159 on Wednesday, following the Senate's 86–11 vote in August; it hands the president discretionary power to hit the top buyers of Russian crude and gas — a group that includes China, India and Turkey — with secondary tariffs, and the White House has signaled he will sign it. Congress.gov · Bloomberg (paywall)

Midstream — pipelines, LNG & shipping

Chartering a Gulf VLCC now costs $30–32 a barrel. War-risk premia and extra insurance on top of freight have pushed the cost of moving a cargo out of the Persian Gulf to that range, Kpler says, as the Yanbu outage layers fresh ship-to-ship demand off Sohar and Fujairah on top of an already-squeezed Hormuz tanker market; the firm also flags tightening diesel supply into Europe and added pressure on gas and coal prices as knock-on effects. Kpler

Ksi Lisims LNG signs a third offtake deal, with Australia's Santos. The British Columbia project inked a 20-year heads of agreement for 1 million tonnes a year of LNG from around 2031, its third international buyer, as developers push toward a targeted year-end final investment decision. BOE Report · Natural Gas Intelligence

Downstream — refining, fuels & chemicals

A Ukrainian drone strike knocks out part of one of Russia's largest refineries. An overnight attack disabled the primary distillation unit at the Rosneft/Gazprom-controlled Slavneft-YANOS plant in Yaroslavl — about 40% of the 300,000-b/d refinery's capacity — sparking a fire that authorities say was extinguished by morning with no casualties. The Moscow Times

ExxonMobil's Joliet refinery is still down, nearly a week after the outage began. Power to the 275,000-b/d Illinois plant has been restored after floodwater overwhelmed a pump, but the facility flared again Wednesday and remains offline past the initial end-of-week restart target — a delay landing on a Midwest market with no spare distillate to give. 93.3 The Drive (Reuters)

The Chatter

HFI Research (Substack): in "The Most Hated Oil Rally," HFI argues this is a rally nobody trusts — even the bulls who called it obvious six months ago now doubt it — but says that's beside the point: inventories are drawing regardless of the headline noise, and crude, products and refining margins are all still mispriced relative to how tight the physical market has become. Post (paywall)

Rory Johnston, Commodity Context (Substack): in his September OPEC+ Data Deck, Johnston shows Saudi crude output cratered by nearly 1.9 million b/d in August to 6.24 million b/d — the kingdom's lowest since Desert Storm in 1990 — even as group-wide OPEC+ output rose on Iraqi gains, arguing headline compliance numbers increasingly mask a supply picture that's geography-constrained, not policy-constrained. Post (paywall)

RBN Energy (public blog): in "Basket Case," RBN argues 2026 will be remembered as the year the US Gulf Coast diesel crack broke $100/bbl for the first time, tracing the shortfall to years of refinery closures and underinvestment rather than any single outage — meaning today's Saudi and Russian disruptions are compounding a structural shortage, not causing one. Post