Rory Johnston

SuperSpiked: Arjun Murti on Why "Super Volatility" Replaced the Super Cycle

🎙️ NEW PODCAST 🎧

On the latest episode of Oil Ground Up, I spoke with Arjun Murti about the transition from super cycle to super volatility, as well as how best to anchor yourself in a market increasingly defined by foundational data disagreements.

open.spotify.com/episode/0faP...

🛢️ OIL CONTEXT WEEKLY 🛢️

📈🇷🇺 Crude prices and term structure rise from the dead 🧟 on the back of surprisingly harsh US sanctions on Russian oil that threaten to dramatically tighten what were weakening oil market balances.

Full report:
www.commoditycontext.com/p/ocw43w25

Summary:

a man with a mustache is shown with the words done & done behind him ALT: a man with a mustache is shown with the words done & done behind him

🇨🇦🇺🇸

Reagan generally opposed tariffs

Reagan in specific cases used tariffs

Pretending Reagan loved tariffs is stupid

Ontario gov't anti-tariff Reagan ad was a performative waste of money

Trump doesn't need good reason—which this isn't—to blow up negotiation

And that's all

India is the most commonly cited source of forward demand growth optimism in the oil market.

It has also roundly disappointed those expectations so far this year, with the Big-3 forecasting agencies cutting the 2025 demand growth notably over the past half-year.

👨‍🚀🔫👨‍🚀

oil market rn

Reply guys in full swing with various geopolitical theories about OPEC-Trump strategic oil cooperation (re: Russia, etc)

is this Abundance?

"Lower oil prices will bring with them a necessary supply-demand correction ... Still, it will be important to remember that the low prices realized over the next year or so are themselves likely temporary, an echo of the artificial tightness experienced in 2023 and 2024."

Taking a walk down memory lane this morning.

4 years, completed by 2012—seems like a slam dunk, guys

Backwardation is bullish because it reflects tight supply-demand balances, which boosts prices…

… which is bearish because the cure to high prices is high prices

Contango is bearish because it reflects loose balances, which collapses prices…

… which is bullish because…

Hi everybody, this is Colonel Drake from that other social media platform called Twitter/X. I'm passionate about energy, I like the outdoors and I can get political but keep it in the rational middle. Hello Bluesky!

China is an obvious market even if refining growth is peaking out (likely soon), as well as India and other emerging Asia.

But more generally the advantage is simply putting these barrels into the Pacific Basin, and commodity markets will figure out the optimal logistics.

My personal arbitrary benchmark is "early-2030s", but then generally followed by a fairly slow decline (as opposed to a steep net-zero-complaint collapse)

And there's plenty of egress debottlenecking we can achieve, no doubt, but that's good because we can't possibly build a new pipe fast enough.

Fwiw, even if crude prices do continue to decline next year to force a rebalancing of the global market we're still going to need Western Canadian pipeline expansions over the next few years if we want to avoid differential blowouts like we've experienced in the past.

The Coming Oil Glut The surplus is on track to surpass even that of the COVID era.

🚨 Trying something new with the @thedispatchmedia.bsky.social, publishing some **unpaywalled** oil thoughts for a more general audience

Before delving into the deeper debates, I wanted to start with a primer on where oil markets stand today and how we got here

Read:
thedispatch.com/newsletter/d...

The Coming Oil Glut The surplus is on track to surpass even that of the COVID era.

🚨 Trying something new with the @thedispatchmedia.bsky.social, publishing some **unpaywalled** oil thoughts for a more general audience

Before delving into the deeper debates, I wanted to start with a primer on where oil markets stand today and how we got here

Read:
thedispatch.com/newsletter/d...

Headline quote in the Financial Times calling Keystone XL Canada’s “zombie” pipeline on my birthday.

Dreams really do come true, guys. 🥳

Full story: on.ft.com/3LeqWfy

🙌🏻 Can’t discuss the IEA’s astronomically large global oil market supply glut scenario forecast for 2026 without some aggressive hand-talking.

~4 MMbpd implied surplus, ~1.5 BILLION barrel implied stock build.

Check out my full BNN Bloomberg interview here:
www.bnnbloomberg.ca/video/shows/...

🌮

this is where the President of the United States announces important policy changes

a man with his eyes closed is wearing a plaid shirt and a blue jacket . ALT: a man with his eyes closed is wearing a plaid shirt and a blue jacket .

Currently attempting to write a more general audience summary of where we're currently standing in the oil market and

a man with gray hair is smoking a pipe in a room and says `` he 's only mostly dead '' . ALT: a man with gray hair is smoking a pipe in a room and says `` he 's only mostly dead '' .

Keystone XL has become some weird meta-meme in the place of actual progress in Canada's oil industry.

Never built but never fully dead, always there when someone needs it.

Ha, they've divested the liquids assets—all owned and operated by South Bow now ;)

Interesting—imho, south to the US, doubling down on Canada's current extraordinary market concentration, remains the least strategic (yet typically most "commercial") direction for Canada's next crude oil export pipeline

But it's still better than no pipeline

(Proponent TBD...)

Beijing’s Long-Term Oil Problem Perceptions of China’s structural foreign fuel dependence are driving both the oil market’s biggest support (SPR buying) and heaviest drag (from world-leading to flatlining Chinese demand growth)

🚨 NEW POST 🚨

Beijing’s Long-Term Oil Problem

Perceptions of China’s structural foreign fuel dependence are driving both the oil market’s biggest support (SPR buying) and heaviest drag (from world-leading to flatlining demand growth)

www.commoditycontext.com/p/beijings-l...

wife hung some early Halloween decorations and now they keep setting off my doorbell cam and giving me a heart attack with the notification pic

Why does an obsession with energy insecurity dominate Chinese policymaking?

Exhibit A: