🇨🇦🛢️🇺🇸 US Canadian crude imports by importing region and crude grade quality Total US plateauing/rolling over Midwest still key Canadian market, but entirely saturated USGC was the pressure valve, but fell back when TMX opened (first went to West Coast, now increasingly China)

US refinery heavy crude sourcing from Canada (red) vs Venezuela (pink), compared to refinery capacity (blue) 2010 on the left, 2024 on the right

US Gulf Coast refineries (PADD3) have continued to grow distillation capacity while dramatically shrinking imports, displacing imported light and medium crudes with domestic light tight oil from the Shale Patch

"trading"

The Brent (white) and WTI (blue) futures curves are telling rhyming but importantly different stories right now Both have a backwardated front, depressed belly into contango past 2027 But Brent curve seeing steepening prompt backwardation (70c/bbl now) while WTI weakening (20c)

China will ban Stanley Cups in Canada

This was, of course, the status quo before Moscow invaded Crimea—and then the rest of Ukraine.

🛢️ OIL CONTEXT WEEKLY 🛢️ 📉📉📈Crude prices fell back sharply from last week’s Iran-related rally before recovering roughly half those losses; meanwhile, pressure continues to mount on Russian supplies amidst US-India trade deal. Summary below, link to full report in reply.

Brent curve is still currently backwardated out through summer 2027

Latest EIA data confirms October high-water mark for US crude production. Still to early to declare shale in retreat, but this is pretty aligned with what we would have expected coming out of sharp April 2025 price rout.

WTI crude term structure weakening at a brisk pace once again. WTI prompt timespreads (below) slipping.

Nooooooooooooooooo

And I’d like to be known for my thick, dense, luscious hairline.

bitcoin chart is wild

Brent crude prices (white) have pulled back from their late-January high, but Iran worry—still best visualized by Brent options skew (blue)—continues to steadily rise. Again, that's both bullish—professionals are worried—and bearish—that's a lot to unwind once this resolves.

Wow, that LLM just took care of that really messy data cleaning exercise in a few minutes that would have taken me a few hours of manual data grubbing. ... ... ... oh, it's all wrong.

Trump admin issues second Venezuela General License to facilitate the “exportation, reexportation, sale, resale, supply, storage, marketing, delivery, or transportation of U.S.-origin diluents” This had been in the game plan from the outset.

👀

biggest hurdle is overcoming the X/x capitalization clash

before there was ClawdBot there was Claw’dBoard

You may think crude doesn’t trade over the weekend. But it’s actually up in Bitcoin terms.

therapist helping you work through your ruminations:

🛢️ OIL CONTEXT WEEKLY 🛢️ 📈📈 Crude prices rocketed to their highest level since last July on the combination of still-heightened Iran risk and the background energy of frothy commodity market sentiment and a plunging US dollar. Read the full report: www.commoditycontext.com/p/ocw05w26 Summary:

🛢️ OIL CONTEXT WEEKLY 🛢️ 📈📈 Crude prices rocketed to their highest level since last July on the combination of still-heightened Iran risk and the background energy of frothy commodity market sentiment and a plunging US dollar. Read the full report: www.commoditycontext.com/p/ocw05w26 Summary:

PUBLISHED AS ANNEX TO MELANIA MOVIE MUST SIT THROUGH FULL FILM, DOCUMENTS AT END OF CREDITS

AI will end up conquering us because we decided we loved sycophantic assistants and now that they’re chatting they’re going to end up agree-spiralling to our destruction. We need more stubborn, toxic contrarian AIs to short-circuit our automated doom.

Argus: "The changes [to Venezuela's hydrocarbon laws] mean that in some oil projects the government's take, in taxes plus royalties, will not automatically be of 83.33pc, but will instead hover from 65-80pc" Link: www.argusmedia.com/en/news-and-...

Excellent read.

🤔 do I acquire my own company with one of my other companies

OFFICE OF FOREIGN ASSETS CONTROL Venezuela Sanctions Regulations 31 CFR part 591 GENERAL LICENSE NO. 46 Authorizing Certain Activities Involving Venezuelan-Origin Oil Link: ofac.treasury.gov/recent-actio...

During the peak of the Israel-Iran War rally in crude prices last June the entire Brent futures curve shifted back into backwardation (blue curve) Today we've still in smiley-face curve land (white) But there's your comp where what it'll look like if we ramp a level higher here

Oil Context Weekly basically just has structurally permanent sections for developments in Venezuela, Iran, Russia, and Kazakhstan at this point. Getting hard to remember that there were weeks during Biden admin where you were really scraping the bottom for things to talk about.

has anyone considered unplugging the market and plugging it back in?

Crude futures curve torqued higher again by Iran strike risk—white today, blue end-December. Precautionary demand galore. We've seen this story before.

🚨 NEW POST 🚨 Barreling Ahead: Realizing—or Denying?—The Glut The oil market in 2025 ended up much looser than anyone expected by the IEA/EIA/OPEC, and expectations for 2026 balances are beginning to tighten after nearly a year of ever-weaker outlooks. Full report in reply.

Some folks saying this oil price rally is about supply losses. But the big realized production drops largely occurred in December and early January—if anything, the two largest realized hits to supply (Venezuela blockade and CPC outage) are beginning to resolve, not get worse.

In the latest episode of Trump is Bearish for Oil Prices, the president’s renewed Iranian sabre rattling has pushed Brent crude nearly $10/bbl higher through January to more than $70/bbl.

Shout out to the unequal thruple set to watch Melania alone on opening night this Friday at Scotiabank Theatre in Toronto. Only three seats sold across four showings.

My science/engineering obsessed 5-year-old has recently gotten really into Myth Busters and this parenting thing just keeps getting better and better.

We hear a lot about IEA/EIA vs OPEC on oil market demand data, but there's much more than demand that divides the major agency balances. Check out that gap on non-OPEC+ supply growth—for LAST YEAR. OPEC data still missing the acceleration in non-OPEC+ Americas supply growth.

The claim that Canada doesn't export crude to India, via the Reuters piece below, is incorrect but understandable. Canada doesn't ship to India via our own ports, but does regularly ship to India via US Gulf Coast re-exports. Typically 1-2 VLCCs-worth a month (60-120 kbpd)

What are the chances that Donald Trump places 100% tariffs on Canadian oil imports? Less than 1 in 4,600,000 daily barrels, Commodity Context says.

"since 2008"

Latest Canadian leader favourability polling. Pretty lopsided.

the issue with the oil:*whatever* (gold, silver, etc.) ratio to say where oil prices *should be* is that oil production costs are not denominated in *whatever* costs are rising, sure, but not as much as implied by *whatever* asset chart supply & demand rule everything around me

Torontonians have abandoned their vehicles in snow banks, taken to cross-country skis

Acute snow egress crisis. Storage capacity overflowing the banks. Diffs blown out to drifts. Folks paying dearly for white pow takeaway.

shoveling in this weather

a boy, his poutine, and the Leafs how Toronto hunkers down through a snowstorm