oil

Russia is moving full steam ahead with its plan to kill the petro-dollar, and is burying OPEC's influence along with it. 

As we reported earlier, Russia has taken its next step toward de-dollarization by launching its own benchmark oil futures contract that will price oil in rubles instead of USD. Now, it appears as though Russia has deemed it is time to start chipping away at OPEC and its power within the oil space.

According to Reuters, Rosneft CEO and close Putin ally Igor Sechin had some harsh words to say about the oil cartel, and effectively announced its demise.

A day after oil tumbled to the lowest level in weeks, it has once again started to climb, ignoring the changing dynamic in the oilsands region where the fire has now moved away from critical Canadian oil infrastructure, and is instead focusing on concerns about supply disruptions not just out of Canada but also a series of attacks on Nigeria's oil infrastructure which pushed the country's crude output close to a 22-year, cumulatively knocking out 2.5 million barrels of daily production.

Submitted by Adam Taggart via PeakProsperity.com,

M. King Hubbert did more to raise awareness of the finite nature of global oil reserves than any other person, living or dead. He was a larger-than-life figure, who fought tirelessly to insert the limits of nature into the national dialog regarding the strategic use of resources. Yet surprisingly little has been publicly documented about the man, even though we are hurtling ever faster into a future shaped by the very limits he warned about.

Following the biggest news of this weekend, the (anticipated) resignation/termination of Saudi Arabia's longstanding oil minister Ali al-Naimi, everyone has been wondering about what comes next and how this development will impact the price of oil. We laid out our preliminary thoughts as follows:

Ultimately this is not about the new oil minister: this is about Prince Mohammed taking full control over Saudi oil. So the question everyone now wants answered is "what does this mean for oil?"

 

It appears Russia is close to taking the next big step towards de-dollarization and killing the petro-dollar as Vladimir Putin's "dream" of ruble-based pricing of its domestically-produced oil is on the verge of realization. SPIMEX (The St. Petersburg International Mercantile Exchange) is actively courting international oil traders to join its emerging futures market, which as Bloomberg reports, is designed "to create a system where Russian oil is priced and traded in a fair and straightforward way."