Despite huge oil reserves waiting to be tapped, the ongoing sanctions on Venezuelan oil and the current state of politics and the economy are driving international oil majors away from the Venezuelan energy market.

Russia must start getting used to lower oil, gas, and coal use in the future, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin told Russian media, adding that the government will approve a plan for adjusting Russia's economy to the global energy transition by the end of the year, TASS has reported.

Global oil and gas prices will remain higher for longer as companies resist the urge to ramp up production, the chief executive of Chevron, Mike Wirth told Bloomberg in an interview.

Global oil demand is set to rebound with a 1.6-million-bpd jump in October and continue rising through the end of the year, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said on Tuesday.

For a long time, China’s energy policy has centered around one primary and pressing goal: to establish energy security. As the biggest importer and second-biggest consumer of oil in the world, China is extremely dependent on international markets to keep the lights on and the gears of industry turning. In 2019, a whopping 72% of all crude oil consumed in China was imported. This is a dynamic that makes Beijing uncomfortable, to say the least, and President Xi Jinping’s administration has been hard at work trying to shore up a greater degree of energy independence.

The COVID pandemic has wreaked considerable damage on the economies of South America’s smaller fiscally fragile countries, with the former Dutch colony of Suriname hit especially hard.

China made headlines last week with the news that it was going to release some crude oil from its strategic petroleum reserve and sell it in a move that Bloomberg called "an unprecedented intervention."
Indeed, this was the first time China announced the sale of oil from its strategic reserve. The size of this reserve is unknown as the government never releases that data, but analysts have been using satellite imaging to estimate just how much oil China has in storage.

Politicians, environmentalists, economists, and energy executives are all puzzled over a compounding conundrum: what’s to be done about Bitcoin? Just this week, El Salvador became the first country in the world to validate Bitcoin as a legal tender, to initially disastrous results. The once-fringe cryptocurrency and its acolytes have the potential to massively disrupt commerce as we know it -- and they could very well disrupt the global campaign against catastrophic climate change while they’re at it.

OPEC could revise down its forecasts for global oil demand in 2022, in view of the increased uncertainty with the Delta variant, two OPEC+ sources told Reuters on Friday.

In a little over a decade Latin America’s largest economy Brazil has become a leading global oil producer. At the end of 2020, Brazil was not only pumping the most oil in Latin America, an average of 3.03 million barrels daily, but finished ranked as the world’s seventh largest producer behind OPEC member Iraq and ahead of the United Arab Emirates. According to Brazil’s Mines and Energy Minister Bento Albuquerque, Latin America’s top oil producer will become the world’s fifth-largest petroleum exporter by the end of this decade. Brazil’s government is forecasting that the country will be pumping 5.3 million barrels of oil per day by 2030 facilitating its ability to substantially boost exports. That is compared to an average of 3.05 million barrels of crude oil and condensate production per day for July 2021 and an average of 2.94 million for the first seven months of 2021. This indicates that there is still considerable work to be completed if Brazil is to achieve such an ambitious target.

India's crude oil demand has been on the mend since mid-summer. It is likely to continue along this same vein for quite a while, with at least one refiner planning to boost refining capacity considerably.

A consortium of Indian energy companies—including state major ONGC—is in early talks with Rosneft for the acquisition of a stake in the Russian state company’s massive Vostok oil project, the Economic Times reported, citing unnamed sources.