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Agro Resilience Kit (ARK) retweeted
🇨🇦🇨🇦🇨🇦Canadian Oil Discount Exceeds $30 Amid Gulf Coast Pressures
Western Canadian Select’s discount to the monthly average of West Texas Intermediate has widened to $31 a barrel, the largest gap since October 2022. On the US Gulf Coast the differential reached $23.50, the widest in data going back to 2018.
The pressure stems from a supply build-up of competing Venezuelan heavy crude on the Gulf Coast and elevated tanker rates that make re-exporting Canadian barrels to Asia prohibitively expensive. The Baltic Dirty Tanker Index remains elevated after hitting a record earlier in the month, with shipping costs to Asia now in the $30–40 per barrel range.
While global benchmarks have rallied on the Iran conflict—with Brent near $115—Canadian heavy crude has largely traded below $70 since June.
Agro Resilience Kit (ARK) retweeted
🚨Shell just made $ 10.8bn in 3 months.
That’s its best quarter since 2022, almost double last year’s $ 5.4bn and above the $ 10.3bn analysts expected.
The surprise came from refining.
Shell’s refining margin hit a record $42 a barrel, up from $24 last quarter and $11.60 a year ago.
Its fuels business alone earned $ 3.8bn.
Here’s what the quarter produced:
🔹$21.0bn of operating cash flow
🔹$16.3bn of free cash flow
🔹$5bn of buybacks for the next 3 months, up from $ 3bn
🔹Net debt cut to $ 39.7bn, from $ 52.6bn in Q1
The part that matters for the long run is gas.
During the quarter Shell closed its ARC Resources deal and took the final investment decision on LNG Canada Phase 2.
Its gas production goes from 772k to more than 1m barrels of oil equivalent a day next quarter.
The Iran war shut Qatar’s exports.
Shell is adding LNG supply on the Pacific coast of 🇨🇦 Canada, with no strait in the way.
The refinery margin pays for this year.
The gas decisions set what Shell earns in 2030.
One thing to know before Q4: Shell will book a non-cash loss of about $ 6.4bn on its Dutch pension plan.
That will hit reported profit.
Cash and buybacks aren’t affected.
Agro Resilience Kit (ARK) retweeted
☢️Constellation, the biggest US nuclear operator, got a conditional loan of up to $ 5bn from the Energy Department.
The money upgrades 8 plants in Illinois, Maryland and Pennsylvania to add nearly 1.1 GW.
That’s enough for more than 930,000 homes, the department says.
Operators swap in more efficient turbines and parts, or refuel with slightly more enriched uranium, to get more power from the same reactor.
No new plant, no new transmission line and no new licence from the regulator.
New licences have taken years in the past.
At Byron in Illinois, 2 reactors producing about 2.35 GW could add 150 MW.
“All the infrastructure is here we’re just changing out some turbines and getting more energy out of it,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said.
This is the second deal this month. Vistra got about $ 4.2bn in October for the same kind of upgrades.
The reason is demand.
US power use is growing for the first time in decades, driven by AI data centres, electric transport and crypto mining.
Agro Resilience Kit (ARK) retweeted
The Great British Rip Off:
2021 vs 2026 - How much more British people are paying on essential goods, services, products and taxes. This simply isn’t sustainable. It’s breaking households and businesses. And the government don’t give a shit. We are paying them to piss around on TikTok videos and for them to tax us even more.
Agro Resilience Kit (ARK) retweeted
UK industrial electricity prices sit around 26p/kWh:
▪️Highest among the 25 International Energy Agency member countries
▪️4 times higher than USA
▪️50% more expensive than France and Germany.
It’s hardly a surprise that so many UK businesses cannot survive due to energy generated production costs.
Agro Resilience Kit (ARK) retweeted
Russia has more shale oil in the ground than the US. America gets almost all of it out.
The top five, in technically recoverable shale oil:
Russia 74.6bn barrels
United States 74.4bn
China 32.2bn
Argentina 27.0bn
Libya 26.1bn
Russia and the US hold about the same amount.
The difference is everything that comes after the geology.
The US built the rigs, the fracking crews, the pipe and the capital markets to unlock it.
Sanctions have cut Russia off from the Western oilfield services and kit its shale needs, so Bazhenov stays mostly in the ground.
China’s shale sits deep in complex rock, and its access to the best US drilling technology keeps narrowing.
Argentina is the one outside the US making it work. Vaca Muerta is in full commercial development.
Shale is a technology play first and a geology play second.
Agro Resilience Kit (ARK) retweeted
Researchers gave office workers who lived under LEDs a 60W incandescent desk lamp. Two weeks later, every one of them had their color vision improve by 25%.
In 2022, the government banned those bulbs for "wasting" energy.
But that "waste" is actually one of the most important nutrients our bodies depend upon, and the improvement lasted for weeks after the lamps were taken away (while nothing changed in the controls).
Decades of forgotten research show the artificial light we replaced it with is a root cause of many inexplicable illnesses (e.g., insomnia, obesity, cancer, and hyperactivity in children).
Here I show what that research found and why Senator Mike Lee’s bill to bring these bulbs back, which has now cleared a Senate committee, matters.🧵
midwesterndoctor.com/p/the-h…
Agro Resilience Kit (ARK) retweeted
$1,000 in Chevron in 2006 is worth about $4,474 today after inflation, dividends reinvested.
The same $1,000 in BP is worth $1,261.
Gold sits in between at $4,141, and it never paid a dividend.
Over 20 years:
-Chevron +347%
-Gold +314%
-Petrobras +224%
-ExxonMobil +203%
-Shell +161%
-Occidental +133%
-BP +26%
The commodity was the same.
The company decided the return.
Dividends did most of the work.
Without them, BP and Petrobras would show real losses.
(Petrobras’ number came before Monday’s 22% drop after Lula’s win, so it’s lower now)
My new article asks whether oil can keep you rich, and ranks the four fields where the cash is going next.
themerchantsnews.substack.co…
Agro Resilience Kit (ARK) retweeted
🛢️The world burns 103.5m barrels of oil a day.
The West isn’t the main buyer anymore.
Non-OECD countries use 58.5m b/d.
The OECD uses 45.0m.
Asia-Pacific alone burns 39.1m b/d, the biggest block on the map.
That’s where the next barrel of demand comes from.
Inside that block sits one buyer big enough to move the whole market: China🇨🇳
China’s crude imports fell to 7.12m b/d in June, the lowest in about a decade.
Last year they averaged about 11.6m.
Before the war, China had built an estimated 1.2-1.3bn barrels of commercial and strategic stocks.
Since then it has cut refinery runs, curbed fuel exports and lived off those tanks.
That works until the tanks run low.
When China comes back to buy, it lands on a market with Brent over $110.
Agro Resilience Kit (ARK) retweeted
🛢️Not all oil is worth the same.
🇨🇦A Canadian barrel sells for about $28 less than an American one.
The reason starts with what’s in the barrel.
Crude is graded on 2 things: how heavy it is (density) and how much sulphur it carries.
Canadian WCS and Venezuelan Merey are heavy and sour: thick, with a lot of sulphur.
Saudi Arab Medium and Russian Urals sit in the middle.
US WTI Midland from the Permian is light and sweet: thin, with very little sulphur.
All the above can become gasoline, diesel and jet fuel.
What changes is the work it takes to get there.
Heavy sour crude needs refineries with cokers and hydrotreaters to break it down and strip the sulphur.
Those units cost billions and only some refineries have them.
Most of the plants built for Canadian heavy sit in the US Midwest and Gulf Coast.
So Canada sells almost 9 in 10 exported barrels to one country, and to refineries designed around its crude.
That leaves little room to bargain.
The discount is the price of that dependence.
Someone collects that $28 on every barrel.
In my latest article I follow the money:
-which refiners turn cheap heavy crude into full-price diesel
-what Trans Mountain changed by opening a route to Asia
-why Pacific Link and the British Columbia vote matter for the discount
-which listed companies sit on each side of the spread
The full article is here: themerchantsnews.substack.co…
Agro Resilience Kit (ARK) retweeted
This chart is simply mind-blowing. It’s a perfect visualization of the German “green” energy transition though. Let’s take a look.
1. Germany increased its installed energy generation capacity since 2000 by a whopping 120%, yet German electricity generation fell by 13%. Isn’t that a paradox? The answer is simple, renewables do not generate electricity constantly, as required for an industrial nation, so they need parallel energy-generating infrastructure, e.g., gas. That’s the main reason countries that moved to renewables, like Germany or the UK, have the highest energy prices for industry and households.
2. Based on fairly conservative estimates, Germany has spent about €400 billion on this “green” energy transition, an eye-watering amount.
3. Higher energy prices have made German energy-intensive industries uncompetitive. Industrial production imploded, and countless well-paid jobs disappeared. This explains the reduction in energy demand and generation.
4. By shutting clean nuclear plants while keeping coal and gas, German energy production generates about 10 times more emissions than France’s. You read that right: 10 times more. If Germany had switched off coal power plants first instead of nuclear, by now it would have avoided CO2 emissions equivalent to Berlin’s emissions over almost a century. Keep that in mind next time you chew on a paper drinking straw.
5. Worse still, production moved from Germany to Asia, where the same products generate far more emissions in manufacturing and shipping. A Chinese-built car shipped to Europe causes about 70% more emissions than one built in Germany, cement production causes twice as many.
Honestly, can you name a bigger absurdity than the German “green” energy transition? They spent a fortune to ruin their industry and hurt the climate badly. Isn’t it hilarious that German greens seriously claim other countries will follow the German way? In which parallel universe do these people live?
Agro Resilience Kit (ARK) retweeted
The FBI and DEA just pulled a trucking boss out of a nice neighborhood in Eagle Pass, Texas, and I can't find one English-language outlet covering it.
His name is Julio Rodolfo González. Mexican border papers report he's facing a federal money laundering conspiracy charge tied to fuel smuggling.
They also say the case may be sealed, which usually means more people are about to get a knock on the door.
This is the diesel racket nobody in Washington talks about. Hundreds of semis cross into Eagle Pass empty every single day, fill up on Texas diesel, and haul it right back to Mexico.
The bridge got so jammed that a 30 minute wait turned into six or eight hours for legitimate freight.
It gets worse. One Mexican reporter says González may be a U.S. contact for the fuel network run by the Farías Laguna brothers.
Those are high-ranking Mexican Navy officers accused of running fuel tankers out of Houston and pocketing more than $150 million.
Black-market fuel, crooked officials, and a Texas border town stuck in the middle. Where is the national press on this one?
vanguardia.com.mx/coahuila/e…
Agro Resilience Kit (ARK) retweeted
Canada closed 5 refineries and built one.
The country had 21 refineries in 2000 and 17 in 2025, CAPP data shows. Capacity still edged up, to about 1.94m b/d.
The ones that shut were mostly in the East:
2005: Oakville, 90,000 b/d, Petro-Canada
2010: Montreal East, 130,000 b/d, Shell
2012: Bowden, 6,700 b/d, Parkland
2013: Dartmouth, 88,000 b/d, Imperial
2021: Come by Chance, 135,000 b/d, now making renewable diesel
The only new one is Sturgeon in Alberta, at 79,000 b/d. It took seven years to build, and its cost roughly doubled to about C$10bn.
Here’s the part that matters this week.
Canada exports about 4.5m barrels of crude a day, more than twice what it refines at home.
It sells that crude to US Midwest refiners for $28 less than WTI.
US refiners are earning record margins on it. Valero made about $39 on every barrel it refined last quarter.
Canada supplies the barrel, and someone else earns the margin.
So should Canada build more refineries?
A refinery takes years to build. Today’s margins are a wartime price.
What Canada lacks is a way to get its crude out. Trans Mountain is 98% full, and Enbridge’s next 150,000 b/d isn’t due until 2027.
themerchantsnews.substack.co…
Agro Resilience Kit (ARK) retweeted
This is the harbinger of what's coming for the copper industry...
Jubilee Metals, a small copper producer in Zambia, reports that sulfuric acid costs surged over 200%, while diesel costs jumped 90%.
The shortages have already hit copper production...
Some metal processors in the region were even forced to temporarily shut down production amid sulfuric acid shortages and soaring diesel costs.
And this is just the beginning...
You can't produce copper without the physical inputs.
Agro Resilience Kit (ARK) retweeted
Despite Iran’s efforts to disrupt energy shipments, oil exports from the Persian Gulf are roaring back and have surpassed pre-conflict levels.
The message is clear: Iran’s threats have failed to stop the flow of energy to global markets.
Agro Resilience Kit (ARK) retweeted
Germany is running out of refineries, and it now admits that’s a problem.
Economy Minister Katherina Reiche: “Whoever loses the refinery loses not only the supply for the gas station, but above all for the chemical complex.”
Berlin now says it wants to stop more refineries closing.
Look at the timing.
Shell stopped processing crude at its 140,000 b/d Wesseling refinery last year.
BP’s 250,000 b/d Gelsenkirchen has been up for sale since early 2025 with no buyer.
Scotland lost Grangemouth, 150,000 b/d.
Europe chose to import its diesel and jet fuel.
Now the imports are the problem.
Russian diesel exports hit a decade low.
Gulf fuel exports run at about half of normal.
US diesel costs about twice a barrel of crude.
On Friday Germany’s stockpiling agency EBV put out a tender to sell diesel, heating oil and crude from its strategic reserves.
In July it was still buying diesel to refill them.
Germany’s reserve was meant for an emergency. It’s now dipping into it as winter starts.
You can shut a refinery in a year.
Building one takes most of a decade.
