⛽️Diesel is $6.32 a gallon. 🇺🇸The midterms are in 13 days. Trump's approval is 31%. So the peace plan for Ukraine starts with diesel. Ukraine's drones took Russia's refineries apart this year. Russian diesel exports fell to 144,000 barrels a day in September, a decade low. With the Gulf stuck behind Hormuz, diesel costs 140% more than in January. On 9 October Trump bought Russian diesel. The first American purchase since 2022. It returns 125,000 barrels a day in November, against 1.5 million lost. Small as supply... Large as a lever: Washington says the licence depends on Ukraine. Yesterday Zelensky offered a refinery ceasefire for a grid ceasefire. Today Witkoff put it in front of Putin. Europe keeps its embargo and pays $10 a gallon. The refiners that rose 166% to 206% on this margin are the first to give it back. Can Diesel End The War In Ukraine? 3 scenarios, what Europe pays, and the trade a peace unwinds. Link👇 themerchantsnews.substack.co…

🇸🇦Saudi Arabia has the price it wanted, but not the barrels. Its central bank holds about $ 480bn in foreign assets, SAMA data shows. Its cash flow is weaker. It has run budget deficits in most years since 2014 and the current account has slipped into the red too. This year’s deficit is now forecast at SAR 245bn, or 4.9% of GDP, against a SAR 165bn target, the finance ministry says. The IMF now expects the economy to shrink 3.3% this year. Bloomberg Economics puts the fiscal breakeven at about $94–96 a barrel. Brent is at $112, but Riyadh can’t pump enough to cash in. source: Bloomberg

🚨Oil and stocks have split up. Normally they rise together, because a strong economy lifts both. Since the war, Brent’s correlation with the S&P 500 has fallen to about 35%, the lowest since the 1991 Gulf War, Bloomberg data shows. Oil now rises on bad news and stocks fall on the same headline. What that means? Oil is acting as a hedge against fear. When markets panic, crude goes up. The Fed is boxed in. A supply shock pushes prices up and growth down at the same time. Households get hit twice: more expensive fuel and weaker portfolios together. Peace would reverse all of it. The oil price is now telling you more about the war than about the economy. source: Bloomberg

Germany has started burning winter gas in October. Bloomberg reports that cold weather and weak wind pushed German gas fired power above 10 GW on Wednesday. That’s a problem, because German storage is only 61% full, 14.4 points lower than a year ago. The EU as a whole is at 74.6%. Germany, Europe’s biggest gas market, is the weakest link.

Washington wants to turn “bad-guy” tankers into “good-guy” ones. Energy Secretary Wright says about 1,600 ships sail in the dark fleet and that dozens or hundreds could move into legal trade. Kpler’s count is much smaller. Of roughly 160 US-sanctioned supertankers, it reckons only about 24 could return once age and ownership limits apply. Kpler expects “virtually no impact” on the tanker crisis, because war risk in the Gulf is what drives freight. Do not miss my latest article also on it: themerchantsnews.substack.co…

🇺🇸The US is tapping its heating oil reserve. The DOE will lend up to 315,000 barrels of ultra-low sulfur diesel from the Northeast Home Heating Oil Reserve, with deliveries by 13 November. Companies have to return the same amount plus a premium. That’s about 1/3 of the 1m-barrel reserve. It also covers about 2 hours of US distillate demand, which runs at 3.9m b/d. Distillate stocks are 9% below normal and Russia’s diesel exports hit a decade low in September. Energy Secretary Wright says the long-term fix is the Constitution Pipeline, bringing natural gas into New York and New England to replace heating oil. A short term patch for a market that keeps getting tighter.

Brent hit $112 today and the war premium is back. US and Israel have drawn up plans for new strikes on Iran after the 3 November midterms. A White House official said it would not discuss plans “that may or may not exist.” Brent is up 2.9% to $112. On 27 February, the day before the war began, Brent closed at $72.48. That’s a 55% jump.

The US has dropped out of gold’s top 5. World Gold Council data puts US mine output at 157 tonnes in 2025, down 32% from 2010. That ranks it 7th. Canada went the other way, more than doubling from 102 to 213 tonnes. Russia rose 70% to 345 tonnes and Ghana almost doubled. China still leads at 384 tonnes. Peru and Ghana now mine more gold than the US.

Europe got through autumn burning as little gas as it could. Winter is the real test. EU storage is 74.6% full, GIE data shows. That’s 845 TWh, or roughly 80 bcm. A normal EU winter burns about 200 bcm, by IEEFA’s estimate. A year ago storage was about 9 points fuller. TTF sits near €88/MWh and IEEFA says the EU may need to cut winter demand by 7%. The rest has to arrive by ship, while Qatari LNG is still stuck behind Hormuz.

US gas needs more pipelines and Kinder Morgan is building them. It approved $ 4.7bn as its share of 2 new lines: -Permian Link: 2.8 Bcf/d over 434 miles, anchored by a hyperscale data-center customer -Southeast Connector: 2.6 Bcf/d over 470 miles into the US Southeast Its gas project backlog is now a record $ 13.2bn and more than 75% of the total backlog serves power plants and local utilities. The Permian needs the room. By June, Waha gas had traded below zero on a record 99 days this year, because the pipelines out were full. Data centers want the gas now. Neither pipeline starts before Q3 2030.

Latin America’s LNG demand rises and falls with the rain. The region imported about 19.9m tonnes in 2021, when Brazil’s worst drought in 20 years drained its hydro dams. By 2025 it was down to 12.5m. Brazil’s imports fell about 73%, to 2.1m tonnes. Colombia went the other way. Its domestic gas output is falling and imports climbed to about 1.8m tonnes, almost as much as Brazil. Argentina is moving toward exporting. Vaca Muerta gas is set to feed its first LNG cargoes from late 2027. With Qatari LNG stuck behind Hormuz, a dry year in Brazil would put the region in direct competition with Europe and Asia for the same cargoes. One bad dry season and Latin America is back in the bidding war.

The world’s oil buffers are being drained. EIA data shows US commercial crude stocks fell for a 3rd straight week, losing almost 15m barrels in 3 weeks to 412.5m. Saudi Arabia drew down harder. JODI data shows its crude stocks fell 32.4m barrels in August, from 175.6m to 143.2m. Saudi output fell to a record low of 6.24m b/d, while exports rose to 4.45m b/d. The gap came out of the tanks. The US SPR, meanwhile, sits at 283m barrels, about 40% full. When the crisis ends, refilling those tanks becomes extra demand. What happens to prices when everyone restocks at once?

China’s “Malaysian” oil is running out. China’s customs data shows crude imports from Malaysia down to about 0.3m b/d, from a peak near 2m. Malaysia pumps nowhere near that much. Analysts have long read most of it as Iranian crude with new paperwork. That supply is now drying up. Iran loaded no crude onto tankers in September under the US blockade. Iran’s crude export revenue could hit zero by mid-December, which would be a first. China has reported zero imports from Iran all along.

Copper’s supply problem just got worse. About 1,200 workers at Highland Valley, Canada’s biggest copper mine, could strike from 8am Saturday. The mine produced 37,100 tonnes of copper in Q4 2025, or about 400 tonnes a day. That joins a long list of disruptions: -an avalanche at Codelco’s El Teniente -strikes at Escondida and Centinela -Congo’s ban on concentrate exports US copper futures are around $6.50/lb, close to August’s record.

Chevron got Hess’s Guyana oil. It doesn’t want Hess’s Guyana port. Bloomberg reports Chevron declined to fund further studies for a proposed $1–2bn deep-water port. Hess had backed Bechtel’s early engineering work in 2023. Guyana wants the port to serve northern Brazil and to anchor an industrial hub with data centers, fertiliser plants and possibly a refinery. Chevron owns 30% of Stabroek, the block behind Guyana’s 22.3% growth this year. On the same day, it confirmed plans to sell older US Gulf fields. Chevron is spending where the barrels are. Guyana has the oil. It still needs partners for everything that comes with it.

🛢️🇺🇸US Big Oil is selling old fields and running its refineries flat out. 2 moves today show both sides. Chevron is cleaning out the Gulf. The company is exploring the sale of mature US Gulf assets. It’s an early, multi-month process that two people familiar with it say could raise about $1bn. The fields on offer: 🔹Petronius: producing since 2000, partnered with Talos Energy 🔹Tubular Bells: producing since 2014, now 100% Chevron after the Hess deal 🔹Llano: a 50% stake inherited from Hess Corporation, operated by Shell, producing since 2004 The money is going to growth. Chevron is targeting 300,000 boe/d from the US Gulf by the end of 2026, led by Anchor, its first ultra-high-pressure platform and Ballymore, which can produce up to 75,000 b/d. The timing is deliberate, US crude recently hit a 6 month high, so buyers are paying up for US barrels. ExxonMobil, meanwhile, is dealing with a different problem. A 50,000 b/d catalytic reformer at Exxon’s 275,000 b/d Joliet refinery in Illinois has been offline since 20 October, with flaring reported. Exxon says it is “working to resolve an operational issue.” A reformer makes high-octane gasoline blendstock. Joliet supplies the Chicago area and the wider Midwest. This is the risk of running refineries this hard. US utilization stayed above 95% for 11 straight weeks into August and Gulf Coast plants were still at 96% in October, when maintenance usually starts. Upstream, the majors are selling their oldest assets while prices are high. Downstream, the refineries have almost no slack left.

Kuwait’s oil is flowing again. KPC’s CEO says output is now well over 2m b/d and crude exports are back to prewar levels. In September output was 1.77m b/d. Before the war it was about 2.5–2.6m. Kuwait is also talking about pipelines through Saudi Arabia and the UAE to bypass Hormuz. image source:S&P Global

Shipping a barrel of crude now costs more than $20. A year ago it was $3. Goldman Sachs splits the jump into 5 drivers: -Hormuz war risk premium: $7 -Ship to ship transfers outside the Gulf: $4 -Ship fuel: $4 -Tanker inefficiency and rerouting: $3 -Iran’s fleet sidelined: $2 Fuel alone adds $4 a barrel. That’s what happens when Singapore marine fuel goes from $428 to $919 a tonne. Goldman says Gulf producers selling to Asia may have to discount their crude and Asian refiners take the margin hit. Closer barrels, such as Brent and ESPO, gain. Someone always pays the freight bill. Someone else collects it. Do not miss my latest article Ship Fuel Doubled In 2026. Who Pays And Who Collects? themerchantsnews.substack.co…

Russia’s diesel exports are down more than 50% in a year. In 2025 Russia was the world’s 2nd diesel exporter, shipping close to 800,000 b/d. In September it shipped 144,000 b/d. That’s the lowest in more than a decade. Drone strikes cut Russian refining by about 1/3. Moscow then banned diesel exports from 8 July to keep fuel at home. That one gap reshuffled the top 10: United States: still 1st, about 1.3m b/d in 2025 (EIA) Saudi Arabia: up from 3rd to 2nd UAE: up from 7th to 3rd Bahrain: into the top 10, supplying Europe The Gulf filled the gap.... even with the war France has just secured 200,000 tonnes a month from the UAE and Bahrain. The world’s diesel now depends on Russian refineries, the Strait of Hormuz and Washington. Do not miss my latest article on it: themerchantsnews.substack.co…