Regional News

Bloomberg From oil majors to trading companies to pipeline operators, US companies are jumping at the chance to supply a newly free Mexico fuel market. After years of preparation, Mexico finished liberalizing prices for gasoline and diesel across the country. Foreign companies were allowed to start moving fuels in April last year, but now consumers’ costs will be more closely ...

Bloomberg Don’t expect Big Shale to rush and fill the hole left by OPEC in the oil market. Executives from three of the biggest independent US drillers say they won’t increase activity just because prices rise after the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies agreed to extend output curbs. The emphasis, instead, will be on maintaining spending discipline ...

Bloomberg OPEC and Russia just gave their most implacable foe, US shale, an early holiday gift. As corporate boards for American oil explorers prepare to sketch out 2018 drilling budgets, the historic agreement by Saudi Arabia, Russia and other major crude producers to extend supply caps for another year may prompt directors to spend more on drilling. That’s because the ...

RIYADH / Reuters Major Saudi Arabian retailer Jarir Marketing Co expects single-digit growth in sales in 2018, after a double-digit pace this year as it took market share from smaller rivals, its chairman said. Government regulations pushing retailers of electronics to hire Saudi citizens instead of less costly foreigners hurt smaller companies that were less able to absorb the financial ...

Bloomberg S&P Global Ratings lowered Bahrain’s long-term foreign and local currency sovereign credit ratings to ‘B+’ from ‘BB-’, prompting Bahrain’s central bank to reaffirm the country’s currency peg to the US dollar. S&P Global Ratings said the rating cut was due to weak external liquidity and increasing financial risk due to more limited access to international capital markets. The Central ...

Bloomberg The Trump administration, rebuffing oil industry demands for broad changes to the US biofuel mandate, largely maintained the status quo in setting final quotas for how much refiners must blend into gasoline and diesel. But the Environmental Protection Agency’s decision drew only tepid applause from Iowa politicians, Midwest corn farmers and producers of soy-based biodiesel, who say the targets ...

Bloomberg All OPEC members support extending their oil production cuts until the end of 2018, although Russia hasn’t yet committed to the proposal bef- ore Thursday’s meeting in Vienna, said people familiar with the matter. While Russia and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries have crafted the outline of a deal to continue their curbs for nine months beyond the ...

Bloomberg Royal Dutch Shell Plc will pay its entire dividend in cash for the first time in more than two years as Europe’s biggest oil company seeks to demonstrate it has left the worst of the crude slump behind. From this quarter, Shell will no longer offer shareholders the option to take the payout in stock, it said. The company ...

Bloomberg Brent crude slipped towards $63 a barrel before OPEC and its allies meet this week to discuss prolonging their output cuts beyond March. Futures dropped as much as 1.2 percent in London, extending Monday’s decline. Uncertainty over the outcome of Thursday’s meeting is creating the risk of a slide in prices, which have gained on assumptions that the curbs ...

Bloomberg Senator Ted Cruz may want to spotlight a new victim in the King Corn versus Big Oil tussle: US motorists. The Texas Republican took up arms for fuel makers after President Donald Trump upheld the Renewable Fuel Standard, the 12-year-old rule that forces refiners to either mix biofuels in with their gasoline and diesel or buy credits. Despite the ...