Energy News Beat

The post January 2025 Review appeared first on Energy News Beat.

 

Energy News Beat

The post The news distillery appeared first on Energy News Beat.

 

Energy News Beat

As shipping slithers somewhat apprehensively into the Year of the Snake, analysts reckon tankers – whether hauling gas or oil – are best placed to see an uptick in fortunes.

The Lunar New Year is not starting too well with many sectors struggling to break even in January.

The cross-sector ClarkSea Index, a weighted barometer covering all shipping segments, eased back by 8% last Friday to $21,128 a day, the lowest level for more than a year and with the average in 2025 so far down by 10% year-on-year, though still up 13% on the 10-year trend.

One analyst to have stuck his neck on the line with his predictions is Dr Adam Kent, the head of Maritime Strategies International (MSI), who gave delegates attending last week’s Marine Money event in London his take on where each segment is in terms of the cycle, with Kent suggesting LNG, currently experiencing record lows, is best placed for an upswing.

The average spot rate assessment for a 174,000 cu m ship fell by 31% to $14,000 a day as of last Friday, while the equivalent rate for a 145,000 cu m steam turbine unit now stands at just $2,500 a day, down 29% week-on-week. Protracted weakness, especially for older steam turbine units, is seeing more vintage gas tankers head for demolition, while many owners are contemplating lay-ups as a record volume of newbuilds readies to leave Asian drydocks.

Has the sector nearly bottomed out, and will it post a solid upswing, as Kent has forecast? Splash Extra sought the views of other shipping analysts to pick out improving segments to watch out for in the Year of the Snake.

“Ethane and clean ammonia trade should increase too, keeping new orders for LPG vessels high,” Rosano said.

Looking closely at the MSI slide above, Mark Williams, the founder of UK consultancy Shipping Strategy, argued that oil tankers are nearer a cyclical upswing than the graphic suggests.

Williams placed his tanker optimism down to US overtures towards Saudi Arabia and Donald Trump’s plans to increase oil production, along with more Atlantic basin oil production. At the same time, Williams pointed out more tankers are turning 25 in the next few years and the fleet will shrink even as tonne-miles – if not overall tonnes – could grow.

“Tanker freight markets work on fine margins of utilisation – there is upside potential,” Williams said.

Holding similar views is Ralph Leszczynski, the head of research and consultancy at Banchero Costa, who admitted he is concerned about the “really scary” LNG orderbook, which will see more than 100 newbuildings deliver this year alone, resulting in a net fleet capacity increase of 13% year-on-year.

“I highly doubt at this point that there will be enough extra cargoes on the market and/or sufficient increase in tonne-miles to absorb all of these new vessels. Hence the supply-demand balance for LNG is actually likely to get worse rather than better this year,” Leszczynski said, who then went on, like Williams, to express greater confidence in crude tankers, especially VLCCs.

Unlike LNG, the crude tanker orderbook is very modest with Banchero Costa data showing the VLCC fleet is expected to see zero growth this year, and the aframax fleet will expand by only 1%, whilst the shadow fleet, Leszczynski argued, will increasingly struggle under harsher sanctions and controls.

“The Trump government will encourage more US crude exports, and will probably try to strong-arm both Europe as well as China to buy more from the USA at the expense of Russia and Iran, which is beneficial for tonne-miles,” Leszczynski predicted, dismissing upswing prospects for containerships and dry bulk.

Splash Extra contacted more than 20 analysts for their Snake shipping forecasts. However, with today’s incredibly volatile markets and uncertain geopolitical situation, most experts were not willing to stick their necks out.

One analyst who wished not to be named confided that with “Trump 2.0” there are so many fast and unexpected moving parts that the smart play was to adopt famous maritime economist Martin Stopford’s view of never giving a forecast.

Most shipping sectors are expected to see quieter activity levels in the coming days due to the Lunar New Year holidays. Typically, container shipping is most affected followed by dry bulk and to an extent tankers, though over the years, there have been exceptions. In 2024, dry bulk rates and tanker rates both jumped at the onset of the holiday while containers drifted downwards after a short squeeze at the start of the Red Sea diversions.

Across all three sectors this year, freight rates have been on an easing trend heading into Lunar New Year, suggesting further downside from here may be limited. Normally the post-New Year period sees the beginning of a resurgence in dry bulk, somewhat of the status quo for tankers and the start of seasonal softness for containers.

The post Tankers best placed in the Year of the Snake appeared first on Energy News Beat.

 

Energy News Beat

GasMiddle East

The post Bahri and Petredec form partnership to meet Saudi Arabia’s LPG and ammonia needs appeared first on Energy News Beat.

 

Energy News Beat

The post Sliding into the year of the snake appeared first on Energy News Beat.

 

Energy News Beat

Post Content

The post Key Shipping Statistics appeared first on Energy News Beat.

 

Energy News Beat

 

The post Germany ramps up Russian LNG imports via EU ports – report appeared first on Energy News Beat.

 

Energy News Beat

California Democrats unveiled legislation allowing insurers and policyholders affected by ‘climate’ disasters to sue oil companies.

Two California Democrats unveiled a bill Monday that they said would allow insurers and policyholders affected by the Los Angeles fires to sue major oil corporations for their alleged role in the disaster. [emphasis, links added]

Democratic California State Sen. Scott Wiener and a host of other Democrats rolled out Senate Bill 222 on Monday, characterizing it as a means to make oil companies atone for the fires and stabilize California’s faltering insurance market.

This, even as residents pick up the pieces from the devastation. Weiner and Pérez say that oil companies bear responsibility for the fires because of their supposed role in climate change.

This, even though critics say a litany of policy decisions and failures appear to have much more directly fanned the flames, as evidenced by things like malfunctioning fire hydrants.

“Californians shouldn’t be the only ones to pay the costs of devastating climate disasters. From last year’s floods to the fires in LA, we know that the fossil fuel industry bears ultimate responsibility for fueling these disasters,” Wiener said in a post to X, addressing the new legislation. “The fossil fuel companies knew this was going to happen. They had the studies decades ago, suppressed them & obstructed policy changes to transition away from fossil fuels & toward clean energy.”

The new bill would also require California’s state-run insurer of last resort, known as the FAIR Plan, to seek damages from energy companies for policyholders who were affected by the major fires, Wiener said in his post on X.

FAIR, though, may not have enough cash on hand to cover the massive damages caused by the Los Angeles fires, according to Gerald Glombicki, a senior director for Fitch Ratings.

While the specific cause of the fires is not yet known, evidence is beginning to suggest that electrical equipment may have sparked the flames, according to The New York Times.

State and municipal officials have also been criticized for focusing too much on diversity initiatives and not enough on emergency preparedness.

Officials reportedly neglected to fix problematic water infrastructure in the Pacific Palisades area despite knowing it was an issue. A major reservoir sat empty for months awaiting repairs before the blazes broke out.

Notably, an activist group called California Environmental Voters initially pitched the bill to Wiener’s staff, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

Other green groups — Extreme Weather Survivors and the Center for Climate Integrity — also reportedly worked on the bill.

Read rest at Daily Caller

We give you energy news and help invest in energy projects too, click here to learn more

Crude Oil, LNG, Jet Fuel price quote

ENB Top News 
ENB
Energy Dashboard
ENB Podcast
ENB Substack

The post California Dems Unveil Bill Letting Insurers, Policyholders Sue Big Oil For ‘Climate’ Disasters appeared first on Energy News Beat.

 

Energy News Beat

By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET.

Yesterday, we looked at the surge of new completed “spec” houses for sale, and at the surge of new houses for sale at all stages of construction, for the US overall. Now we’ll look at at new houses for sale in the four regions of the US.

In the South – the largest region, with a population of 133 million, see map below – has the most inventory of new houses ever, surpassing even the astronomical levels on the eve of the Housing Bust, just before it all fell apart.

Since June 2024, new houses for sale in the South have surpassed the high of August 2006. In June, there were 293,000 new houses for sale (compared to 291,000 in August 2006). Since then, the inventory of new houses for sale has further ballooned and in October reached 304,000, and has remained in that range through December (301,000). Since December 2019, inventory has exploded by 76%. This is a massive amount of inventory of new houses for sale.

But sales of new houses in the South in 2024 edged down a hair from the prior year, to 411,000 houses sold, and was down by 13% from 2020 and by 9% from 2021, but was up by 3% from 2019.

Those sales were reasonably decent, thanks to the large-scale incentives, including mortgage-rate buydowns that homebuilders have been using to stimulate demand.

So it’s not that sales have collapsed like sales of existing homes – they haven’t – but that sales lagged far behind the speed with which homebuilders put inventory on the market over the past several years, and now there’s this glut of houses for sale.

So supply of new houses for sale, at the current rate of sales, has pierced the 10-month range. To iron out some of the big monthly squiggles, we look at the three-month average. Seasonally, the peak supply period is in November through January in this three-month average. Beyond seasonality, the trend is clear, with supply having about doubled from the pre-pandemic range:

Homebuilders offered incentives amounting to 10% of the sales price on average in Texas and Florida to get the inventory moving, according to the most recent Burns Homebuilder Survey. And that’s clearly not enough to get the inventory moving.

Here is a map of the four Census regions:

The West.

In the West – the second largest Census region, with a population of 80 million – a similar problem is piling up. Inventory of new houses for sale surged to 119,000, the highest inventory since December 2007, not far below the peak in June 2007 early on in the Housing Bust, and up by 35% from 2019:

But sales have been anemic in the West because prices are way too high. In 2024, a total of 157,000 new houses were sold, down by 28% from 2020, and down by 14% from 2019. While annual sales were up from the prior two years, all three years were at the lower end of the scale, with only 2008-2016 and 1990 and 1991 having been even lower.

So lots of inventory piling up and sluggish sales:

Supply has therefore spiked to 11.3 months on a three-month-average basis. There were only three brief periods with higher supply:

• In late 2022 as the market for new houses was waylaid by the surge in mortgage rates, triggering a tsunami of cancellations of new-house purchases, as buyers who’s sighed the contract when rates were 3% or 4% couldn’t take delivery when rates were 6%.
• Four months of November 2008 to February 2009.
• Two months of December 2007 and January 2008.

The other two regions are not big players in the single-family market

The Northeast and Midwest are smaller in terms of the population, and much much smaller in terms of the market for new single-family houses. The regions are dominated by huge old cities, particularly the Northeast with New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, and the cities and urban areas around them. New construction is focused on multifamily to increase density and shorten commutes from the already unwieldy urban sprawl.

So there are only a few sales of new houses in those two regions, amid rising inventory and supply. But all of it is too small to really weigh on the national scale.

In the Northeast, only 33,000 new houses were sold in all of 2024, down by about two-thirds since the 1980s, but roughly in the range of the past 10 years.

The Census Bureau rounds sales on a monthly basis to the nearest 1,000 houses. In the Northeast, these rounded sales have been either 2,000 a month or 3,000 a month rounded. And on a few occasions 4,000 a month. We use annual sales here which would largely average out the big rounding errors of the monthly data.

Inventory in the Northeast has been zigzagging higher over the past few years. Supply reached 17 months, by far the highest of any region. During the worst moments during the Housing Bust, supply reached 18 months. This is just not a big market for new single-family houses that would expand the urban sprawl further.

In the Midwest, sales of single-family houses in 2024 rose to 79,000:

Inventory in the Midwest, at 47,000 houses over the past three months, is at the highest level since late 2022, and beyond that at the highest level since 2009. Supply exceeds 9 months on a three-month average basis.

Enjoy reading WOLF STREET and want to support it? You can donate. I appreciate it immensely. Click on the beer and iced-tea mug to find out how:

Would you like to be notified via email when WOLF STREET publishes a new article? Sign up here.

The post Glut of New Houses for Sale in the South Is Bigger Even than during the Housing Bust. The Glut in the West Gets Close appeared first on Energy News Beat.

 

Energy News Beat

 

The post Ukraine conflict could end in weeks – Putin appeared first on Energy News Beat.