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Europe’s Green Deal will transform its economy, as floods confirm urgency of tackling climate change

18 July 2021

The floods raging in Germany and Benelux highlight the scale of the Climate Change challenge ahead.  Last week, Europe announced its roadmap towards a Net Zero economy.  It emphasised that achieving Net Zero, even by 2050, will be impossible if we don’t start now. As the Commission noted in presenting the strategy: “Climate change is

The post Europe’s Green Deal will transform its economy, as floods confirm urgency of tackling climate change appeared first on Chemicals and the Economy.

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Oil market supply/demand finally begins to matter again as commodity funds withdraw

11 September 2017

Its been a long time since oil market supply/demand was based on physical barrels rather than financial flows:   First there was the subprime period, when the Fed artificially boosted demand and caused Brent to hit $147/bbl   Then there was QE, where central banks gave free cash to commodity hedge funds and led Brent to hit […]

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Hurricane Harvey: lack of insurance will hit Houston’s recovery

8 September 2017

“By Monday, the third straight day of flooding, the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey had left much of the region underwater, and the city of Houston looked like a sea dotted by small islands.  ’This event is unprecedented,’ the National Weather Service tweeted. ‘All impacts are unknown and beyond anything experienced.’” This summary from the New […]

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Sinopec’s results confirm China’s focus on employment and self-sufficiency, not profit

1 June 2017

China’s strategies for oil, refining and petrochemical production are very different from those in the West, as analysis of Sinopec’s Annual and 20-F Reports confirms.  As the above chart shows, it doesn’t aim to maximise profit: □  Since 1998, it has spent $45bn on capex in the refining sector, and $38bn in the chemicals sector □ […]

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Oil market rebalancing myth looks close to its sell-by date

24 April 2017

The myth of oil market rebalancing has been a great money-maker for financial markets.  Hedge funds were the first to benefit in H2 last year, as Reuters has reported, when: “OPEC and some of the most important hedge funds active in commodities reached an understanding on oil market rebalancing during informal briefings held in the […]

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China’s rising exports: less about growth, more about exporting deflation

18 March 2016

China’s move towards self-sufficiency is radically changing global oil and petrochemical markets,as I describe in my latest post for the Financial Times, published on the BeyondBrics blog Markets used to cheer when China’s exports rose, believing this showed the global economy was in good shape. They are still hopeful today, despite the 25 per cent fall in February’s […]

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EU auto sales hit new lows

21 November 2011

Autos are now the single biggest market for petchem sales. They are also reported very quickly. So October’s EU auto sales provide the best real-time picture of the downturn now underway. As the chart shows:

• October’s sales (red square) were th…