Nevada, Utah, and Venezuela: A tale of two oil and gas policy moves

Possibly, if these events hadn’t all been concurrent, I mightn’t have noticed either tale, or the events it encompassed.

But they did all unfold at the same time.  And they struck me quite forcibly.

One struck me in particular, for reasons I suspect will be obvious.  So I’ll just mention that one at the outset, to get things started.

In October 2022, a batch of Venezuelan bonds bought by Goldman Saches back in May 2017 reached their final maturity date.  The bonds were against the Venezuelan state-owned oil and gas company, Petroleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA).  They were nominally worth $2.8 billion when purchased for some $865 million in 2017.  Many business and political commentators thought it was a bad buy at the time: a use of investors’ money that was neither sound from a business standpoint nor impressive from a moral one.

Advertisement

TOC Ready Room 22 July 2022: Biden returns from MidEast, with prejudice; CNN v. Bannon; Bonus tag

We’re on deck with a full-up Ready Room today, after a relatively extended blogging hiatus.  Strap in for some serious (if selective) situational awareness.

Biden’s Middle East adventure

It turns out to be a good thing I didn’t get the segment on President Biden’s Middle East trip posted on Sunday, as originally planned.  Quite a bit has ensued since Sunday, all of it fallout from the essential failure of Biden’s junket, and the fallout is significant.  It’s what needs to be highlighted up front.

Here’s the short list of fallout items.  We’ll look at a few implications with each topic.

On Sunday, a senior Iranian official made a rare statement about nuclear weapons, and baldly averred that Iran is capable of producing them.

Shell, with unexpected Arctic drilling approval, looks like Obama’s kind of oil company

Shell-leased rig Noble Discoverer in the Chukchi Sea. (Image: Royal Dutch Shell via LAT)

As noted earlier today, the Obama administration on Monday gave Royal Dutch Shell “conditional approval” to drill an Arctic oil lease off the coast of Alaska in the Chukchi Sea – a move that has environmental groups in a tizzy.

Shell actually gave up on its hopes of drilling in the Arctic a little over a year ago after a setback in federal court, and at the time, environmental groups and the media were satisfied that the situation made sense, given the administration’s well-known posture on environmental issues and energy.

The mainstream media have been silent this week on why the Obama administration, with its pattern of uniform and ruthless hostility to the fossil fuels industry, has given this approval.  Even the New York Times, which is usually able to mouth a narrative planted by administration officials, has offered no explanation.

Bad tidings of sea and air space challenges

“History teaches that war begins when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap.” — Ronald Reagan

It made the most news when China did it a few days ago.  But it’s been building for a while, and it’s not just off China.  As the holidays settle in on us, probes of other nations’ sea and air space are in the air.  Is war coming tomorrow?  No.  But whether it comes after tomorrow will depend on more than gestures from that shapeless blob of geopolitical potential that we may now, in a post-superpower world, call the “status quo powers.”  It will depend on the outcomes the status quo powers can secure.

The China Challenge

Egypt, Cyprus, Turkey: Pax Americana crack-up watch

If you want to know what it will look like for the status quo crack-up to actually happen, as the stabilizing influence of the Pax Americana fades in the rearview mirror, a recent legislative proposal in Egypt is a good place to start.

Elder of Ziyon caught this a few days ago.  According to regional media, the upper chamber of parliament, the Shura Council, last week approved a bill submitted by MP Khaled Adbel Qader Ouda to invalidate Egypt’s 2003 accord with Cyprus on the maritime demarcation of the two nations’ exclusive economic zones (EEZs).  Ouda’s pretext for doing this is reportedly that Egypt was not “present at the signing” of Cyprus’s later (2010) EEZ accord with Israel.

As Elder notes, it is questionable