ENERGY Pipeline by Felipe Germini Podcast

Felipe Germini
  • 0.0 (0)
  • Politics
  • Updated Daily

Insider analysis on energy, markets, and geopolitics—and the power dynamics that quietly move prices. fgermini.substack.com

  1. Jul 27

    The Signal: The Barrel got cheaper but the Voyage did not.

    The board went red on Monday, and the desks read it as relief. Brent down 7.56 percent to $89.46. WTI at $83.43. Murban, the light Abu Dhabi grade that loads at Fujairah and prices off the Gulf, down 12.57 percent, almost double the Brent move. The tape said the war was ending. Then look one line down. Heating oil, the cleanest proxy for diesel on the screen, fell 1.35 percent. Crude lost more than seven percent and the distillate barely flinched. That gap is not noise. It is the whole story, and most of the tape missed it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fgermini.substack.com/subscribe

  2. Jul 21

    JPMorgan: The Bank Sold the Barrels. Now It Is Buying the Ships.

    ON JULY 16, Hanwha Ocean filed a disclosure in Seoul: two very large crude carriers, 394.3 billion won, an undisclosed North American buyer. The anonymity did not survive the week. Shipbroking desks named the buyer as JPMorgan, or more precisely the shipowning platform inside its asset management arm, and the two VLCCs at roughly $132.5 million each joined a slate that now runs to about ten supertankers across Chinese and South Korean yards, close to $1.3 billion of crude-carrying steel, deliveries stretching from 2029 to March 2030. Read that again slowly. The bank that sold its physical commodities business in 2014, under regulatory pressure and with visible relief, is now one of the largest single buyers of crude tankers in the sharpest ordering boom the market has ever recorded. Not oil. Ships. The distinction is the whole story. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fgermini.substack.com/subscribe

  3. Jul 16

    Brazil Rare Earths: The 21 Million Tonne Illusion

    This week, the Brazilian Senate postponed the vote on the first law meant to do something with Rare Earths. In the meantime, a Texas company agreed to pay $2.83 billion for Brazil’s only producing rare earth mine. Reserves are geology. Supply chains are chemistry, capital and law. Only one of those three is settled in Brazil’s favor. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fgermini.substack.com/subscribe

  4. Jul 15

    The Price Cap Just Gave Moscow a Raise

    The West is now running two sanction architectures on the same barrel: a European price cap that loosens itself when oil rallies, and an American tariff that pushes buyers away from the only system the cap can see. They are working against each other, and someone is going to trade the seam. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fgermini.substack.com/subscribe

  5. Jul 14

    The Last Dance: Hormuz’s New Normal

    Late Monday, the President of the United States posted that the Hormuz Strait “is OPEN, and will remain OPEN, with or without Iran,” that America is reinstating “THE IRANIAN BLOCKADE,” and that the United States will henceforth be “THE GUARDIAN OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT,” reimbursed at 20 percent of all cargo value for the service. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fgermini.substack.com/subscribe

  6. Jul 13

    America's 319 Million Barrel Problem

    The number printed this morning: 319.5 million barrels. That is what remains in the United States Strategic Petroleum Reserve as of the week ending July 3, and you have to go back to April 1983 to find less oil in those salt caverns. Ronald Reagan was in his first term. The reserve was still being filled for the first time. Against an authorized capacity of 714 million barrels, America's oil insurance policy is now 44 percent funded, and the tape it must be rebuilt against closed near $79 Brent today, up roughly ten percent in a week. The world's largest strategic reserve has become the world's largest short position in physical crude, and the delivery notices start arriving on November 1. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fgermini.substack.com/subscribe

  7. Jul 3

    The Barrel Forgot the War. Brazil's Onshore Ledger Did Not.

    Front-month WTI, the August contract, settled under $68 this week. Dated Brent sits under $71, the weakest print since February 27, with the August CFDs telling the same flat story. February 28 was the day US and Israeli strikes shut the Strait of Hormuz and Brent went looking for $120. Four months later the tape has erased the entire episode, as if a war in the world’s most important chokepoint were a data glitch someone corrected. The war premium was rented, not owned. Markets do not price history. They price flow, and the flow never really stopped. What interests me is not the round trip itself. It is where a $68 barrel lands once it crosses the Brazilian ledger, because it lands twice, on opposite sides of the page, and only one of those entries is getting any attention. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fgermini.substack.com/subscribe

  8. Jul 1

    Oilfield Services a Workforce between the Iron and the Algorithm

    Look at where the service majors are putting their money, not where they are pointing their press releases. SLB now runs a standalone Digital Division. Annual recurring revenue near 926 million dollars, compounding double digits quarter on quarter, the fastest-growing business in the house. Put it in proportion first, because the number alone will mislead you. That is a small slice of a company turning over tens of billions, two to three percent, not the whole income statement. The signal is not the size of the line. It is the direction the capital and the org chart are pointing, while the same company’s drilling customers idle rigs and trim exploration budgets with WTI stuck in the low sixties. Halliburton sells LOGIX automation and remote operations. Baker Hughes is chasing the same turn. All three are leaning into AI data-center infrastructure work because the old growth engine sputtered and the new one runs on software margins, not on bodies. Watch which team grows and which seat is never refilled after the next cut, and you have already read where the value is going. The digital desk hires. The field engineer’s chair sits empty. Nobody vanished in a press release. They became a cost line to be managed down. That is the validation. Now the part nobody on the technical career track wants to hear. 01 · THE SURVIVOR POPULATION AI is landing on a workforce two crashes already gutted This is the detail every comparison to banking or law gets wrong. AI is not arriving to a fat workforce in upstream. It is arriving to a survivor population, a crew already cut twice to the bone. Two price crashes did the heavy work before a single model touched a drilling program. When Brent broke in 2014, and again when demand fell off the table in 2020, the service majors shed people like ballast over the side of a sinking hull. SLB alone cut roughly 34,000 jobs across 2015 and 2016, about a quarter of its entire workforce, and discovered it could run the same scope of work with far fewer hands. The crews that came back came back thinner. They never came back to the prior peak. The schools tell the same story from the other end. US petroleum-engineering enrollment is down about 75 percent from its 2014 peak of 11,474 students. Texas Tech off 88 percent. Oklahoma off 90. A whole cohort looked at the price chart and the transition narrative and walked into a different building on campus. So the displacement arithmetic in this industry runs backward from the arithmetic everywhere else. The marginal person AI removes from a bank is one of thousands doing cognitive routine. The marginal person it removes from a service company is rarer, more expensive to replace, and carries knowledge that took fifteen years and three failed jobs to build. The fat is long gone. What is left is muscle and a thinning seam of grey hair that remembers, in its hands, why the last cement job channeled. Hold that picture, because it inverts the comfortable story. In most industries automation eats the factory floor first and the credentialed desk is the safe harbor. Upstream flips it. The hands on the iron are the hardest thing on earth to automate, fenced behind a safety culture where the bar to remove a human from a high-consequence task sits near impossible. The exposed roles are the desk-bound technical ones that always assumed a diploma was a moat. The model reads the log. The hand on the rig floor reads the well. Those are not the same skill, and only one of them is being commoditized this decade. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fgermini.substack.com/subscribe

See All (16)

About

Insider analysis on energy, markets, and geopolitics—and the power dynamics that quietly move prices. fgermini.substack.com

Information