Sunday Gulf War III Week 2 – Tanker Passage, What Tanker Passage?

By Paul Sankey Published on March 8, 2026 at 7:56 PM

Well, that was quite a week. And there it is, oil through $100/bbl on the Tokyo open. It is blatantly clear that the Trump Administration had zero, nada, nothing, as contingency plan for Iran declaring the Strait of Hormuz shut to transit. Even now, their $20bn insurance knee jerk response has been completely ineffective. We are facing the largest overall oil & gas volume outage of my career, which started in 1990, Gulf War 1. …

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Qatar LNG Shutdown: Global Energy Crisis (ex-US)

By Paul Sankey Published on March 4, 2026 at 10:03 PM

LNG superpower Qatar finds itself having been bombed by both Israel AND Iran within the past year. Now a gigantic oil and gas outage, and notably the unprecedented shutdown of the world’s single largest LNG facility, which is a multi-month outage, will roil markets far more than is currently being discounted in relatively muted energy and equity market responses. The world is sold out of LNG supply, and this gas would represent around 2mb/d of …

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Sunday Distilling US Distillate

By Paul Sankey Published on February 22, 2026 at 5:53 PM

Pondering the potential disaster of the incoming blizzard that has started here. Our Monday JFK flight to London at 9am… Cancelled First world problem Some 80% of the world’s population has never taken a plane. As of 4pm snow barely an inch ~ This note is a bullish US Distillate note. Strong demand, flat supply. Bullish complex refiners such as Valero, Marathon Petroleum and PSX, but the rising tide lifts all US refining boats, assuming …

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