MPC

Over a decade ago, I upgraded a stock with the unfortunate & ironic line: “We are putting together two uncomfortable words for sellside analysts: `Buy Marathon`” Again, it was more than a decade ago, when Marathon Oil’s head of downstream, Gary Heminger, based in Finlay Ohio, would complain to me bitterly (off the record) that his US-leading massive free cashflow-generating downstream business was being pillaged by the Marathon Oil upstream management based in Houston, to …

Tonight on Happy Hour, Ira Joseph, Senior Research Scholar, Center on Energy Policy, Columbia University. Former Head of Global Generating Fuels & Electric Power Pricing and Research at S&P Global Platts. Former Head of Global Gas and Power PIRA Energy Group. Former Editor in Chief Energy Intelligence. The man has 30 years form in energy expertise. Ira was recommended by Sankey Research friend Jay Saunders, long term natural resource Portfolio Manager at Jennison, and connoisseur […]

Your correspondent is flying tomorrow at 7am La Guardia to Houston for Steve Chazen’s Memorial at 2pm assuming flights co-operate, and so this week’s Sunday is here on a Saturday; a brief highlight reel, or should that be “bloopers” “fails”, and “cringe” in this tape. From the UK pound, to Japanese Yen, to Credit Suisse credit default swaps (CDS) this is a market at war with itself, quite literally. The incredible sabotage to the Nordstream […]

Last call for the Sankey Research Party at the Hard Rock Penthouse tonight. If you are in NYC and around Times Square, we have a glittering panoply of oil market experts, CEOs, investors, and some hangers on, all welcome. Kathleen Kelley “OPEC whisperer” will comment on the symbolic cut, and we are highlighting the new CEO of refiner Delek USA Avigal Soreq. RSVP if you want to join, there is plenty of space and we […]

We have spoken about the structural shortage of US refining capacity repeatedly. We have warned that the US refining system has been running very hard, but has been unable to keep inventories from all time lows relative to demand, particularly for distillate. And we have underlined that distillate (think diesel for my newbie readers) is the default “convenience premium” fuel when natgas and coal get short. It is easier to transport, and generally directly substitutable. […]

Tonight Happy Hour: Kathleen Kelley on OPEC. Frank Kelly (invited) on Washington DC – lots of action there. View share on results on what happens next. Today Thursday 4th August 5pm Eastern. Register for this meeting: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUkc-qvqjgrH9NWL5mVuMMR2AyR3q1cZrtm I was on Bloomberg TV bright and early this morning and… I used the “B” word. Just to note, we are long natgas over oil into the coming economic slowdown, and playing for winter. The announcement that Freeport […]

Big week for what should be terrific oil earnings this week. Watching Iraq Highlight charts – market rebounding, oils catching a bid ~ Week ahead: It’s good to see that oil earnings have worked back onto generalist earnings calendars, as shown from “Earnings Whispers” below. Devon aftermarket Monday sure, BP, Marathon Petroleum and Oxy Tuesday, etc, but believe me, a year ago Berry and Callon did not make these lists (see Wednesday below). Marathon Oil […]

Good to see oil holding, we have broken the bottom of our $110/bbl-$150/bbl range for Brent this summer, but news out of China is positive both in terms of higher oil demand and re-iterated low oil product export quotas. These product export quotas are some 40% below last year levels and underline that Beijing is moving away from energy-intense processing and exports, prioritizing its own air quality and environmental issues. Quotas are cut from 37Mt […]

Back in Brooklyn, Happy July 4th weekend, insert my annual joke about my not recognising US independence, or Make America Great Britain Again. Harry and Meghan’s second kid is eligible to be a female US President, being born in California. Based on the recent candidates, not just the winning ones but the primaries, just about anybody will do better than the current political class. Enough, let’s take a quick look at the first half. As […]

Briefly noted: Gazprom shares plummet -25% as shareholders reject record dividend plan Uniper, largest German buyer of Russian gas, shares plummet -18% as it says it is receiving just 40% of volumes ordered from Gazprom After two weeks in the dark, with no weekly oil data published, the US Department of Energy released the backlog yesterday. The DOE was keen to stress the “systems outage” was not a hack. Better not be, DOE manages emergency […]

Strategy Session was back to the round table stock discussion. It was sufficiently enjoyable that we will now have a monthly round table on stock ideas. Next week we have Tourmaline, week after Bob McNally. In between, Memorial Day is a week Monday, check the whites in your wardrobe and start yelling at the pool guy’s voicemail. Companies mentioned last night: Long Inventory E&P’s. We discussed oil volatility and beta skew as oil holds over […]

Re-iterate Price Target: Valero $150/share by June 30th. Re-iterate Overweight all US refiners. Illustrating Valero $190/share argument. This is a time of year when the weekly Department of Energy US oil data is crucial: it will be released at 10:30am today. We see an emerging crisis in US oil product markets, depending on how much of that crisis we export to Atlantic Basin markets. It will be a battle of demand destruction: who blinks first […]

Sankey Strategy Session tomorrow evening: Bob Jonke, Oil trader for Engelhart CTP and Kathleen Kelley, Oil Market Expert aka “the OPEC Whisperer”. When: May 5, 2022 05:00 PM ET, Register in advance for this meeting: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcofuqprzMuHd0CDoGbkzN6CiapFAdCg6k2 The Strategy Session this week will be in the context of what will be an extremely low-key OPEC meeting tomorrow with no press conference. Why no press conference? No comment on Russia. Simple as that. Bloomberg 5/4/22 The European […]

With the company reporting tomorrow, a client asked if it was time to sell Valero with the stock over $100/share. Our first target was $120 prior to the Ukraine invasion. We now think that $150/share is a stretch target. For your consideration: Using VLO’s reported indicators as a starting point, we see momentum established in late 1Q has carried through to 2Q so far.  These are straight off the VLO website: We’re in uncharted territory […]

This LNG round up with Gordon Shearer (Poten & Partners guru) from Thursday night took longer to write and I got tangled in the SLB results, which came in okay – readers will know I am not pushing service companies but love oils… “to 10% of S&P500!” Chatting to a client with Midstream expertise before Gordon Shearer, LNG expert, came on Strategy Session Thursday evening, the view was that Kinder Morgan results were decent owing […]

China rant PBF – Q1 likely half messy, but finishes running strong into incredible margins as Q2 starts Sankey Recommends: Liverpool vs Man City Premiership decider tomorrow – two of the best club football teams ever to play, at their peak. PBF CEO Tom Nimbley, President Matt Lucey, CFO Erik Young, and IR Colin Murray were on good form on Strategy Session yesterday evening. Nimbley started his career in refining in the 1973 oil price […]

Tonight PBF management on Strategy Session, 5pm for a tight hour. RSVP. I was at the Knicks vs Nets game last night with a global oil executive; combined with conversations with ConocoPhillips management Tuesday, some brief points. First, Shell profit warning this morning. Break it up. We would like to see a global LNG & gas and power trading powerhouse, a downstream “high carbon” operation with refining, chemicals and retail, a deepwater company. We don’t […]

Kathleen Kelley, “OPEC Whisperer” tonight on Happy Hour. Additionally in the following weeks we have two major refining CEOs ready to talk about oil markets. 3/24, 5:00PM EST – Kathleen Kelley 3/31, 5:00PM EST – Delek CEO | Uzi Yemin 4/7, 5:00PM EST – PBF CEO & CFO | Tom Nimbley and Erik Young You can participate on application, but if you don’t pay Sankey Research, why would you ask? If you want a charity, […]

Friday joke in serious times: yesterday a “Stop Oil” pitch invader interrupted the Everton-Newcastle (Saudi-owned) Premier League soccer game by attaching himself to a goalpost mid-game. An additional 17 minutes of extra time played. The joke? What does he think the zip tie that he used to attach himself with, is made of? Yep, he used an oil product. While wearing plastic glasses. He should have used rope? So much more inconvenient. Client question of […]

“Only the dead have seen the end of war” – Plato (Attributed). The Quote is writ large at the entrance of the Imperial War Museum in London, one of London’s great museums, if lesser known. Recommended. Thoughts & prayers with the suffering in Ukraine. Peace in Brooklyn, the weather our worst direct concern. The hard yards, I always say from my First World Wall St perch, are January 1st through to March Madness. And today, […]

Big Shot, Big Short moment. Nickel suspended at $100,000 per tonne on the London Metal Exchange. That means that today a Nickel (5c coin) is worth 12.5c, given it is 5g in weight and 25% nickel. The other 75% of a Nickel is copper, by the way. It’s being reported that Chinese entrepreneur Xiang Guangda – known as “Big Shot” – had a large short position on the LME through his company, Tsingshan Holding, the […]

Having featured a fellow independent researcher on Strategy Session last night – Doomberg – today’s note is a highlight reel of other people’s research. But of course first, Friday you demand jokes, and we are not here to disappoint clients. I used to play the triangle in a band, but it’s just one ting after another. I swallowed a dictionary, and now I have thesaurus throat. My boss arrived at work in a new Lambourghini, […]

Executive Summary With decades of experience covering oil & gas, from a US and global perspective, the authors have sufferedtwenty years of government renewables fuels “strategy” as brutally as any analysts in the market. In this notewe conclude there is a major problem with the current hottest theme in global oil & gas investment:renewable diesel. We walk you through from “what is it?” to “what is the problem?” The answer is:feedstock. This note is the […]

What’s going on the market? The Intelligent Investor is back from extended sabbatical and he/she/they is furious. Key current trading ideas: Long Shell into results tomorrow. Long Suncor into results tonight. Stock has lagged CNQ badly, one month, three months, six months, one year. We had strong downstream chat from Suncor’s EVP of downstream Kris Smith on our refining conference, which continues tomorrow with Joe Gorder’s Valero, RSVP. SU has key differentiation from CNQ in […]

Before we argue that Big Cap tech can stabilise the market here, on a fast & personal take of last week’s and next week’s earnings, in recognition that we need to focus on mega-themes, the latest population data from China is extremely important. NYT January 17th, 2022: China announced on Monday that its birthrate plummeted for a fifth straight year in 2021, moving the world’s most populous country closer to the potentially seismic moment when […]

Wildcard 2022 year starter: Kazakhstan declares state of emergency amid unrest. A member of OPEC+ that has failed to meet its quota increases, at times in 2020. Yesterday’s OPEC meeting was a rubber stamp. The question is when they meet in person to re-set quotas more sensibly. June is the best guess. Kazkahstan is a major concern for Chevron, although their massive Kazakh operations are totally remote in what is the lowest population density country […]

Our refining conference opened yesterday with an entertaining and informative conversation with the senior management of PBF: Tom Nimbley, Chairman and CEO, Matt Lucey, President, and Erik Young, CFO, and Colin Murray, IR. Noted in passing: OPEC meeting today, huge bull story over the past week was Russia’s December production numbers that once again failed to meet quota and remained flat with November at 10.93mb/d. Russian gas flows are also again very low to Europe […]

Happy New Year! Dan Loeb was complaining on Twitter that we hardly got any time off here: “Even prize fighters get 6 months off between fights, NFL players a week. Only 2 days off between years makes me want to join a union”. He was also welcoming New York’s new mayor; I am completely with Dan on both these matters. By the same token it feels as if neither of us will be joining Gettr.com […]

Not talking about COVID, just to say I am feeling 100% fine. This Omicron will hopefully be the largest and fast mass vaccination programme in history, whether by God or Government. Nice chart this morning from Greg Wachsteter, who kindly said I could publish. No more comment on COVID, I think the conclusion here is pretty obvious; this chart is therefore bullish S&P Energy. Sankey-Laffer curves. The presentation attached today, made me think what a […]

Of the many fine analysts I have had the privilege to know over the years, Greg Bordelon is clearly in the pantheon. A true oil guy, son of a Mobil Oil man, he graduated in 2000 from Tulane, cut his teeth at Exxon, and moved on to finance at FBR Capital Markets and Millennium, and before spending many years as an oil long-short portfolio manager for Citadel, subsequently running his own firm. I extend deep […]

Mega-theme, ESG backlash: progressive Dem agenda whacked by Virginia governor Republican backlash Mega-theme, short wind, long coal: second 2021 profit warning from Vestas Mega-theme, global energy crisis: European gas prices bouncing on Russia natgas supply outages Mega-theme, Renaissance of US E&P: Devon with great results, COP is about as good, Pioneer after market tonight ESG backlash: the general disarray in the current US administration has been exacerbated by the major swing of Virginia voters to […]

Key points: CHK new CEO EQT issues stock & hedging status Enbridge Line 3 starts tomorrow delivering oil, good for Canadian oils Emissions intensity of global oil producers Quote of the day: “I just know the the more control there is, the less growth there is. The great lesson of the twentieth century is that central planning doesn’t work” – Rick Warren (Drucker-Warren Dialogue, 2003) after @buckquivas on Twitter Chesapeake raises Domenic “Nick” Dell’Osso Jr […]

Enjoy the last weekend of summer, beautiful day here in London, readying ourselves for next week with a slew of oil corporate oil & energy newsflow in “conference season” starting with this week’s traditional “Lehman Conference”, as we oil old schoolers know it. For my entire career, the Lehman conference has occupied the oil/energy week after Labor Day. Post-Labor Day, for me, as a research analyst, opens the Wall Street year, back when it culminated […]

Tonight Happy Hour 5pm we are delighted to host Steve LeVine, world battery expert and author of “Powerhouse, America, China and the Great Battery War”, editor at large, Medium, “covering the turbulence all around us, electric vehicles, batteries, social trends”. He writes for The Mobilist, and is ex-Axios, Quartz, WSJ, NYT. 5pm ET tonight, https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZEtc-2vqz8jGtxwSq3R416BOuVoJD9v1vnE Steve and the debate that follows will allow me to finish my thematic “Electric Vehicles, not so fast”. The fact […]

The note today is delayed by England vs Croatia, thankfully the currently ongoing Austria vs North Macedonia game is not imperative for me to watch.  There are some great slides in today’s presentation. For example on how solar projects do not deliver their IRR, on worrying Indian oil demand, on the global petchem balance by company, and our new mega-theme, of new young CEOs following through on our “Renaissance” theme of US E&Ps. This new […]

OIL RISK HIGH. We have an OPEC meeting tomorrow, and the word is that Iran is pumping into storage on anticipation of successful negotiations with the Biden administration, which, for reasons I do not fully understand, is very keen to make a nuclear deal. This will allow Iran back into global oil markets. We understand that OPEC is warning Iran not to flood the market, and Iran is saying “we are going to flood the […]

Good day, The week ended with the guided announcement from Marathon Petroleum that its deal with Seven & i to sell the massive Speedway gasoline retail network had closed for $21bn cash, and upside guidance from Marathon Petroleum on an imminent Dutch Auction for $4bn of stock, within a $10bn open buyback authorization. It was uncertain how much debt would be paid down, but that was announced light at $2.5bn. MPLX, the 63% MPC-owned MLP, […]

As we hoped, oils’ results are going great. The sector is powering higher, with the overall steady outperformance grind that has resumed in value over growth. The oil price for Q2 is tracking well ahead of these results, further boosting the EPS upgrade cycle. Huge result from Suncor; great commentary on cash return from COP, a surprise beat from Marathon Petroleum with major disposal and buyback coming… good results from head-to-head rivals Diamondback and Aramco, […]

What’s Sisyphus’ least favorite band? The Rolling Stones We visited Japan for two weeks and did not see a single ninja. It was really impressive. “Officer, you can’t give me a ticket. I have to go run the marathon tomorrow.” Cop: “That’s not how you play the race card.” The Ketchup shortage this year was so predictable. Heinz sight is 2020. Happy Hour yesterday evening, we had a player whose firm had done a deep […]

BP announced the early achievement of its 35% debt target after the strength of Q1, and we think several unhedged oil companies will surprise with the strength of their profits after a $60/bbl quarter. We believe the overall market has lost track of just how profitable major oils are when oil prices are above $60/bbl, by which we mean the entire S&P500 upstream oil sector, with the major warning on levels of hedging exposure (see […]

Covering global oil markets, you can be sailing along peacefully and from nowhere, a new major event leaves you scrambling. And so a vast container ship blocks the Suez canal. Around 10% of world oil trade and 8% of world LNG trade move through the canal. Quite how the captain managed to hit the side of the canal and wedge the ship remains an open question, but we do know that the Suez is a […]

Yesterday’s DOE data was brutal for US refiners and particularly PBF. We had been hoping for a much more bullish picture – we got increases in crude AND product inventories. Imports surged particularly into New York Harbor – hence the PBF reference – as European refiners, desperate for market, scramble to attack the surge in gasoline prices caused by the Texas Crisis. This should be a brutal month for refiners, as the quarter ends and […]

Pondering the results and performance of Marathon Petroleum and ConocoPhillips, led me to thinking to what is really working for clients. The answer below is solar, but onwards! The issue is that Marathon Petroleum is mildly outperforming the XLE energy ETF, ConocoPhillips under-performing, so what? This is a swing for the fences market. Note we do have speculative stock picks, and investment stock picks every week in the Sunday Sankey, and these are both on […]

Well Happy New Year! This week in the Sunday Sankey we run through slides with attention on our refining conference starting tomorrow. It is not too late to register, dear clients… welcome to the slimmed down distribution list that like me, will be on a strict diet. At the same time, tomorrow OPEC meets, believe or not, as they shift to a monthly meeting. JMMC is meeting today, word is Russia is keen to increase […]

We continue to focus on refiners as we move towards our Monday January 4th refining conference. Register interest above. Before moving on to the subject of Valero and renewable diesel, it is worth noting that while the Dakota Access Pipeline situation is a known negative for PSX, as covered yesterday, the company is clearly, alongside Valero, the premium US refiner. In both cases, highly capable and credible managements led by well-established CEOs – Greg Garland […]

Good morning! Back from a week in Springs, out in the Hamptons. In retrospect I should have not only logged off, as I did,  but also deleted Twitter, where the tag of the week was “ATH” All-Time High, and an upsetting drivel of “I told you so” posting on Bitcoin and Tesla, among others. Most interesting Twitter post came from Lightshed, a fellow AnalystHub platform (which hosts Sankey Research for compliance etc) covering media, with […]

Special Sunday Sankey featuring the legendary oil’s share of the S&P500 vs oil’s share of the S&P500 earnings charts! Sadly, it was not worth running them all year, given the horrendous earnings of the sector in what will be the worst year in the history of oil relative to expectations. Now, as we look directly into 2021, the charts are beginning to make sense. More inside this note but a couple of starters for you, […]

Gyms should be allowed to stay open during COVID. The constitution guarantees freedom of the press. Who is Irish and stays out all night? Patty O’Furniture What is Beethoven’s favorite fruit? Ba-na-na-naaaa Further to our bullish refining commentary yesterday on net operating losses (NOLs) carry-forward for refiners, and E&Ps for that matter, meaning that companies will pay little or no income tax through 2021 and beyond, a client notes that “the CARES Act allow refiners […]

It is a delight to confirm that our 11th annual refining conference is on this year, as tradition dictates, on the first working day of the year, January 4th. Thanks indeed to the loyal CEOs of a heavily consolidated sector who find time at a difficult time of year – board meetings, strategy planning etc – to find time to join us. We will be running six fireside chats, back-to-back, with US independent refiner CEOs […]

Well for sure my timing in the Sunday Sankey making the uber-bear call for oil was completely destroyed one day after I made it, on Monday, by Pfizer’s announcement of a 90% effective COVID vaccine. My old joke is that I am never wrong, it’s just sometimes my timing can be WAY off. And the question of this note, given oil dynamics next move is positive, is timing of entry. Clearly the market was coiled […]