RIYADH: The November data-set sparked a question that we thought we’d take a chance at answering. Commentators will periodically provide updates about Saudi Arabia’s inventory levels and point out the dramatic decline of crude oil inventories since 2015, yet leave out the reasons. Often when looking at country-by-country data, it’s helpful to have a slightly broader perspective. As we can see above, Saudi Arabia’s oil inventories have fallen by close to 80M barrels since October 2015. What’s behind this? Let’s walk through it. Taking a deeper dive, we can obviously see that production has fallen off from the 10.46M bpd average in 2016 to 9.95M for 2017, a decline of close to 500K bpd.This decline, however was mirrored by a decline in exports. Exports from Saudi Arabia have fallen from an average of 7.65M bpd in 2016 to 6.96M bpd in 2017 (approx. 700K bpd), which exceeds the decline in production. Thus, in contrast to the first slide, we should expect to see Saudi Arabia’s crude oil inventories building.
Pakistan, Iran agree to keep border crossings open round the clock to boost trade
ISLAMABBAD: Pakistan and Iran on Wednesday agreed to further expand trade ties by keeping border crossings open round the clock,...
