Gustav Came And Went

After massive offloading by speculators on Wall Street, Gustav came and went without hiking up crude oil price. Oil was below US109 per barrel on Wednesday. Wall Street is still trying to convince the general public that speculation on futures and commodities is not the number 1 culprit for the high oil price. It is supply and demand. There is no supply disruption aside from the small supply closure from the Gulf of Mexico (GOM). Contrary to Wall Street, Iran OPEC Governor has announced that OPEC will reduce supply by 1M barrels per day, stating that the market is "oversupplied". Do you trust the American Wall Street sharks or the gung-ho Persians?

The personnel onboard 100 rigs operating in GOM, after lessons learnt from Katrina, were safely evacuated with all wells secured with 1.3Mbpd production. 13 refineries were shut down.

Meanwhile, Exxon is expected to increase production from Sakhalin-1 in Russia (the world's second biggest oil exporter) to 183kpbd. Oil firms are claiming that high taxation in Russia is dampening future prospects in Sakhalin.

Nigeria has been crowned the biggest producer in Africa at 1.92M barrels per day, dropping Angola to second spot.

For those working in South China Sea worried about piracy and hijacking, it is good to know that the Navy finally deployed one warship to Yemen to "monitor the situation", 2 weeks after the seizure of the first MISC tanker. A second tanker was hijacked 10 days after that.

Talk about immediate response time to national security.

MISC tankers hijacked

NST today reported in page 29 that another MISC vessel "Bunga Melati Lima" was hijacked off the coast of Yemen. She had 36 Malaysian crews onboard. The hijackers were armed to the teeth, with RPG and automatic weapons. On Aug 19th, another vessel "Bunga Melati Dua" was hijacked with 29 Malaysians onboard. She was hijacked between Somalia & Yemen.

Our prayers to the crews. My surprise is how much priority we put into this. The news was way back on page 29 and this happened close to Independence Day. There is lack of updates as to what the authorities are doing and what has progressed (we may have dispatched our Paskal but could someone at least tell us). For someone who works 100 km from shore, open to all kinds of weather threats and piracy, I'm highly concerned that there is no urgency to inform the general public what our resolve is (if there is such) to end this standoff.

The media and relevant authorities need to answer these questions:

1. What are their demands with 2 ships laden with CPO and petrochemicals?
2. Is there beef with the Malaysian government?
3. How did the hijackers manage to board the ships with RPG and automatic weapons? Who do they represent?
4. What is the status of the crews?
5. What is being done to resolve the issue?

Everyone seems to be quiet about it, MISC, Navy, Government or maybe I do not get full coverage out here in South China Sea!