Good morning, here's what the Oilman has for you today:

• EVs Fail To Dent Norway’s Oil Demand

• Freeport Troubles Highlight Vulnerable Supply

• Tweet of the Day

EVs Fail To Dent Norway’s Oil Demand

Norway is the country with the most EVs per capita in the world.

Oil demand there, however, has remained almost unchanged.

What gives?

An EV and a gas car in every garage

The above revelation comes from UBS, which admitted to being surprised by the facts.

Then it suggested that although Norwegians drive a lot of EVs, they are not their only cars.

Per the Swiss bank, Norwegians may be buying and using EVs for short distances and ICE cars for longer journeys.

And yet, EVs account for 21% of all cars in Norway.

Gasoline cars account for 23% and diesel vehicles represent 33%.

It would make sense for oil demand to have dropped palpably with this mix.

But it hasn’t. Why?

Because Norway is a cold country.

Oil’s not only for cars

Demand for oil from the transport sector may have declined in the world’s EV capital.

But heating and petrochemicals have gone up.

And it has gone up strongly—by as much as 35%, according to UBS.

"We continue to believe [oil demand] will increase over the coming years,” the bank said.

“Then plateau and begin a gradual decline at some stage during the next decade."

Some optimists they have at UBS.

Freeport Troubles Highlight Vulnerable Supply

Freeport LNG is one of the largest exporters of U.S. natural gas.

It is also one of the most troubled exporters of U.S. natural gas.

Fires and outages have kept the place from achieving 100% capacity.

And they highlight how fragile LNG supply actually is.

Not the news importers want to hear

The U.S. is now the world’s largest LNG exporter.

This means any news about an outage would make some serious waves.

Especially when demand is on the climb.

Especially when outages and below-capacity operations are not new.

Freeport has been operating below capacity since January, per Reuters data.

It is only producing from two trains out of three.

The company is blaming the January freeze for damage to the motors of Train 3.

But that’s not its first outage.

In 2022, a fire shut the place down for months, decimating exports.

"Future LNG projects will want to study what went wrong with Freeport's design," one commentator said on X”

LNG is a challenging place to be

Freeport may sound like an exception, but it’s not.

Problems at LNG facilities are not exactly uncommon.

These are massively complex factories for turning gas into liquid, after all.

That’s why they’re so expensive…

…And that’s why some of them end up never getting built at all.

In case anyone wondered why LNG is so expensive—that’s why.

Importers can only hope no two outages occur at two LNG exporters at the same time.

Tweet of the Day

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