he best scandals are those that start when someone, somewhere, decides to say something utterly shocking: the truth! A senior official of the OPEC+ oil cartel has said publicly what many thought privately — the group has been keeping oil prices too high, effectively subsidizing its rivals.

Mike Wirth became the king of Big Oil on Oct. 7, 2020. That was the day the chief executive officer of Chevron Corp. elbowed out archival Exxon Mobil Corp. to become America’s largest oil corporation by market value. It was the zenith of a honeymoon between Wall Street and Wirth.

At the height of summer, Europe had hoped that the coming winter would be its last difficult one to secure enough natural gas. By the middle of next year, liquefied natural gas was expected to turn into a buyer’s market, easing the squeeze the region has suffered since Russia invaded Ukraine. No longer.

In corporate-speak, when a company says a key target is “currently” unchanged but it plans to disclose a “review” soon, you know trouble is coming. And indeed, there’s trouble ahead for BP Plc.

In what should be one of the least surprising developments, global electricity demand is soaring everywhere as the world moves to electrify everything. Out go gasoline cars, in come electric vehicles; out go gas boilers, in come heat pumps; and so on and so forth. That’s the energy transition.

Since the beginning of the year, the OPEC+ countries that are subject to output caps have pumped together more than 600,000 barrels a day above their self-imposed limits.

When John D. Rockefeller wanted to punish a rival, he cut prices to force them to operate at a loss. The father of the modern oil industry had a name for it: a “good sweating.” A century later, OPEC+ is giving Big Oil the modern equivalent of Rockefeller’s time-tested tactics. Not everyone will be fit enough for it.

OPEC+ is like a teabag – it only works in hot water. The late Robert Mabro, one of the savviest oil-market observers, liked to say the cartel only got the job done when it was under prolonged financial pain. To judge by its latest actions, OPEC+ has yet to realize it’s inside a warming kettle.

Oil, copper, soybeans and a handful of others monopolized the attention — but of all commodities, the humble lump of iron ore benefited the most from the Chinese economic boom of the last 25 years.

The headlines suggest catastrophe for the global food supply: Biblical heatwaves, floods, storms and wildfires. And yet, in the world’s breadbaskets, the weather has been fair this growing season — so good that we’re facing an oversupply of key agricultural commodities and thus much lower prices than in 2022 and 2023.

Wheat and corn are the most actively traded grains in financial markets. But they can’t damage the global economy like rice. The staple for half the world is largely ignored by Wall Street, but it’s the one commodity that really matters for global food security.

The oil company declared its traditional business was all but over. “The demand for fossil oil products will continue to decline,” it said in late 2020 as the pandemic slashed consumption. Even when Covid-19 is over, consumption wouldn’t “recover to previous levels.”

The petrodollar died this month -- or so I learnt via the financial blogosphere. In the past fortnight, Google searches for “petrodollar” have spiked to a record, and viral posts about Saudi Arabia ditching the greenback have ricocheted throughout commodity and currency trading rooms. Apparently, a cataclysmic event has ended American economic hegemony.

When the Hunt brothers cornered the silver market in 1980 by amassing a huge cache of the precious metal, jeweler Tiffany & Co. ran an advertisement in the New York Times denouncing the move: “We think it is unconscionable for anyone to hoard several billion, yes billion, dollars worth of silver and thus drive the price up.”

In its moment of most need, back in 2022, the liquified natural gas market saved Europe. Now, that same LNG market is the continent’s new vulnerability. The good news is that the weakness should be short-lived; the bad news is that it won’t go away before the next winter.

After relentlessly pursuing $100-a-barrel oil, the OPEC+ cartel has all but thrown in the towel. Whether the U-turn is a tactical retreat, or a strategic shift, is still unclear. But for now its impact would be the same: Oil prices would be somewhat lower and global inflation would ease.

When Thomas Edison wired his own house in Menlo Park, then a tiny village in New Jersey, he fabricated a primitive cable. As insulation he chose a mix of asphalt, linseed oil and beeswax; for the core, copper wire.

Like clockwork, the commodities market worries in May about the strength of oil demand heading into the northern hemisphere summer holiday. Nervousness about the seasonal pickup in oil consumption abounds.

The prize is called Stabroek — a series of oil fields off the coast of Guyana, the Latin American nation bordering Venezuela and Brazil. The potential riches are incredible — about 11 billion barrels of oil, worth nearly $1 trillion at current prices.

Big Oil has delivered a set of remarkable earnings. Without fanfare, ExxonMobil Corp., Chevron Corp. and Shell Plc all did in the fourth quarter what they’d promised: Start new oil and gas projects; cut costs; return lots of money to shareholders. It’s a model for the notoriously boom-and-bust industry.

Picture the scene: Weeks after the world came together at the COP28 summit with a deal for “transitioning away from fossil fuels,” Saudi Arabia, the oil industry’s flagship producer, cancels a planned increase in its crude output capabilities. On paper, it’s the stuff climate activists dream about.

Being asleep at the wheel is invariably a hyperbolic cliché. But in the case of the London Metal Exchange and its regulators, it’s no metaphor; it’s a literal description of last year’s crisis in the nickel market.

When Saudi Arabia needs to quickly convince the oil market that supply is tightening, putting upward pressure on prices, nothing beats reducing its crude exports into the US.

In August 2020, Exxon Mobil Inc., the largest American oil company, was expelled from the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the world’s most famous stock index. It was described at the time as green triumphing over greed.

When the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, triggering the largest-ever oil spill in the US, all eyes turned to BP Plc, the British company behind the drilling. But BP wasn’t alone in the project.

If putting his country first was impolite, Prince Abdulaziz — son of King Salman, half-brother of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman — warned he would have no choice but to be rude. “I’m pro-Saudi,” he said.

The recipe for making money if you’re a commodities trader is simple: buy natural resources in one place and time and sell them somewhere else later — hopefully making a buck by exploiting the difference.

The US has become the world's oil barrel of last resort, single handedly keeping prices in the energy market from exploding even higher by selling a large chunk of its Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

Europeans enduring an unseasonal April cold snap may be forgiven for thinking winter is back. But for the natural gas market, summer has arrived. April 1 marked the start of a new year in the energy calendar, moving the focus to injecting enough gas into storage during the coming low-demand months in preparation for next winter. It’s a race Europe cannot afford to lose, but one it will struggle to win following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The OPEC+ alliance warned of a “precarious” outlook as a resurgent coronavirus pandemic hurts oil demand, dropping further hints about a potential change of policy next month.

Futures are now at the lowest level in almost two decades after Saudi Arabia signaled it’s doubling down on a price war with Russia just as demand evaporates