Venezuela Braces for the Return of U.S. Sanctions

Politics, Geopolitics & Conflict

Offshore Yemen, in the Red Sea shipping lane, it was status quo this week, with the Houthis launching a close-range ballistic missile targeting the USS Laboon, but missing the mark, while U.S. and allied forces continued to strike Houthi targets. At the same time, reports emerged of backdoor talks between Washington and Tehran, during which the former appealed to the latter to step in and convince the Houthis to cease and desist.

Maduro is in trouble, and waiting to see if the U.S. will renew full-on oil and gas sanctions in April when the current conditional deal expires amid the Venezuelan leader’s sidelining of the opposition ahead of this year’s elections. The pending return of sanctions has sent Venezuela back to Iran to repair relations that soured when Maduro couldn’t make good on an oil swap deal, partly because when the U.S. eased sanctions, it redirected Venezuelan oil to cash buyers and away from the Iran swap obligations. Now Maduro is playing catch up on the deal to shore up relations with Iran when sanctions-lifting expires.

Russian presidential elections take place on Friday and Saturday, with Putin (running unopposed in reality) wrapping up his campaign on Thursday. There are only three other candidates, and no one outside of Moscow has probably ever heard of them. Together, the three could potentially muster 20% of the vote at best, with a resilient economy further bolstering Putin despite the war in Ukraine. Nonetheless, Putin has continued to intensify the nuclear rhetoric, which manages to rile the West every time it is pulled out of the empty threats hat.

In Ukraine, Kyiv launched a series of damaging drone strikes on Russian refineries, taking products offline in the ensuing fires. Ukraine also fired more than half a dozen missiles at Russia’s Belgorod border region, killing at least two people, and attempting cross-border raids that the Russians claim have been wildly unsuccessful and deadly for the Ukrainian side. There will be no negotiating for the time being, with Dmitry Medvedev (Russian Security Council Deputy Chair) calling for a “peaceful formula” of the total elimination of the Ukrainian state and its reunification with Russia.

Deals, Mergers and Acquisitions

Kimmeridge proposed to combine Kimmeridge Texas Gas (KTG) and SilverBow Resources in a deal that values SilverBow Resources at around $2.1 billion including debt. The KTG assets have an equity value of $1.1 billion and an expected enterprise value of $1.4 billion at the closing of the proposed transaction.

The geopolitical fallout of the Israel-Hamas war has claimed its first big oil deal victim, with the $2B Adnoc (UAE) and BP offer to buy a 50% stake in Israeli gas producer NewMed now on pause in a shock to NewMed’s share price.

Discovery & Development

China’s state-run Sinopec has completed the development of its submarine West Sichuan Gas Field and launched production. The 100-billion-cubic-meter field is part of Project Deep Earth and is the third such field of its size for Sinopec in the Sichuan basin. West Sichuan will produce 2 billion cubic meters of natural gas annually.

Sinopec’s news comes just days after CNOOC (China National Offshore Oil Company) made a massive deep-water oil discovery in the Kaiping South oilfield, which Beijing says will add more than 100 million tons of oil equivalent to the field’s proved-in-place volume.