Irina Mironova
I would like to welcome our readers to the new semester with ENERPO students! We are continuing our activities within the World Oil and Gas Affairs Seminar, and for the next thirteen weeks, we will send you our Newsletter. The structure of the Newsletter will remain the same: we will provide with our analysis of the oil and gas news in the Energy News Blog, and provide with the overview of main outside publications during 7-10 days preceding the issue.
Let me introduce our team. Next week, Michael Camarda (mcamarda@eu.spb.ru), ENERPO Executive Director, will take over as the Acting Editor-in-Chief of the Newsletter, he will also lead our seminars and work directly with the students. Aaron Wood (awood@eu.spb.ru), the ENERPO Student, continues as the Managing Editor of the Newsletter. You can write to all of us if you have questions, comments and suggestions. Please get in touch if you would like to contribute for the Energy News Blog – we are open to outside contributions!
Our ENERPO crew this semester includes:
John Collins (jcollins@eu.spb.ru)
Pierre Jouvellier (pjouvellier@eu.spb.ru)
Lina Nagell (lnagell@eu.spb.ru)
Glenda Pavon-Suriel (gsuriel@eu.spb.ru)
Bogdan Polishchuk (bpolishchuk@eu.spb.ru)
Michael Roh (mroh@eu.spb.ru)
Soojeong Shin (sshin@eu.spb.ru)
Henrik Vorloeper (hvorloeper@eu.spb.ru)
Zachary Waller (zwaller@eu.spb.ru)
Aaron Wood (awood@eu.spb.ru)
Oil prices troublesome for Russia
The topic of this issue is the Low Oil Price. Low oil prices in principle is not a new phenomenon in the international oil markets, and falls occur regularly. The oil prices are currently at a very low level (around 30 USD/bbl as of the beginning of February 2016), and as can be seen from Figure 1, the trends currently are different from what we observed in 2008-2009. During the previous crisis period, the price has started to recover in the beginning of 2009(Year 2), while currently it remains within the low range.
The Monitoring Team reports on the implications of the low oil prices worldwide, and Glenda Suriel in her Energy News Blog outlines the implications for Saudi Arabia, the largest producer within the OPEC.