Equinor ASA

Tell me and tell us how it came to be.

So last summer I done an Equinor contest.

It was a contest that Equinor held.

It was called the New Sound Town Contest.

And one of the things that came with winning it was I got to record my own single.

Some of the winners with $100-plus oil, Shell's up 27%, ExxonMobil 34%, Chevron 37.

Norway's, uh, uh, Equinor is up 84%.

They supply 30% of all the natural gas consumed in the EU.

Home sellers, okay.

But actually, that neighborly vibe is quite deceptive because behind a very carefully placed pelt of woodland, there's a sprawling, um, industrial complex.

You've got Shell, RWE, Equinor, all with kind of vast operations there, and Moerdijk really sits in this very strategically important area for the Netherlands.

You know, it's, it's industry, it's transport, it's logistics.

And the village itself is under threat because the Dutch government has decided that it needs possibly up to 700 hectares for more energy infrastructure in the area, and that's mainly, um, to help, um, the port transition to more sustainable energy actually.

Two-year leasing rates for VLCCs could rise by 20% to 30%, according to Morgan Stanley in a note published on Thursday.

"There's quite a few bottlenecks all at the same time," said Alex Grant, Equinor ASA's global head of crude products and liquids trading.

He said on the sidelines of the Asia Pacific Petroleum Conference by S&P Global Energy in Singapore, "The market is quite stressed with all of that, and that's showing up in the shipping rates." And here you can see this is the, uh, daily time charter earnings of Middle East to China routes.

At the start of the year, they were about $29,000 a day.

built out.

Empire Wind, which is the big Equinor offshore wind project in New York State, is 810 megawatts.

And so just to give you a sense, what is the average combined cycle gas? A couple hundred megawatts.

A couple hundred megawatts.

You're a scholar, not only of Venezuela, but of national oil companies and state-owned enterprises more broadly.

And I'm just wondering if you think the U.S. government has now created a national oil company on the spectrum of Saudi Aramco to Equinor to, as you just said, a company like any or places where there's a minority government stake, but also government control over the board or the CEO.

What is the spectrum of nationally owned and operated versus government influenced? And how should we think about what we think may have been created here?

I think that is a question that is really relevant to answer because taking a 35% stake, a government agency taking a 35% stake in an extractive industry of another country, That comes with a lot of challenges, Jason.