** Bloomberg News reported this week that a cargo ship loaded with crude product from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserves has departed a port in Texas bound for Europe. President Biden said the release of oil was to lower the price of gasoline.
** U.S. utilities will shed insights on whether soaring natural gas prices will crimp investments needed to revamp electric grids and pursue clean energy projects when they report earnings starting this week.
** Financing potential is “infinite for the right project that has the right commercial support,” Anatol Feygin, chief commercial officer and executive vice president of Cheniere Energy Inc., said during a press briefing at the company’s Sabine Pass LNG export terminal in Louisiana.
** Opponents trying to derail a $5 billion, 7,500-job electric truck plant in Georgia dominated a state meeting this week that was meant to gather suggestions on how to design the plant to mitigate any impact on the environment.
** Arizona citizens and businesses will still be using their existing electricity provider indefinitely as a bill banning competition in the state heads for Gov. Ducey’s desk. The bill was sparked last year after a Texas energy company said it wanted to compete with Arizona power companies.
** Low-producing oil and gas wells that account for just 6% of total U.S. production account for half of the methane emitted from all U.S. well sites, a new report showed on Wednesday.
** Marathon Petroleum Corp., previously the largest U.S. buyer of Russian oil, just beefed up supplies of Ecuadorian crude after sanctions cut off its supplies from Moscow.
** The federal Bureau of Land Management withdraws six parcels from an upcoming oil and gas lease sale in Montana because they overlapped with a pronghorn migratory corridor.
World
** Washington and Brazil have discussed the South American nation’s role in keeping a lid on global crude prices since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Brazilian Energy Minister Bento Albuquerque told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday.
** Germany announced Wednesday that it plans to end oil imports from Russia by the end of the year and will then begin phasing out Russian gas imports, charting a path to energy independence from Moscow amid its ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
** Italy on Wednesday penned a deal with Angola to ramp up gas supplies from the southern African country as it urgently scrambles to break away from Russian gas over the Ukraine war.