Gulf crude and condensate exports ex-Iran recovered to about 16.5M bpd in September, near pre-war levels, Standard Chartered estimates. But only 60% crossed Hormuz vs 83% pre-war, so barrels move at higher cost. #Oil# #Hormuz# #CrudeOil# #OPEC#

💥 A drone attack has reportedly targeted the Surgut Condensate Stabilisation Plant in Russia’s Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug, approximately 2,500 km from the Ukrainian border. The facility processes gas condensate and produces several types of fuel, including aviation fuel. If confirmed, the strike would demonstrate the growing reach of attacks against Russia’s fuel infrastructure, far beyond the immediate war zone. The extent of any damage and disruption to production remains unclear.

IRAN’S OIL PRODUCTION AND REVENUE SQUEEZE IS INTENSIFYING: IRAN HAS LOADED NO CRUDE OR CONDENSATE CARGO SINCE AUGUST 25, AND TANKERS LOADED SINCE MID-JULY HAVE BEEN UNABLE TO CROSS THE BLOCKADE LINE. NIOC HAS CONSEQUENTLY CUT PRODUCTION TO DOMESTIC REQUIREMENTS—BELOW 2 MILLION B/D THIS FALL AS SEASONAL DEMAND DECLINES.

The man is such a genius that he couldn’t be arsed to take the fact that he remote detonated a bomb, and just invented a diode. He clearly had other important physics problems to work on — like the Bose Einstein Condensate.

BERRI GAS PLANT (SAUDI ARAMCO), SAUDI ARABIA, NEW THERMAL HIT 26.96, 49.595 THE SITE Berri Gas Plant is a Saudi Aramco gas processing plant near Jubail in Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province, with 1.42 billion cubic feet a day of gas throughput, producing condensate, natural gas, and NGL. It sits in the dense Jubail industrial cluster, about 9 km east of the SATORP refinery, with the Juaymah crude oil terminal about 14 km north. THE DETECTION • One Aqua satellite detection on 10/31/26 at 8:00 AM EDT: 53.07 MW at 91% instrument confidence, 13.5 times the site's baseline median of 3.9 MW • The pixel sits 6.44 km from the plant's mapped position and also qualified against the Juaymah terminal and SATORP. It is attributed to Berri as the nearest of the three, which leaves plant-level attribution open CONFIDENCE • A real thermal event at the pixel location: HIGH, 85 to 92%. A 53.07 MW daytime detection at 91% instrument confidence • Event real at Berri Gas Plant specifically: LOW, 25 to 40%. The 6.44 km offset and the shared-pixel ambiguity across three adjacent facilities • Cause: no basis. No reporting of any incident at Berri or in Jubail today, and routine flaring is a standing feature of this cluster • Damage: no basis. Nothing in the reporting or the thermal record supports a damage claim CORROBORATION No news reports and no social media reporting of any incident at Berri or in the Jubail area today. Berri was reported hit on 08/09/26, background only. The Houthi claim statements of 10/29/26 and 10/30/26 named other Saudi targets, not Berri or Jubail. STATUS UNVERIFIED. A strong single pixel in a dense cluster with three candidate facilities and no corroboration. Attribution, cause, and damage all stay open.

UKHTA REFINERY STRUCK - OCTOBER 9, 2026 SITE • Ukhta Lukoil refinery (Lukoil-Ukhtaneftepererabotka), Komi Republic, Russia. Cracking refinery, ~4.2 Mt/y (~84 kbpd, per @NOELreports/jakony, unverified). • ~1,900 km from Ukraine's border, among the longest-range drone strikes of the war. WHAT HAPPENED • Zelenskyy (official X post): Ukrainian drones struck the Ukhta oil refinery overnight with An-196 RS long-range drones. The same post confirms the Oct 8 Omsk refinery strike (FP-6 drones). • @NOELreports (OSINT): attack reported on Lukoil's Ukhta refinery in the Komi Republic. • TheGaze (citing Ukrainian intel via Deutsche Welle): drones damaged a petroleum products tank causing a spill, plus a gas/condensate processing unit. Russian Telegram channels confirmed explosions, worker evacuation, and tank damage. Komi authorities confirmed the incident with no casualties; Ukhta airport temporarily suspended operations. • All damage claims are attributed and unconfirmed. No independent verification of unit-level damage. THERMAL • No satellite thermal detection has registered at Ukhta as of this post. OFFICIAL SILENCE • No Lukoil statement found. Coordinates (approximate): 63.56277, 53.72688

Managing Chaos in Atoms and Markets: Michael Egorov on Physics, Liquidations, and Financial Engineering Shoal Signal Ep. 19 with @newmichwill, founder of @CurveFinance and @yieldbasis, hosted by @zaddycoin We cover how cooling atoms to 100 nanokelvins taught him to trust an invariant instead of a price, why he took impermanent loss on a trade on purpose, the half year he sat in liquidation on purpose to test Curve, and why nuclear fusion gets solved sooner than the field expects. 0:00 Photons look like giant cucumbers 0:58 What coherence time actually is 4:46 Bose-Einstein condensate and laser cooling 8:47 A qubit that held for seconds 11:36 From ideal atoms to ideal markets 13:50 The invariant is the only signal 15:08 Control systems in the lab and DeFi 16:42 Quantum finance and prices tunneling 18:49 A toy universe made of vortices 21:18 Why there is no antimatter around us 23:57 Crypto as the revolution in money 25:29 Cycles from Mt. Gox to meme coins 30:40 Where retail's next opportunity sits 33:36 The Web3 promise that never landed 35:28 Why crypto fits agents better than humans 39:09 Working only on impossible problems 40:00 Solving impermanent loss with Yield Basis 40:48 Reversible liquidation in Curve 42:26 Half a year in liquidation on purpose 45:42 Where the risk actually sits 49:45 Paying authors when AI trains on books 53:28 Energy as the next breakthrough 57:17 Two roads to fusion 1:03:33 Thorium and the economics of nuclear 1:08:13 Where the alpha is 1:10:21 Turning mercury into gold in San Francisco

The oil deal with Venezuela does not take US proved reserves from 46 billion barrels to 111 billion. Majority control of 17 fields does not give America 7.1% of the world's oil, does not put it level with the UAE, does not add supply in 2026, and does not replace a barrel lost at Hormuz. EIA proved reserves are volumes recoverable with reasonable certainty from known reservoirs inside the United States. At year-end 2024 that was about 46 billion barrels of crude oil and lease condensate. A lease, a 55% offtake right, or "majority control" of Venezuelan acreage does not move oil across a border on the ledger. Venezuela books it, and already does. Those barrels sit inside its 303 billion. Which makes the 7.1% figure double counting. Venezuela's reserves are already inside the 1.57 trillion world total. Putting 65 billion in the US column counts the same oil twice. Caracas also did not say proved reserves. It said 17 fields with a "proven potential" of 65 billion barrels, which is not a classification that exists under SEC or SPE-PRMS rules. The number has moved accordingly: Axios put a similar field list at over 90 billion, a US official said 63. There is no published agreement, no named operator and no audited reserve report behind any of them. The 17 fields have not been named either. Reuters, which reviewed the list under negotiation, described a mix of undeveloped Orinoco acreage and mature Lake Maracaibo blocks. Orinoco crude is 8–10° API, high sulfur, high metals. It needs diluent, steam and upgraders, plus pipelines and terminals that need billions in repairs first. Venezuela produces roughly 1.1–1.2 million b/d today. The 100-year term does not exist in Venezuelan law. The reformed hydrocarbons law caps mixed companies at 25 years plus a single 15-year extension. These are not the barrels Hormuz carries. The strait moves Murban, Arab Light, Basrah and Kuwait Export, light to medium grades that refineries across Asia and Europe are built to run. Extra-heavy Venezuelan sour is coking feedstock. It competes with Maya and Canadian heavy on the US Gulf Coast. It does not replace a lost Gulf barrel in Ningbo or Rotterdam. Access to future barrels, if the contract holds and the fields get built, is a long-cycle supply story. It is a contract, not a reserve. Only one of those appears on the EIA ledger.

🚨🇺🇸🇮🇷 What six months of war has done to the Strait of Hormuz... -Traffic collapsed from about 130 vessels a day before the war to an average of 15 a day in August -Both sides imposed rival routes, Iran hugging its own shoreline and the U.S. running a channel along the Omani coast, where most attacks have landed -Shipping a supertanker from the Gulf to China now costs more than $500,000 a day, double the prewar rate, driven by insurance and a shrinking pool of willing operators -Houthi threats in the Red Sea pushed some Saudi cargoes around to Suez, adding roughly 30 days to Asian deliveries -Iranian crude and condensate exports fell to about 280,000 barrels a day in May from over 2.2 million in February -The UAE, Kuwait and Iraq are pouring billions into new pipelines, trucking, rail and ports to route around the chokepoint entirely -The U.S. struck more than 13,000 targets and destroyed most of Iran's navy, though the fast attack boats that police the strait survived -Gas went from $2.98 to about $4 a gallon, with the Strategic Petroleum Reserve at its lowest level since the 1980s The forecasts of $150 oil never landed, and crude sits near $80, partly because China cut its imports and partly because the Gulf found workarounds faster than anyone expected. That resilience is real. What it cost is a permanently redrawn map, with billions in pipeline spending, a new Turkish, Saudi and Pakistani defense pact, and global inflation turning back up to 4.7% after two years of falling. Source: The Wall Street Journal / Writer: Daniel