The port is nestled along a cove in the Bay of Bengal. Located on the western coast of Myanmar, Kyaukphyu is just dot on the map home to a tanker terminal and crude storage tanks.

Yet it’s also the flash point for some of the biggest issues facing the world. China’s muscular foreign policy, US sanctions against Iran, the treatment of ethnic minorities, to name just a few.

One of the remarkable things about the crisis in Venezuela has been the oil industry’s ability to survive even while the rest of the economy faces a state of collapse.

The country’s production has indeed fallen to levels not seen for decades, but still managed to keep daily output north of 1 million barrels per day.

It’s only the dog days of summer, but the early candidate for story-of-the-year in the oil market might well be the Permian Basin bottleneck.

Quarterly earnings out this week renewed attention on the outsized role that a lack of pipeline capacity in West Texas and New Mexico has played on oil companies’ bottom line.

A discount for WTI crude in Midland, Texas versus Cushing, Oklahoma has meant different things for different companies.

Just days after Libya’s eastern ports reopened, the country’s oil exports were interrupted some 50 miles west of Tripoli.