You could be forgiven for missing this headline with all the attention placed on the meeting of oil ministers held September 23 in Algiers.

“Platts eyes changes in dated Brent crude price assessment,” Reuters reported.

These should be good times for oil producers.

Crude futures have stabilized around $70-$80 per barrel. Prices generally look high enough to make money, but not too high to cause demand destruction or invite megaprojects destined to flood the market for years to come.

The longer this Goldilocks scenario lasts the better for oilmen around the world.

The pipeline between the Cano Limon oil field in northeast Colombia and the Caribbean town of Covenas has been bombed repeatedly by leftist guerrillas for more than 30 years.

A fresh round of attacks that began last month blamed on the Marxist National Liberation Army (ELN) has occurred at a fragile moment in the country’s history.

The plunge in the Turkish lira has unnerved global investors, raised the cost of living for millions of ordinary citizens, and tested President Recep Erdogan’s ability to survive politically.

After years of heavy borrowing, Turkey’s economy faces a moment of reckoning as dollar-denominated debts come due. Traders have dumped the lira fearing the worst.

With only three months to go before the US cracks down on buyers of Iranian oil, questions remain about how effective unilateral sanctions will prove to be.

With the amount of crude in storage at Cushing, Oklahoma falling to multi-year lows, oil prices should be deep into bull market territory. Right?

Not exactly.

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.