Oil prices rallied to their highest levels in two and a half years after OPEC+ recently agreed to extend its historic production cuts. On Monday morning, WTI was trading at $71.66 per barrel while Brent crude was changing hands at $73.49, levels they last touched in 2018.e

With oil trading above $70 per barrel while investment activity remains low, the world’s publicly traded exploration and production (E&P) companies are set to generate record-breaking free cash flows (FCF) in 2021, a Rystad Energy report projects. Their combined FCF is expected to surge to $348 billion this year, with the previous high being $311 billion back in 2008.

The OPEC+ alliance is widely expected to decide next week to further ease the collective production cuts, but the additional supply from August will likely still be less than the supply deficit on the market, analysts and traders told Bloomberg in a survey.

$100 a barrel oil “sure is possible,” Harold Hamm, executive chairman at Continental Resources, told FOX Business on Thursday, commenting on oil prices and supply and demand on the oil market.

Solid oil demand is driving up the spot crude prices in every part of the world. This is a clear indication that the physical oil market is finally catching up with the recent rally in the paper market.

Oil prices jumped further today after the Energy Information Administration reported a crude oil inventory draw of 7.6 million barrels for the week to June 18.

“Canadian oil industry’s carbon emissions are among the world’s highest for every barrel of oil it pumps,” Reuters reported this week. A typical barrel of oil derived from the thick crude bitumen that naturally occurs in the Albertan oil sands (an energy-intensive process) emits three to five times more greenhouse gas emissions than the global average.

Crude oil prices clambered upward on Monday afternoon as the market feared that Iran nuclear talks may be stalled after hardliner Ebrahim Raisi won the Iranian presidential election.

Gulf oil producers are finding it difficult to diversify their economies away from their biggest export revenue contributor, and it may take them at least a decade to make any progress on this. This is what Moody’s forecast in a recent report, as quoted by Reuters, noting that this reliance on oil revenues would be the “key credit constraint” for the six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council: Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

For decades, the true numbers relating to Saudi Arabia’s level of crude oil reserves and production have been a subject of much debate and confusion, not helped by the obfuscation from the Saudis over precisely what these numbers are. The reason for obfuscation is that Saudi Arabia’s only source of real power in the world begins and ends with its oil reserves and production, so the higher these numbers, the more the power, and the lower the number the less the power.

China National Petroleum Corporation has made an oil and gas discovery with reserves estimated at 900 million tons, Chinese media reported.

The discovery was made after six years of exploration work in the Tarim Basin in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, northwestern China. The geology of the formation is challenging, the report said, requiring ultra-deep drilling, at a record 8,470 meters.

Oil jumped by the most in a month amid a weaker dollar and as key timespreads surged with expectations for further supply declines at the biggest storage hub in the U.S.