President Donald Trump said India offered to cut tariffs, while New Delhi signaled it’s continuing to negotiate a trade agreement with the US, indicating both sides are keeping the door open to resolving tensions.  Trump said in a social media post on Monday that India offered to reduce its tariffs on US goods to zero, without saying when the concession was made. He added that “it’s getting late” and India should have made the offer “years ago.”  India’s government hasn’t officially responded to Trump’s remarks, but Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal said at an event on Tuesday that both sides continue to engage to reach a trade agreement. “We are in dialog with the US for a bilateral trade agreement,” Goyal said in New Delhi.  There are no formal talks taking place between the trade negotiators at the moment after a US team canceled its trip to India in August. Bloomberg News reported last week that the two nations are keeping informal communication channels open. Trump’s latest post may signal that the US remains open to trade talks, according to Abhijit Das, a former Indian trade official and author on trade matters. “This is his attempt to walk back on his earlier hardened stance on India,” he said. Trump slapped India with 50% tariffs on exports to the US to penalize it for its trade barriers and its purchases of Russian oil. India was among the first countries to open trade talks with the Trump administration, with the US president and Prime Minister Narendra Modi committing to a bilateral deal by the fall of this year. The two sides failed to clinch a deal after five rounds of talks, with the US getting increasingly frustrated with New Delhi’s unwillingness to budge on key issues, such as opening up its dairy and agriculture markets. Trump later

Oil edged up by the most since late July as technical buying supported a rally driven by signs of enduring physical market tightness. West Texas Intermediate rose 2.5% to settle near $66 a barrel. Ukraine struck two oil refineries in Russia in a continued assault on energy infrastructure that has begun to hurt flows, pushing Moscow’s crude-processing runs to the lowest since May 2022 last month. The conflict has contributed to unforeseen tightness in a market that was expected to be overwhelmed by OPEC crude at this time of year. Commodity trading advisers, meanwhile, were steadily buying throughout the session, helping push prices higher, according to Daniel Ghali, a commodity strategist at TD Securities. However, the algorithmically driven traders will sell both benchmarks in any scenario for prices over the coming week, indicating that crude’s run may reverse soon, he said. Russian flows have been in the spotlight over the past few weeks amid US efforts to pressure Moscow to make peace in Ukraine by targeting India, a top importer of its crude. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Washington would look at sanctions on Russia this week. Elsewhere, US stockpiles have remained low at the key storage hub of Cushing, Oklahoma. The wealth of bullish near-term factors — from the war in Ukraine to the US deploying naval forces off the coast of Venezuela — contributed to timespreads widening in their backwardated structures toward the end of last week. “Sentiment in the oil market is shifting from very negative to more neutral,” said Arne Lohmann Rasmussen, chief analyst at A/S Global Risk Management. “The main support for oil prices is the geopolitical premium. No one believes anymore that a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine is imminent.” The jolt of strength comes amid a bearish chapter for crude. US benchmark

The Northern Lights Joint Venture, comprised of Equinor, Shell plc, and TotalEnergies, has injected and stored the first volumes of CO2 into the reservoir 2.6 m under the seabed and 100 km off the coast of Western Norway. The CO2 is transported from Heidelberg Materials’ cement factory in Brevik  to Øygarden via two 130-m-long vessels (Northern Pathfinder and Northern Pioneer) designed by Shell engineers. The liquefied-carbon carriers are each capable of transporting 7,500 cu m of CO2 in a single trip, according to Shell. The CO2 is then offloaded and transported through a 100-km pipeline and injected into the Aurora reservoir. Heidelberg Materials is expected to capture around 400,000 tonnes/year (tpy) of CO2 from its cement factory in Brevik, two hours south of Oslo, accounting for about half the plant’s total emissions, according to Shell.  Equinor, as the Technical Service Provider (TSP), has been responsible for the construction of the Øygarden receiving infrastructure and the offshore infrastructure on behalf of the joint venture. Equinor also will have operational responsibility of the CO2 plant. The start of CO2 injection completes the first phase of the development, which has a total capacity of 1.5 million tpy of CO2. The project’s industrial customers include Hafslund Celsio and Heidelberg Materials in Norway, Yara in the Netherlands, and Ørsted in Denmark. In March, the owners of Northern Lights made the final investment decision for Phase 2 of the development, which will increase transport and storage capacity to a minimum of 5 million tpy of CO2 from 2028. FID for Phase 2 followed the signing of an agreement to transport and store up to 900,000 tonnes/year of CO2 from Stockholm Exergi.  The expansion of Northern Lights builds on existing infrastructure and includes additional onshore storage tanks, a new jetty, and additional injection wells. Development of the second

Energy Transfer’s Lake Charles LNG Export Co. LLC has been granted additional time to begin exports of LNG to non-free trade agreement countries from the Lake Charles LNG plant in Lake Charles, La. US Secretary of Energy Chris Wright signed an amendment order granting the additional time, the US Department of Energy said in a release Aug. 22. Lake Charles LNG was originally configured as an LNG import terminal but is now being developed as a 16.45-million tonnes/year (tpy) LNG export plant to be constructed on the existing brownfield regasification terminal site in Calcasieu Parish, La. The proposed project includes three 5.5 million tpy liquefaction trains which will utilize existing infrastructure. The existing Lake Charles LNG import and regasification terminal has about 430,000 cu m of above ground LNG storage capacity, two deep water docks capable of handling ships with up to 217,000 cu m of capacity, and a deep-water turning basin. Lake Charles LNG project milestones In June, Energy Transfer LNG Export LLC agreed to supply an additional 1.0 million tpy of LNG to Chevron USA Inc. from the Lake Charles LNG plant (OGJ Online, Sept. 20, 2024). The 20-year agreement increases Chevron’s total contracted volume from Energy Transfer LNG to 3.0 million tpy, following the initial 2.0 million tpy agreement signed in December 2024. In May, the company signed a deal with MidOcean Energy that will see 30% of the project’s costs paid. That same month, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued an order granting Lake Charles LNG Export and its affiliates an extension through Dec. 31, 2031 to construct the export project and related pipeline modifications and make it available for service. Energy Transfer expects to make a final investment decision on the project this year.

Natural gas consumption in the US will rise by 1%, reaching a record high of 91.4 bcfd in 2025, according to forecasts by the US Energy Information Administration (EIA). In its most recent Short-Term Energy Outlook, EIA anticipates increased natural gas usage across all sectors, with the exception of the electric power sector, which was the primary driver of natural gas consumption growth over the past decade. Driving the forecast was high natural gas consumption in the beginning of the year. In January, US natural gas consumption reached a record 126.8 bcfd, 5% more than the previous record set in January 2024, according to EIA’s Natural Gas Monthly. In February 2025, the US saw natural gas consumption reach 115.9 bcfd, marking a 5% increase over the previous record set in February 2021. The increased consumption during the winter months can be attributed in part to colder weather, including a polar vortex event that occurred mid-January. Typically, natural gas consumption peaks in January or February due to heightened demand for heating in residential and commercial buildings. According to data from the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, 45% of households rely on natural gas as their primary heating source. EIA estimates that US natural gas consumption decreased this spring and summer, compared with consumption over the same period last year, especially in the electric power sector. Natural gas remains the most prevalent source of electricity generation in the US, but so far in 2025 natural gas has lost market share in the electric power sector to coal, solar, and wind. According to EIA, increases in natural gas consumed in the residential and commercial sectors is expected to offset decreases in natural gas consumed in the electric power sector. EIA currently forecasts US natural gas consumption will decrease slightly in 2026, due

Equinor Energy AS discovered additional oil and gas in two reservoirs in the Fram area 9 km north of Troll field in the North Sea. The operator and its license partners will consider tying the discovery, preliminarily named F-South, back to existing or future infrastructure, Equinor said in a release Aug. 25. One of the discoveries consists of both oil and gas, while the other one is just gas, Equinor said. In total, the resources are estimated at 0.1-1.1 million std cu m (0.6-6.9 MMboe).  The discoveries are “in an interesting area with a well-developed infrastructure,” said Geir Sørtveit, Equinor’s senior vice-president for Exploration & Production West on the Norwegian continental shelf. He said the companies intend to further explore the area. “We believe that we may encounter more, both oil and gas,” he said.  Discovery details In a separate release Aug. 25, the Norwegian Offshore Directorate provided additional details about the discovery. Well 35/11-31 S, the 24th exploration well in production license (PL) 090, was drilled in 354 m of water by the COSL Innovator drilling rig 9 km north of Troll field and 97 km southwest of Florø to 2,636 m TVD subsea. It was terminated in the Oseberg formation from the Middle Jurassic. The well’s primary target was to prove petroleum in reservoir rocks from the Late Jurassic (Sognefjord formation). The secondary exploration target was to prove petroleum in reservoir rocks from the Middle Jurassic (Brent Group) and the Late Palaeocene. The well encountered a 5-m oil column in the Sognefjord formation, about 36 m of which consists of sandstone with good reservoir properties. A 4-m gas column was encountered in the secondary exploration target in a 68-m thick sandstone layer with moderate-to-good reservoir properties. In the Lista formation, the well encountered aquiferous sandstone with very good reservoir