WTI (Jan) $69.94 +$1.84, Brent (Feb) $73.62 +$1.79, Diff -$3.68 -5c
USNG (Jan) $3.05 -17c, UKNG (Jan) 119.85p, TTF (Jan) €48.065 -€0.63

Oil price

Oil remains slightly up today ahead of tomorrows Opec+ meeting. It seems obvious that having had discussions for some days that the decision is already made and tomorrow a ‘deal for a quarter’ will be announced. This is what the market is expecting so expect no fireworks…

Iran is also back in the picture, with no need to try and manipulate the gasoline market any more Sleepy Joe has started to play hard ball with them and has applied sanctions to 35 ships and the like for transporting crude oil.

And with the rebels in Syria taking Aleppo and no one quite knows who is backing who any more in the area and with Martial Law in South Korea our world is getting more and more diplomatically harder to fathom. 

Chariot

Chariot has noted the press release (link below) made by British International Investment (“BII”) and GuarantCo announcing a US$100 million guarantee finance facility for Etana Energy (Pty) Limited (“Etana”), the South African electricity trading platform which is owned by Chariot (49%) and H1 Holdings (Pty) Limited (51%). Etana’s business model is to provide competitive, sustainable end-to-end power solutions through the connection of power generation projects to commercial and industrial users by wheeling electricity across South Africa’s national grid. 

• BII and GuarantCo will each provide US$50 million of default guarantee finance on behalf of Etana in South Africa’s largest “energy wheeling framework” transaction
• Innovative deal designed to guarantee customer demand to enable new renewable power by providing developers with revenue certainty needed to break ground on new projects
• US$100 million in guarantee financing has the potential to unlock an estimated US$500 million of new renewable developments, equating to a total generation capacity of circa 500MW from wind and solar projects

Adonis Pouroulis, CEO of Chariot, commented:
“Securing such substantial guarantees from these multi-national financing institutions provides strong validation of Etana’s business model. Being a business that we co-founded, this endorses Chariot’s strategy to diversify into different types of assets and regions where we see rapid, scalable growth under the umbrella of transitional energy in Africa. These guarantees are the important first stage of the ongoing financing process required for the bankability of Etana which is being carried out at the subsidiary level.”

Securing such finance from these important lenders is really impressive and Chariot are proving that investing and co-founding Etana in order for it to access and develop new power generation projects was a very worthwhile investment decision.

With so many projects in the ‘transitional energy in Africa’ umbrella Chariot is very well placed to benefit as the need for such infrastructure is only going to increase and will, in this case be facilitated by such financial backing. It would be remiss to discard Chariot, this could be something big for them.

Original article   l   KeyFacts Energy Industry Directory: Malcy's Blog