NEW DELHI: Two Indian refiners declared force majeure on crude purchases from the Middle East on Friday after fuel demand plummeted due to a nationwide lockdown to stem the spread of coronavirus and the companies’ tanks are full, sources said. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has asked India’s 1.3 billion people to stay indoors for three weeks in the world’s biggest lockdown, shutting down Asia’s…
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Highways are empty. Planes are grounded. Factories are dark. The unprecedented collapse in oil demand has sent crude crashing to 18-year lows.Supply, on the other hand, remains largely resilient amid a price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia. US producers don’t want to be the first to blink by turning off production.That could mean a supply glut so epic that the world will soon run out…
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BEIJING, PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA (31 March 2020)— The Asian Development Bank (ADB) and China Gas Holdings Ltd. (CGH) today signed a $20 million private sector loan agreement to support natural gas and liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) deliveries to households, hospitals, industry, and services crucial to the ongoing response to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) and the post-pandemic recovery in Wuhan…
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ISLAMABAD: Demand in the country for electricity, natural gas and petroleum products has dropped dramatically as a result of the coronavirus epidemic, creating serious operational and financial challenges in the supply chain. Senior government officials told Dawn that electricity consumption had plummeted by almost 30 per cent and authorities had been compelled to provide uninterrupted power supply to even high-loss…
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If humanity is to tackle the problems of a growing global population, increased urbanization, scarcity of resources and climate change, we have to rethink the way we live. The ReGen Village is aimed at doing this, by being built to be self-sustaining from the ground up There are newly conceived community concepts around the world that are designed to help…
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The wave of oil industry spending cuts continues, with the majors now announcing significant reductions to spending as oil remains stuck in the $20s. Royal Dutch Shell said on Monday that it would cut spending by 20 percent, or about $5 billion, and also suspend its share buyback plan. French oil giant Total SA and Norway’s Equinor announced similar moves. ExxonMobil and Chevron have suggested they…
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I attended one of three major biodiversity planning meetings this February, originally scheduled for China, but relocated to Rome. The day I arrived, there were three cases of the coronavirus COVID-19 in northern Italy. Two days later there were 21, and five days later there were 229. I left the fifth day, without even attending the primary workshop. A colleague…
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As the municipal waste disposal system came to a virtual halt in several areas of the city during the ongoing lockdown, environmental experts voiced concern, calling it a ‘recipe for disaster’ amid the coronavirus health crisis.“We are simply inviting a disaster if we stop municipal waste disposal in Karachi during an epidemic, as resultantly, issues related to public health will…
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This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions. KARACHI, Pakistan, July…
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More than 20 cities across mainland China have been overloaded with medical waste, with Wuhan, the centre of the Covid-19 outbreak, producing up to six times more medical waste than usual, authorities said. Medical waste treatment facilities in 28 other cities are working at full load, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment told a press conference on Wednesday, without specifying…
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