Portland Market Reports

This month Portland was lucky enough to go on a study tour – courtesy of the Association of Convenience Stores – that took in four state of the art petrol stations. All were independently owned (‘dealer-owned’ in the industry jargon), Read more »

It says something about the current oil market that the conflagration between Saudi Arabia and Iran at the beginning of the year, generated little more than a slight upward blip in prices. Ditto the muted market reaction to an apparent Read more »

The 21st United Nations Climate Change Conference (confusingly called COP21 = Conference of Parties to the United Nations) took place in Paris at the end of 2015 and considering prior events in the French capital, Parisians were almost certainly glad Read more »

Portland’s Christmas special Over the years, Portland has been able to interview some of the key players in our great industry. Who can forget the interview we did in in 2005 with Frank – one of the tanker drivers at Read more »

As we hit the final quarter of the year, it’s fair to say that pricing volatility and uncertainty have, to date, been the oil market watch words of 2015. After the massive downward price trend in Q4 2014, we have Read more »

Ahhh, the smells of summer….fish and chips on the beach, freshly mown grass, sun-lotion (particularly those coconut ones) and…erm, the smell of hot bitumen being laid on the road network. And the sights of summer? Well depending on the kind Read more »

It’s fair to say that for a country that relies heavily on people taking summer holidays, Greece seemed on the brink of ruining a lot of those holidays as June and July progressed. The whole of the Eurozone was balanced Read more »

Back in April the Portland report took a look at Canada’s Tar Sands and explored how low oil prices were having such a profound effect on this key Canadian industry. But with prices continuing to stay low, the tar sands Read more »

With the world awash with oil, a natural question to ask would be “where is it all going”? World demand may still be edging upwards, but production has truly rocketed over the last three years and most estimates now put Read more »

Big oil companies and their shareholders tend to panic when oil prices plummet and the result is often a splurge of corporate mergers. Indeed, it was the low oil price at the end of the 1990s, that led Lord Browne Read more »