Reliance Industries has made its first oil purchase from Canada’s new Trans Mountain pipeline, acquiring 2 million barrels of Canadian crude from Shell for delivery in July. This move by Reliance reflects a broader trend among Asian refiners, who are increasingly buying Canadian crude to be exported via…

Lithium’s sudden price rebound is injecting a measure of optimism, and breathing room, into Australia’s embattled mining sector after nearly two years of punishing declines. The upswing, driven by Chinese supply cuts, has given producers a reprieve from the cash burn that was pushing some to unload prized assets at distressed valuations.

Hard rock spodumene prices have climbed from a four-year low of about $610 a tonne in mid-June to around $880, still far from the 2022 highs above $6,000, but enough to shift strategic calculations. For companies like Mineral Resources (MinRes), IGO, and Chile’s SQM, all of which had explored partial sales or restructurings to shore up balance sheets, the rally could make such moves less urgent.

A small pile of Middle Eastern barrels left on the table at the end of the November trading cycle is often just noise. This time it looks like signal. With 6–12 million barrels of UAE and Qatari crude still searching for homes after the spot window closed, the physical market is flashing the earliest, most reliable warning it has: sellers are discounting into the hand-to-mouth end users in China and India and still not clearing quickly.

On its own that doesn’t make a glut, but it does say that marginal demand in Asia, the swing sink for incremental Middle East supply, has softened enough to hand the price-setting baton back to buyers.