Putin prohibits supplying Russian oil to countries using oil price cap
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday signed a decree prohibiting supplies of oil and petroleum products to countries which imposed a price cap on Russian fuel. The decree, published on the governmental portal, comes into effect on Feb. 1 and will be valid until July 1, 2023.
The ban is applicable to contracts which 'expressly or indirectly' contain either the term 'price cap' or a mechanism for setting a price limit at any stage of supply from the producer to the end buyer.
Supply of Russian oil and petroleum products to countries that have introduced a price cap will be possible only on the basis of a special resolution from Putin, the decree said. Russia's Energy Ministry has also been instructed to monitor compliance with the decree on retaliatory measures.
'This decree implies a ban on the supply of oil and oil products to those countries and those legal entities that will require compliance in contracts with the price ceiling introduced by the European Union,' Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak told Russian state TV. Last Friday, Russia vowed such a move, taken in the wake of the EU and Group of Seven countries introducing a price cap of $60 per barrel for Russian oil, seeking to restrict the money Russia can earn from oil amid the 10-month-old war in Ukraine.
The price cap applies to oil supplies by sea and does not affect supplies via pipelines. Hungary, Bulgaria, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and Croatia are temporarily exempted from the need to introduce the price limit.
US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm announced a 'tremendous scientific breakthrough' in the decades-long effort to develop limitless clean fusion energy.
"Simply put, this is one of the most impressive scientific feats of the 21st century," she said at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, one of many sites in the world where researchers have been trying to develop the possibility of harnessing energy from nuclear fusion.
"It is the first time it has ever been done in a laboratory anywhere in the world," she said, adding researchers have been working on the technology for more than 60 years. "Ignition allows us to replicate, for the first time, certain conditions that are found only in the stars and the sun."
Granholm stressed that the breakthrough strengthens US national security and is "one significant step closer to the possibility of zero-carbon abundant fusion energy powering our society."
She said fusion energy can be used to produce clean electricity for transportation fuels to power heavy industry and much more in a clean energy economy.
The secretary said private sector investment and fusion research are already booming, reaching $3 billion last year alone and added that it meets President Joe Biden's goal to achieve commercial fusion within a decade.
Granholm noted that the Energy Department made a $50 million investment in September for a public-private partnership to start working toward fusion-pilot plant designs.
Fusion, which occurs when two nuclei combine to form a new nucleus, offers a potential long-term energy source that uses abundant fuel supplies and does not produce greenhouse gases or long-lived radioactive waste, according to the Energy Department.
Creating conditions for fusion on Earth involves generating and sustaining plasmas which are hot gases that electrons are freed from atomic nuclei, it added.
Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari in a meeting with Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Samantha Power has discussed the long-term cooperation for rehabilitation and reconstruction of Pakistan's flood-affected areas.