i generally repost any larry johnson content so here you are; 

 

On October 25 I published “Record Oil, Empty Tanks: The UAE’s Miracle Recovery,” built on Karl Miller’s October 22 assessment of the Emirates’ oil and gas system. The argument was not complicated. The UAE had rebuilt its ability to pump and ship crude, and good for them. What it had not rebuilt was its safety margin: the product stocks, the gas chain, the bypass capacity around Hormuz. Record oil, empty tanks. It fit in a headline.

That same afternoon I received a note from Philip Robinson, ADNOC’s Senior Vice President of Corporate Communications. My article, he wrote, contained “a number of inaccuracies” and painted a misleading picture of the UAE’s energy resilience. He asked me to correct it or take it down.

Which inaccuracies? He didn’t say. That is a novel approach to fact-checking. It is like calling the fire department to report a blaze and declining to give the address.

An open invitation, still open

I am an accommodating fellow. I offered Mr. Robinson space on this site to publish ADNOC’s rebuttal. Then, to save him the trouble of figuring out what a rebuttal might contain, I sent him a ten-point data request. I asked ADNOC to identify each disputed passage and supply the correction. I asked for the current serviceable capacity at Habshan, Shah, Ruwais and Fujairah, separating what has been repaired from what is still broken. I asked for a matched 30-day balance of production, deliveries and stocks. I asked for inventories by product and location. And I asked what, operationally, ADNOC means by the word “resilient.” I even promised to publish whatever numbers we could validate.

The response has been total, perfect silence. Perhaps the data is stored in Fujairah, in which case I understand the delay. There isn’t much in Fujairah............more............