As mentioned elsewhere, yesterday was release of the annual bible of energy by BP, via EnergyInst.org. BP has done this for 70 years and so far there is no indication this new .org left wing group are tampering with numbers they are given.
Ukraine’s oil consumption 2023 was 220K barrels/day. This number has been in decline for decades. More important, and interesting, it is not up particularly since 2022. Quite flat, less than 1%.
Russia’s oil consumption is a much larger base of multiple millions of barrels/day, and it was up in 2023 just 1%.
Surprising lesson — tanks burn enormous amounts of diesel, but there simply are not many of them and when they must travel significant distance they do so by train.
Russia’s natgas production was down 5% last year. As was the UK and Norway. This looks like noise. No significant loss of customers for them. More importantly for oil because of the most gasp worthy part of the data —
China’s 2023 oil consumption was up over 10% (!!!) to 16.8 million barrels/day. The US is at 19 mbpd up about 0.6%. China will soon be the dominant oil consumer on Earth, there is likely nothing that can be done about this (those EVs over there must run on oil) and . . . the key point here is they are getting that oil from Russia. Their growth in consumption is met by Russia, who seem to have successfully found other customers for their oil. Note that India oil consumption was also up 5% last year, also from Russia.
Oil is everything. Natural gas is whatever is left after oil is everything.
Waiting in the grocery store line has never been the same since Weekly World News went away. I used to even buy one on occasion if the headlines were outlandish enough. Great fun.