Welcome to Seeking Alpha's Wall Street breakfast, your daily source of market news and analysis.

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I'm Julie Morgan host of Wall Street Breakfast, Seeking Alpha's Daily flagship podcast.

Today we're talking about the oil markets, including the impact of China's reopening. I'm joined by Jennifer Warren

she's been a Seeking Alpha contributor for nearly a decade. Jennifer's areas of expertise

include energy trends, their economic and geopolitical implications, and resource sustainability issues.

Jennifer, welcome to the show.

Thank you. Thanks for having me, Julie.

Tell me this. What role does geopolitics play in the oil markets?

Geopolitics are fundamental in oil markets and and that's largely because of where the oil, most of the oil deposits are, which are in the Middle East.

Like 30% of oil supply is from the Middle East basically and when you add in Russia that's another 10% of world market supply that's 40%. So when in 2016, when Russia was added to OPEC via OPEC

plus, that's 40% of the global oil market, which now has even more geopolitics connected to it than before. And that's also going to influence pricing.

And part of the reason why Russia was added

was to redress US shale, because OPEC started seeing that U.S. shale was a player and that we were starting to influence price as well. and so that was done as a redress and of course now with the Ukraine

invasion I would say that geopolitics have been just ramped up more and then you throw

China into the equation and it's gotten even more complicated.

China imports 50% of its oil from the Middle East.

So that also factors in that our role as a US producer can't be understated even amongst this 40% figure.

We're sort of a balancing act in the equation and our production influences pricing as well.

And so we're a factor.

So they're doubling down on the pricing influence. It worked to an extent, but oil is still a global, it's a global market and so they have influence as a cartel but not not total control.

Will China's reopening have an impact on oil prices and explain your thoughts on that?

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