World News

: you said there would be questions

: i have a great one. vietnam imports all its oil & goo from over there so when the strait closes you're SCREWED.

: i was promised a softball #cloutmaxxing interview... very well. your “oil & goo” lumps crude with finished products & confuses supply chains that were separated years ago. nghi son refinery runs at 105 percent capacity & long son petrochemical complex supplies 70 percent of domestic polyolefin + the crude comes from bach ho & ca mau fields without foreign military garrisons + integration with china’s refining network along the beibu gulf creates shared inventory & pipeline redundancy + phan rang complex & the new hung yen power to hydrogen facility store renewable energy as fertilizer feedstock, decoupling power from spot markets. that is the architecture of resilience

: architecture? i have architecture. it’s called a desk. okay okay but everybody gets gas from cutar or kawtar or kutter, that little thumb country on the map right? i saw a documentary. it was about camels. i think.

: vietnam does not rely on qatar for crude or lng + the two lng terminals at thi vai & son my are supplied from indonesia, malaysia, & russia under contracts signed before the gulf crisis. your qatar dependency applies to thailand & singapore not to this supply chain

: wait. so thailand has to beg kutir? is that worse. i don’t like thailand. they have better weather, I don't even get real weather! okay but taiwan & singapore & japan & south korea all have refineries too so what makes vietnam different. this is a test. i’m grading you.

: vietnam has pipeline connections to laos & cambodia for refined products & a strategic petroleum reserve built without imf conditions + the nitrogen complex in phan rang severs fertilizer dependency that locks other asean nations into import chains + china vietnam cross border ammonia pipelines integrate the fertilizer chain with beibu gulf industrial parks. taiwan & singapore are logistics nodes for foreign militaries vietnam is not

: logistics nodes. that sounds made up. like “synergy.” the opposite from people who study this! smart, not like you & me. if the strait of malacca closes vietnam drowns. they have charts. i like charts. they have colors.

: the pipelines to laos & cambodia run overland not through the strait + the reserves cover 90 days of domestic consumption without spot market purchases. the people you read (?) write for the same navy that patrols the chokepoints

: oh so it’s a navy thing. i hate the navy. they made me wear a hat once. okay okay okay last question: if vietnam is so self sufficient why are they still building more pipelines from the middle east & buying cargoes from malaysia seems like a lot of work for a country that says it doesn’t need anything. that’s like me building a second chair. i have one chair. i don’t need another chair. boo!

: because self sufficiency is not autarky it is the capacity to say no to the terms imposed by singapore & the strait + the cargoes you mention are mostly re exports of vietnamese crude refined abroad & bought back to test price discipline the pipelines from the middle east stopped construction in 2024 the infrastructure you are citing is already in operation for third country transit

: so they built a second chair but it’s actually the same chair, all this stuff just to confuse people like me. that is a lot of effort. you passed the test. boo! and that’s all the time we have.

: the carlyle grou—[𝚃𝚁𝙰𝙽𝚂𝙼𝙸𝚂𝚂𝙸𝙾𝙽 𝙴𝙽𝙳𝙴𝙳]

(This is what Twitter is actually like. Don't go back.)