If you missed out on getting tickets for the Backstreet Boys‘ larger than life Into the Millennium Las Vegas residency at the Sphere in Las Vegas there is some good news. On Wednesday morning (Aug. 13), the boy band announced that due to demand they are extending their run at the iconic immersive venue, adding seven new shows in December and January 2026, including a New Year’s Eve gig.
The fresh dates will take place on Dec. 26, 27, 28, 30 and 31, as well as Jan. 2 and 3.
BSB are the first pop band to take up residence at the domed venue and according to a release, at the end of the 21 previously announced, sold-out gigs they will have performed in front of 350,000 fans. Tickets for the newly added dates will go on sale first via a Backstreet Boys Fan Club pre-sale beginning on Aug. 19 at 9 a.m. PT, followed by an artist pre-sale beginning on Aug. 20 at 9 a.m. PT; sign up for the artist pre-sale here through 7 p.m. PT on Aug. 17. A general on-sale will kick off on Aug. 22 at 9 a.m. PT here.
U2 helped launch the venue in Sept. 2023, followed by Phish, Dead & Company, the Eagles, EDM artist Anyma and Kenny Chesney. BSB kicked off their 21-show run of Sphere gigs on July 11, with the current residency slated to wind down this Sunday (Aug. 17) before picking back up in December.
According to a Billboard report on opening night, the eye-popping spectacle, “transported fans to outer space as a massive screen surrounded them with visuals of a spacecraft right before the band appeared on stage. The Backstreet Boys — Nick Carter, Howie Dorough, Brian Littrell, AJ McLean and Kevin Richardson — launched into a night of hits with ‘Larger Than Life,’ which was the perfect description of the show they had created.”
The new Machine Gun Kelly album trailer is just the latest in a string of oddball Dylan cameos over the years that nobody could have ever predicted
Machine Gun Kelly received the shock of his life back in February when Bob Dylan posted an archival video of him freestyling in a record store to his 1.2 million followers on Instagram. “Someone goes, ‘Bob Dylan just posted a video of you,”’ he told his own Instagram followers the next day. “And I’m like, ‘There must be another Bob Dylan. Whatever.’ We got to his Instagram, he did post a video. I’m like…Just the originator of doing everything opposite of what people wanted him to do, randomly posting a video of me back in the day rapping in a vinyl shop. I’m just like, ‘What the fuck?’”
It felt like a one-off crossover between two wildly different artists. But three months later, a trailer for MGK’s new record Lost Americana had a narrator with a familiar drawl. “Lost Americana is a personal excavation of the American dream – a journey to find what’s been lost,” Dylan says. “[It’s] a love letter to those who seek to rediscover.”
We’ve yet to learn exactly how mgk roped Dylan into this, but he essentially confirmed that they met in May when the Outlaw Tour came to Los Angeles. “I met and had a conversation with someone last night that I never thought I’d get the honor to meet all because of a video of me rapping in a music store 10 years ago,” he posted on X the day after the show. “I love music.”
The Lost Americana trailer is just one of many times that Bob Dylan has popped up in very surprising pop culture places throughout his long career. Here’s a look at 10 others, including an underwear commercial, a History Channel show, a Jenna Elfman sitcom, and a very, very bad Dennis Hopper movie.
‘Sun City’ (1985)
Image Credit: Dave Hogan/Getty Images
Just a few months after “We Are the World,” Steve Van Zandt assembled another large crew of famous musicians for a song. Their task this time wasn’t raising money, but convincing musicians to stop playing concerts at the South African resort Sun City. This should have been a no-brainer since this was the peak of apartheid, but everyone from Queen and Elton John to Rod Stewart, Linda Ronstadt, and Cher had appeared there in recent years. The song and video features cameos from Lou Reed, Bono, Hall & Oates, Keith Richards, Ron Wood, Herbie Hancock, Pete Townshend, Clarence Clemons, Bob Dylan, and many, many others. Dylan’s appearance comes at the halfway point when he walks down the street with Jackson Browne and sing a few lines of the song with him. It would have been great to see him interact with the Fat Boys, Afrika Bambaataa, and Kurtis Blow, but we’ll take what we can get.
Kurtis Blow’s ‘Street Rock’ (1986)
Image Credit: Vinnie Zuffante/Getty Images
If you wanted Bob Dylan to do something strange and out of character, the mid-1980s was the best time to ask. For whatever reason, this was a time when he was willing to do lots of interviews, even on television, guest on charity singles, do a choreographed dance move in one of his music videos, or star in a truly awful Rupert Everett movie. He also recorded this rapid-fire rap at the kickoff to Kurtis Blow’s 1987 single “Street Rock.” “I’ve indulged in higher knowledge,” he raps, “took scan of encyclopedia/Keeping constant research of our reports in news media/Kids starve in Ethiopia and we are gettin’ greedier/The rich are gettin’ richer and the needy’s gettin’ needier.” He agreed to do it because he borrowed some of Blow’s backup singers for a recording session. And in Chronicles, Volume 1, Dylan said Blow made him a fan of N.W.A., Run DMC, and Public Enemy. “These guys weren’t standing around bullshitting,” said Dylan. “They were beating drums, tearing it up, hurling horses over cliffs. They were all poets and knew what was going on.”
The 25th Anniversary Chabad Telethon (1989)
Image Credit: Gary Gershoff/Getty Images
According to the typical narrative, Bob Dylan walked away from Judaism forever in the late Seventies when he embraced Jesus Christ and became a passionate Born Again Christian The truth is significantly more complicated, and the exact timeline is unknown, but he definitely returned to his Jewish roots in the early Eighties. If you need any visual proof of this, check out the numerous appearances he made on Chabad telethons in the Eighties and early Nineties. The 1989 one is especially memorable since he sings “Hava Nagila” with actor Harry Dean Stanton and folk singer Peter Himmelman, who happens to be his son-in-law. It’s so weird it almost looks like an AI video, but it’s real. This happened. (And what are Dylan’s religious beliefs today? Nobody knows, but it’s likely some unique fusion of Judaism and Christianity.)
Dennis Hopper’s ‘Catchfire’ (1990)
Image Credit: Youtube
By nearly any standard, the 1990 Dennis Hopper/Jodie Foster movie Catchfire is terrible. The thin plot revolves around a visual artist (Foster) who witnesses a mob hit and has to flee for her life. The only thing even remotely notable about it – beyond the fact that Foster’s next movie was Silence of the Lambs and Joe Pesci shot a quick scene the same year he made Goodfellas – is the fact that Hopper talked his longtime buddy Bob Dylan into filming a cameo. He’s creating a chainsaw statue during his brief scene, and his speaking voice is so mumbly that he’s essentially incoherent. (It makes renditions of “Desolation Row” circa 2013 clear and lucid by comparison.) The whole movie is so abysmal it makes Masked and Anonymous look like Casablanca.
Wyclef Jean’s ‘Gone till November’ Video (1997)
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When Wyclef Jean was lining up possible cameos for the video to his 1997 song “Gone till November,” he thought about reaching out to Bob Dylan. “No one really thought he would come,” Jean told the Herald-Tribune in 2018. “I remember people chastising me like, “Man, he don’t even show up for his son’s videos, so he’s definitely not coming to your video.’” But he showed up for a 15-second cameo seated next to Jean in an airport as Wyclef sings “I’m knockin’ on heaven’s door like I’m Bob Dylan.” “The only person he’d talk to on the set was me,” said Wyclef, ‘and he said, “Man, you’re such a cool cat, you remind me of my bass player that I played with.’ And it’s so funny he said that because one of my first instruments is bass, so it’s just crazy to me, like certain things that happen are just cosmic.”
‘Dharma and Greg’ (1999)
Image Credit: Keith Baugh/Redferns/Getty Images
In the world of Nineties sitcoms, Dharma & Greg is about as unmemorable as Caroline in the City, Veronica’s Closet, and Wings. Millions of people watched it back then since there wasn’t much else on TV, but we’d be willing to bet only a fraction of them could recall even the most premise today. (It starred Jenna Elfman and Thomas Gibson as two polar opposites who impulsively married each other on their first date. There were 119 episodes across five seasons.) Its greatest claim to fame today is the October 12, 1999, episode Play Lady Play where Dharma plays drums in a friend’s teenage garage band. At the end, Bob Dylan appears out nowhere to jam with her alongside T-Bone Burnett and other veteran musicians. It’s fantastically surreal, and it likely only happened because Dylan’s longtime buddy Eddie Gorodetsky was one of the writers. Friends and Seinfeld are watched and referenced roughly ten zillion more times today than Dharma and Greg. But then again, neither of those shows has a Bob Dylan cameo.
A Victoria’s Secret Commercial (2004)
Image Credit: Dave Hogan/Getty Images
It’s tough being Bob Dylan. Sometimes you have to fly to Venice, hang out with Victoria’s Secret model Adriana Lima as she showcases the store’s newest underwear collection, and then accept millions of dollars for the inconvenience. Some fans were stunned when Dylan appeared in this ad, even though he allowed a Canadian bank to use “The Times They Are a-Changin’” in a 1996 commercial. But he telegraphed the move back in 1965 when he joked to a reporter that he’d let his music appear in an ad for “ladies garments.” It took 39 years, but the prophecy came true. And when Rolling Stone questioned Dylan about the move in December 2004, he was typically flippant. “Was I not supposed to do that?” he asked. “I wish I would have seen it. Maybe I’d have something to say about it. I don’t see that kind of stuff. That’s all for other people to see and make up what they will.”
Gene Simmons’ ‘Waiting for the Morning Light’ (2004)
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At some point in nearly every interview with Gene Simmons, he mentions that he wrote a song with Bob Dylan. It sounds like a braggadocios fantasy, but this actually took place in 1991. It started with the KISS frontman simply calling Dylan’s manager and asking if there was any chance he’d be down for a songwriting collaboration. “And all of a sudden within two days, an unmarked van shows up at my house,” Simmons said, “and Bob gets out with an acoustic guitar in his hand, and tells his driver, ‘I’ll see you at the end of the day,’ comes up, and we start strumming. I mean, it was just like that.” Simmons broke down how they worked together in an interview with Billboard. “Bob came up with the chords, most of them, and then I took it and wrote lyrics, melody, the rest of it,” he said. “We understood each other right away. He picked up an acoustic guitar, and we just tossed it back and forth, ‘How ’bout this, how ’bout that?’’ They called their song “Waiting for the Morning Light,” and it finally came out in 2004 on Simmons’ solo LP Asshole.
‘Pawn Stars’ (2010)
Image Credit: Youtube
In the real world, getting anywhere near Bob Dylan when he comes to town is simply impossible. In the magical world of Pawn Stars, all it takes is walking up to his bus tour with a vinyl copy of Self Portrait and asking for an autograph. Our bullshit detector went into overdrive when Pawn Stars star Chumlee pulled off this feat on the History Channel program. And when we called Chumlee up later that week, he stuck to the official story. “I found out he didn’t do that, so I scouted the grounds for about four hours,” he said. “He was shocked, but he signed the album for me. We talked for a minute and I told him I was a big fan of his work and my boss Rick would be really psyched if I got his autograph.” This was almost certainly a setup, especially since Rick appraises an unsigned Self Portrait at $50 when it’s worth a fraction of that. But staged or not, Dylan did indeed appear on an episode of Pawn Stars. (We await the day that Chumlee reveals the real story of how this happened.)
Commercials for the Cadillac Escalade and Chrysler (2007, 2014)
Image Credit: Youtube
An underwear commercial with Adriana Lima was one thing. But a vocal contigent of Dylan fans flinched when he appeared in a 2007 commercial for the Cadillac Escalade, and then flinched again in 2014 when he shot another one for Chrysler. In both ads, he provided the narration (“You can’t import original. You can’t fake true cool…What’s life without the occasional detour?”) and even drove the car around. The Escalade commercial doubled as an ad for Dylan’s Theme Time Radio Hour on XM, and the Chrysler one emphasized creating jobs in America, but it wasn’t like Dylan did them for free. He was surely paid several million dollars. There may have been a stigma on such a thing years ago, but it’s almost totally gone.
Researchers from the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology explained that the genetic code uses 64 codons to produce proteins, though only 21 are essential. The streamlined Syn57 strain features a more compact genome and opens possibilities for novel amino acids not found in nature.
From Syn61 to Syn57: A major leap
Following the 2019 development of Syn61, which involved 18,000 DNA changes, the latest Syn57 strain required over 100,000 modifications. Led by synthetic biologist Wesley Robertson, the team significantly advanced genome engineering.
Current limitations and future potential
Although Syn57 grows four times slower than standard E. coli, researchers believe optimization could improve its growth. The earlier Syn61 strain is already used to enhance the reliability of medicine production.
Implications for synthetic biology
Robertson highlighted Syn57’s radically recoded genome as a milestone for synthetic biology. Its potential includes virus-resistant bacteria and the development of innovative medicines and materials, marking a major advancement in genetic engineering.
The price of 24 karat gold witnessed a decrease of Rs. 200 per tola on Wednesday and was sold at Rs. 358,100 against its sale at Rs. 358,300 on the previous trading day, All Pakistan Sarafa Gems and Jewelers Association reported.
The prices of 10 grams of 24 karat also decreased by Rs. 171 to Rs. 307,013 from Rs. 307,184 whereas the price of 10 grams of 22 Karat went down by Rs. 157 to Rs. 281,438 from Rs. 281,595.
The rates of per tola and ten-gram silver declined by Rs. 59 and Rs. 51 and was traded at Rs. 4,072 and Rs. 3,491 respectively.
The price of gold in the international market decreased by $2 to $3,354 from $3,356 whereas silver increased by $0.59 to $38.39 from $37.80, the Association reported.
Los Angeles police have formally linked a break-in at Brad Pitt’s home in the city in June to a string of other burglaries at properties belonging to celebrities.
Los Angeles police chief Jim McDonnell announced the arrest of four suspects, saying they were a a crew that were committing burglaries at the homes of “various high-profile residents” throughout the city, adding that “some of the burglaries included homes of actors and professional athletes”.
McDonnell did not name Pitt but said the case originated from a burglary investigation on 25 June of a resident in the 2300 block of North Edgemont Drive, which corresponds to the date and location of the robbery at the actor’s home.
McDonnell said: “Three masked suspects scaled a perimeter fence, approached the glass window and used [a] tool to shatter that window. They entered the residence, removed property, and then fled.”
After a surveillance operation, four suspects aged from 16-18 were arrested, and “numerous items taken” were recovered. McDonnell added that the suspects were “documented or affiliated with a criminal street gang”.
Pitt’s home, in the Los Feliz neighbourhood of Los Angeles, was reportedly ransacked while the actor was on a promotional tour for his most recent film, F1. Other well-known figures reporting burglaries in recent months include actors Nicole Kidman and Austin Butler, and the footballer Olivier Giroud, who played for Los Angeles FC last season.
McDonnell suggested that criminals were using increasingly sophisticated methods of targeting victims, including wifi jammers to knock out surveillance cameras, and monitoring celebrities’ movements on social media. He also said that gangs were fully aware that juveniles (under 18s) were treated differently by the US justice system.
Strictly Come Dancing has announced that this year’s competition will feature its first contestant with Down’s syndrome, the model and actor Ellie Goldstein.
Goldstein was the first model with Down’s syndrome to appear on the cover of British Vogue. She has also partnered with Mattel to launch the first Barbie with the condition.
“I’m absolutely over the moon to be joining the cast and pros of Strictly Come Dancing this year,” said Goldstein. “It’s a show I’ve loved watching for so long and the chance to now be part of it feels like a dream. I know it’s going to be challenging, but I’m ready to do it with the glitter and glamour and make some magic on that dancefloor. Let the Strictly journey begin!”
Goldstein is the latest in a series of Strictly contestants seemingly intended to widen access to dance since the Paralympian Jonnie Peacock took part in 2017. In 2021, Rose Ayling-Ellis, who was the show’s first deaf contestant, won the competition. In 2022, Ellie Simmonds became the contest’s first participant with dwarfism and last year’s series was won by Chris McAusland, the show’s first blind dancer.
Goldstein is the ninth contestant to be announced for this year’s competition. Other confirmed participants include the former footballer Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink, the Love Island star (and daughter of Danny Dyer) Dani Dyer and the former England rugby captain Chris Robshaw. They are joined by the EastEnders actor Balvinder Sopal, the social media personality George Clarke, the Drag Race UK finalist La Voix, Harry Aikines-Aryeetey – AKA Nitro from Gladiators – and the actor Alex Kingston.
This year’s contest takes place after the BBC’s investigation into alleged cocaine use by two Strictly stars, who were accused by the Sun on Sunday of a drug habit that was “talked widely about among the cast”.
In June, the EastEnders star Jamie Borthwick was suspended by the BBC after a video emerged of him using an ableist slur during Strictly rehearsals in November.
Borthwick apologised and a BBC spokesperson said: “This language is entirely unacceptable and in no way reflects the values or standards we hold and expect at the BBC. We have robust processes in place for this.”
For more than 50 years, scientists have debated whether a massive ice shelf—up to 1 kilometer thick—covered the entire Arctic Ocean during past ice ages, transforming the frigid water into a solid icy surface similar to Antarctica’s Ross Ice Shelf.
The hypothesis dates to the 1970s, when British glaciologist John Mercer and others proposed that during extremely cold periods, continental ice sheets would have extended far into the Arctic Ocean. It gained support in the 1990s when researchers began finding evidence of scouring on the seafloor, indicative of large, kilometer-thick ice running aground.
“We found out that even close to the Norwegian coast, there was still open water, which completely contradicts the hypothesis of a big ice shelf covering the Arctic Ocean.”
But new data published in Science Advancesadd evidence against such a “pan-Arctic” ice shelf, instead suggesting that seasonal sea ice, rather than a continuous ice shelf, dominated parts of the Arctic Ocean over the past 750,000 years.
“We found out that even close to the Norwegian coast, there was still open water, which completely contradicts the hypothesis of a big ice shelf covering the Arctic Ocean,” said coauthor Gerrit Lohmann, a climate modeler from the Alfred-Wegener-Institut in Germany. However, some experts argue that the results alter merely the timing and location of Arctic ice shelves.
Reading Ancient Algae
Instead of analyzing seafloor scars, the study’s authors looked at what was living in ancient seafloor sediment. They analyzed two sediment cores drilled from the Arctic Ocean between Europe and Greenland, searching for molecules produced by marine algae such as diatoms and dinoflagellates before the organisms died and sank to the seafloor.
Some species of alga grow on the underside of seasonal sea ice, and others thrive in open water. Their presence or absence within sediment deposited at a given time signals whether sea ice was present when they were living. Levels of calcium in the sediment can also indicate the production of marine organisms in surface waters.
By searching for organisms’ unique chemical signatures in dated sections of the cores, the scientists could conclude whether and when a solid ice shelf completely covered the ocean surface.
The results showed evidence of both seasonal sea ice and open water over the past 750,000 years, with one exception, around 676,000 years ago, when the chemical signature of the key marine life decreased for roughly 55,000 years.
On a train home after a funding interview, the study’s first author, Jochen Knies, was discussing the sediment core findings with Lohmann, who immediately recognized that the computational climate model he worked on, the high-resolution AWI Earth System Model, might offer additional data on the sea ice conditions during that time. “We discussed it for hours, maybe disturbing others on the train,” Lohmann said.
After some testing, he found that the model independently predicted that the same regions covered by the core samples would have had open water and seasonal sea ice instead of a continuous ice shelf, even during the coldest periods. “I was fascinated to see that in the time slices that [Knies] was interested in, the sea ice was even partly absent in summer,” Lohmann said of the modeling results. “It was completely the opposite of other hypotheses.”
“I would have assumed that where they found open water, there should have been times when this Arctic Ocean ice shelf moved into the area, and apparently it didn’t,” said Johan Nilsson, a paleoceanographer at Stockholm University in Sweden who was not involved in the new study but has published seafloor evidence of an Arctic Ocean ice shelf.
The Debate Continues
To Nilsson, the results don’t completely refute the possibility of large Arctic Ocean ice shelves; instead, they redefine their possible boundaries. “I think for me, it pushes back the edge of Arctic Ocean ice shelves a bit further north of Svalbard,” Nilsson said.
The authors of the new study “don’t see ice shelves in the Norwegian-Greenland sea, but that doesn’t mean that they didn’t exist in the Arctic.”
Leonid Polyak, a retired paleoceanographer at the Ohio State University who was not involved in the research, said the new study reveals “a very strong set of data.” He noted, however, that the evidence for Arctic ice shelves is strong, and the debate over whether they came together into one pan-Arctic ice shelf is “a bit overblown.”
“Pretty much everyone agrees that there have been ice shelves in the Arctic Ocean. The question is, When exactly did they exist, for how long, and where?” Polyak said. The authors of the new study “don’t see ice shelves in the Norwegian-Greenland sea, but that doesn’t mean that they didn’t exist in the Arctic.”
Lohmann acknowledged that mysteries remain in the Arctic and that the pan-Arctic ice shelf debate may not be settled. “I feel the final word hasn’t been spoken,” he said.
Citation: Chapman, A. (2025), Arctic ice shelf theory challenged by ancient algae, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250298. Published on 13 August 2025.
PPP Chairman Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari on Wednesday criticised Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif over the inordinate delay in the K-IV water project, saying he had expected the premier to demonstrate the same speed and efficiency in Karachi as he does in Lahore.
Launched in the early 2000s to ease Karachi’s water woes, the K-IV project has faced repeated delays and cost hikes. With just Rs3.2 billion allocated against the Rs40bn needed, officials fear completion could be pushed back another decade.
Addressing an inauguration ceremony of a new canal for Karachi from Hub Dam, Bilawal said: “The K4 project, we had hoped for Shehbaz speed, but Karachi got Shehbaz slow. This cannot happen that Lahore gets Shehbaz speed and Karachi gets Shehbaz slow, so I will especially request the prime minister to complete the promises as quickly as possible regarding the K4 and this city.”
Bilawal was referring to the famed ‘Punjab speed’, a term coined to describe PM Shehbaz’s swift and efficient governance as chief minister of Punjab.
Islamabad’s budget allocation had triggered a kind of rift between the PML-N and the PPP — allies in the ruling coalition.
The Sindh government had expressed strong reservations over the “inadequate allocation” in the federal budget, saying it was taking the matter very seriously and in the process of reviewing the entire budget.
“We have serious concerns not only about this project but also the K-4 initiative,” Sindh Information and Transport Minister Sharjeel Inam Memon had said. “The funds allocated are highly inadequate. The Pakistan Peoples Party is taking these issues seriously and will thoroughly review the budget.”
He had stressed the need for fiscal discipline and smarter resource management at the federal level.
“We’ve submitted formal proposals to the prime minister and urged the federal government to cut down on unnecessary expenditures,” he said. “If revenue is not increasing, it becomes essential to control expenditures. All spending must be managed wisely; otherwise, we’re putting our entire fiscal policy at risk.”
Meanwhile, the new Hub Canal, a significant initiative of the provincial government aimed at addressing the water woes of the city, will add 100 million gallons of water per day (MGD) to the supply.
The Hub Canal project, approved in 2022, included the construction of a new canal and the rehabilitation of the old Hub Canal to further increase water supply in the two districts. The project included upgrading the Hub pumping station, rising main, and Hub Filter Plant from 80 MGD to 100 MGD.
Bilawal said the water from the new canal would be supplied to the Central, East and Keamari districts, hoping that it would be supplied to Lyari and the islands in the future as well.
He said restoration of the old canal was also underway and added that the party would try to secure increased water allocation of 200 MGD for Karachi from the chief minister.
World oil supply will rise more rapidly than expected this year and next as OPEC+ members further increase output and supply from outside the group grows, the International Energy Agency said Wednesday.
Supply will rise by 2.5 million barrels per day in 2025, up from 2.1 million bpd previously forecast, said the IEA, which advises industrialized countries, in a monthly report, and by a further 1.9 million bpd next year.
OPEC+ is adding more crude to the market after the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, Russia and other allies decided to unwind its most recent layer of output cuts more rapidly than earlier scheduled. The extra supply, along with concern about the economic impact of President Donald Trump’s tariffs, has weighed on oil this year.
Supply is rising far faster than demand in the IEA’s view. It expects global oil demand to rise by 680,000 bpd this year and 700,000 bpd next year, both down 20,000 bpd from the previous forecast.
“The latest data show lackluster demand across the major economies and, with consumer confidence still depressed, a sharp rebound appears remote,” the agency said in the report, which linked its higher output forecast to increased OPEC+ production targets. “Oil market balances look ever more bloated.”
IEA demand forecasts are at the lower end of the industry range, as the agency expects a faster transition to renewable energy sources than some other forecasters. OPEC on Tuesday maintained its forecast for demand to rise by 1.29 million bpd this year –— almost double the IEA figure.
Oil prices extended losses after the IEA published its report at 8 a.m. GMT, with Brent crude trading lower than $66 a barrel.
The report implies that supply may exceed demand by almost 3 million bpd next year, driven by growth from outside the wider OPEC+ group and a limited expansion in demand.
Despite higher OPEC+ production, non-OPEC producers will continue to lead supply growth this year and next owing to rising output in the US, Canada, Brazil and Guyana, according to the IEA.
Still, additional sanctions on Russia and Iran may curb supplies from the world’s third and fifth largest producers, the IEA said.
The U.S. announced new sanctions on Iran last month and the European Union lowered a price cap for Russian oil as part of its latest sanctions on Moscow.
“It is clear that something will have to give for the market to balance,” the IEA said.
Continued Chinese stockbuilding due to major institutional and policy developments aimed at enhancing energy security may help absorb the surplus, the agency said. This helped support prices earlier in the year, analysts have said.
Despite lowering its demand forecast, the IEA expects global crude oil refining rates to approach a fresh all-time high of 85.6 million bpd in August, after reaching 84.9 million bpd in July.
Global refinery runs will rise by 670,000 bpd, to 83.6 million bpd, in 2025; and by a further 470,000 bpd, to 84 million bpd, in 2026, driven by better-than-expected data for market economies grouped in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and China, the agency said.
