European officials are expected to visit Baghdad in the coming weeks for high-level talks on energy cooperation, just hours after Iraq warned it could leave OPEC unless the producer group grants the country a higher production quota. According to Iraqi sources cited by Shafaq News, the discussions will focus on expanding cooperation across Iraq's oil, gas and electricity sectors. Planned talks include projects to capture associated gas, increase power generation, expand energy storage capacity and strengthen crude export infrastructure. One proposal…

Over the past 20 years, the story seemed straightforward. Big Oil would gradually become Big Energy. Over time, oil majors would use their balance sheets, engineering expertise, and global project-management skills to build wind farms, solar projects, hydrogen hubs, carbon capture networks, and renewable power businesses. Big Oil did make major investments in renewables. And that transition is still happening in parts of the energy sector. But among the oil majors, the strategy has become far more selective. The latest example is Equinor. The Norwegian…

Saudi Arabia is expected to slash the official selling prices of its crude loading for Asia in August, as Middle East’s crude benchmarks crashed amid the tentative reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and the oil supply increase from the region. Saudi oil giant Aramco, the world’s single-biggest crude oil exporter, is expected to slash the OSP of its flagship Arab Light crude by between $6.50 and $8.00 per barrel, a Reuters survey of industry sources showed on Friday. Refiners polled by Reuters expect the prices of all other Saudi grades,…

August WTI crude oil futures kept falling sharply during the week ending June 26. Traders continued to take out the extra price they had added earlier because they worried about possible supply problems in the Middle East. The contract moved between a high of $78.14 and a low of $68.90 before finishing at $71.53. That was down $3.99, or 5.28 percent, from the week before. The selling went on for most of the week. Traders stopped focusing as much on the chance of oil supplies getting cut off in the Persian Gulf. Instead, they paid more attention…

Traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has picked up over the past week but shipowners remain cautious about transiting, especially after the Thursday attack in the Gulf of Oman on a vessel that had just cleared the chokepoint. On Friday morning local time, two tankers carrying crude were moving out of the Strait while four empty supertankers were traveling inbound near the Omani coast, according to vessel-tracking data monitored by Bloomberg. While some traffic has been observed on Friday, the Thursday attack on the container ship Ever Lovely prompted…

Forget the chips. Forget the code. The most expensive, in-demand commodity in the entire $3-trillion AI revolution is not a patented algorithm or a new Nvidia GPU. It's power. Specifically, a secure, high-voltage connection to the electrical grid that can deliver $100-500 million worth of juice to a new data center. Right now, the largest, richest companies on Earth—Google, Microsoft, Amazon—are in an unprecedented global land rush for energy. They are competing with small cities, massive manufacturing plants, and each other, all because…

Drug lords in Colombia are making more money from cocaine than the government is making from crude oil sales, a report from a Colombian university has found. At $16.5 billion for 2024, cocaine revenues surpassed oil export revenues, which stood at around $15 billion that year, UPI reported, citing the research from EAFIT University. Oil export revenues, however, remain Colombia’s largest export revenue generator, the research showed. Together with coal exports, oil exceeds the illicit trade in cocaine. Still, cocaine revenues in 2024 were…

“It’s going to be the decade of geothermal,” Cindy Taff, chief executive of geothermal company Sage Geosystems, told The Hill in February of 2025. Over a year later, it is becoming increasingly evident that Taff is definitely onto something. Although geothermal energy is still a tiny sector and faces some significant headwinds when it comes to its up-front installation and development costs, it has numerous competitive edges over other, more common energy sources. It’s clean, it’s constant, it’s politically popular,…

Asian refiners have reduced their spot purchases of Middle East crude for loading this month and next, following three weeks in which they had purchased millions of barrels of UAE, Saudi, and Iraqi crude. Lingering uncertainties about the navigability of the Strait of Hormuz and high freight costs have deterred Asian buyers from continuing the buying spree that began earlier this month, with millions of barrels of Abu Dhabi crude snapped up in spot trades. Incentives to Buy Immediately Wane Yet, refiners in Asia have spent the better part of the…

SpaceX has spent years trying to reinvent rockets. Now it's coming after midstream. The aerospace giant plans to begin construction next month on an eight-mile natural gas pipeline dubbed "Starpipe" that will feed its Starbase launch facility in South Texas, according to filings reviewed by Reuters. The pipeline is expected to be operational by January and marks the latest step in Elon Musk's increasingly ambitious plan to control nearly every link in the Starship supply chain. Starship burns liquid methane—a lot of it. Each launch consumes…

The good news is that gasoline prices have been falling for six straight weeks. The bad news? Americans are still heading into one of the most expensive Independence Day weekends they've ever seen. GasBuddy projects the national average price of gasoline will be about $3.75 per gallon on July 4—the second-highest on record, trailing only the $4.80 per gallon reached during the energy crisis of 2022. That's a far cry from May, when the closure of the Strait of Hormuz sent gasoline prices soaring alongside crude oil. But it's also about 65…

Lithium carbonate futures in China fell ~10% over two trading sessions, dropping to a 10-week low of approximately 157,000 yuan ($23,175) per tonne on Tuesday following market speculation that China’s EV battery giant, Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. (CATL), may soon restart its massive Jianxiawo mine.  Reports from authorities in Jiangxi Province show that CATL’s Jianxiawo lithium mine in Yichun passed a preliminary land pre-review and site selection, with the Jiangxi Provincial Department of Natural Resources issuing a "Project…

Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev’s visit to the EU’s headquarters in Brussels has yielded agreements and MoUs potentially valued at over 12 billion dollars. The key deal involves the purchase of 50 Airbus passenger jets for 7.1 billion euros. Tokayev’s visit, which concluded June 23, focused on developing Middle Corridor trade links within the context of the EU’s Global Gateway program. Prominent among Tokayev’s meetings in Brussels were discussions with European Commissioner for Trade and Economic Security Maroš…

Russia has emerged as one of the clearest commercial beneficiaries of the US-Israel war with Iran. Before March 2026, buying Russian crude was widely treated as a sanctions risk that only Chinese and, to a lesser extent, Indian private companies could comfortably absorb. The first US waiver for Russian barrels, announced on March 12, changed that calculation. It showed that, during a major Middle Eastern supply disruption, Asia could not balance its oil market without Russian crude, and even Washington was aware of the that. Successive waiver extensions…

Saudi Arabia's biggest oil export terminal is finally stirring back to life, and that's a much bigger deal than another headline about the Strait of Hormuz reopening. After sitting largely idle since early March, Saudi Aramco is preparing to resume crude loadings at Ras Tanura, with multiple very large crude carriers owned by Bahri moving toward the Ju'aymah offshore loading area on Thursday, according to Bloomberg vessel-tracking data. The past week has been filled with headlines about the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, but reopening a waterway…

Saudi Arabia's biggest oil export terminal is finally stirring back to life, and that's a much bigger deal than another headline about the Strait of Hormuz reopening. After sitting largely idle since early March, Saudi Aramco is preparing to resume crude loadings at Ras Tanura, with multiple very large crude carriers owned by Bahri moving toward the Ju'aymah offshore loading area on Thursday, according to Bloomberg vessel-tracking data. The past week has been filled with headlines about the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, but reopening a waterway…

The Tennessee Valley Authority released its preliminary 2026 integrated resource plan on Monday, saying load growth in its footprint is already outpacing the reference case forecast in its draft IRP, and that it has incremental capacity needs for between 7 GW and 26 GW of natural gas between now and 2040. “TVA’s actual and forecasted electricity demand has increased relative to the draft IRP’s Reference scenario and is approaching the Higher Growth Economy scenario primarily due to data center growth (e.g., artificial intelligence,…

UK Energy Secretary Ed Miliband has vetoed a plan by the Treasury to boost North Sea oil and gas drilling in order to fund part of Britain’s increased defense funding needs, The Telegraph reported on Thursday, citing a government source. As the UK plans to increase funding for military programs and rearmament amid heightened geopolitical tensions, the Treasury has proposed a plan to boost drilling in the UK North Sea and use the higher tax revenues from said drilling to fund part of the $24 billion, or £18 billion, the Ministry of Defence…

Data center developers are scrambling for reliable power, turning away from congested grids and toward on-site fuel cells. Rystad Energy research and analysis projects a tenfold increase in fuel cell market revenues by 2030, rising from around $2.8 billion in 2025 to roughly $30 billion, as AI computing demand drives unprecedented growth in data center construction. A contracted order book of approximately 9 gigawatts (GW), including framework agreements with Oracle, AEP, Equinix, and Brookfield, points to growing confidence among major operators…

Fuel oil exports from the Middle East are expected to rebound to a four-month high this month as tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz picks up and key fuel oil producers Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Oman have moved to increase shipments from ports outside the Persian Gulf. Middle Eastern fuel oil exports are set to jump by 20% from May to about 508,000 barrels per day (bpd) in June, according to ship-tracking data reviewed by Reuters. Saudi Arabia boosted fuel oil shipments from the Yanbu port on the Red Sea, and Iraq started exporting fuel oil…