Equinor is ending its offshore wind business activities in Japan and will close its Tokyo office by the end of the year as the Norwegian energy major is realigning its non-oil and gas strategy to focus on power markets. “This decision reflects a reassessment of Equinor’s strategic direction, with a strengthened focus on integrated power markets,” the Norwegian company said on Friday. While Equinor is ending its Japanese presence, Japan will remain an important country for Equinor, which will continue to invest in its longstanding…

Canada and Japan are considering cooperation in critical mineral projects and a potential plan of joint stockpiling of key metals as the two G7 economies look to reduce China’s outsized dominance in the market, Canada’s Minister of International Trade, Maninder Sidhu, told Reuters in an interview published on Friday. “We're offering Japan that avenue to do more with Canada in terms of critical minerals,” said Sidhu, who led a Canadian delegation on a visit to Japan. Japanese and Canadian companies signed more than C$1 billion,…

Oil prices tumbled as markets bet Strait of Hormuz disruptions will ease, with Brent down 10% on the week and Middle East crude benchmarks slipping into contango. Friday, June 26, 2026 Whilst ship transits through the Strait of Hormuz remain a fraction of their previous norm (130-140 transits per day), plunging crude oil prices suggest the commodity markets anticipate that flows would start to recover sooner than later. The two Middle Eastern crude benchmarks, Dubai and Murban, have flipped into contango, as a temporary period of oversupply is…

Grappling with a severe shortage, Russia is seeking to purchase a significant volume of gasoline from neighboring Kazakhstan. Astana appears hesitant to fulfill the request, however, apparently concerned that doing so might entail consequences for the Central Asian nation’s own energy exports. The Reuters news agency first reported that Russian officials had approached Kazakh authorities seeking to obtain 50,000 tons of gas. Ukrainian drone attacks in recent months have devastated Russian refineries, creating a severe shortage and long lines…

Chinese authorities are not restricting coal power growth in the new five-year energy plan as Beijing doubles down on the fossil fuel as a “bottom-line guarantee” of the electricity system amid rising shares of renewable power. China has unveiled its five-year plan for the energy sector, expecting renewable energy to boost its share of electricity supply by 2031, but also noting that it would aim to strengthen the role of coal a “bottom-line guarantee”. China targets clean energy to account for 30% of its power generation…

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…

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…

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…

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…