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LNG spot market prices in Asia have tripled since the start of the year. Asia and Europe are locked in a race for a limited number of cargoes. The U.S. is exporting record volumes of the fuel. And QatarEnergy just extended a force majeure on its own LNG exports. The world is short on gas—and will remain so for a while. The Japan-Korea Marker, the Asian LNG benchmark, topped $31 per million British thermal units this month. In fact, the benchmark briefly rose above $33 per mmBtu, compared with a little over $9 per mmBtu in January this year.…
Canada’s proposed associate membership with the European Union is a first-of-its-kind political and economic partnership announced by Prime Minister Mark Carney and EU leaders during the October 2026 Canada-EU Summit in Montreal. The arrangement creates a multi-layered tie that goes well beyond a standard free-trade agreement (like CETA), while stopping short of full EU membership. The push is driven largely by a need to reduce economic and strategic reliance on the United States amid ongoing trade tensions, tariff disputes, and political…
U.S. President Donald Trump’s core vision of the future of global oil and gas is to have as much of that supply as possible coming from his self-proclaimed ‘Americas’ region, which is directly in the U.S.’s sphere of influence. Venezuela is one of the key countries from which this increased production is designated to flow, which is why Washington is focusing so much of its efforts on encouraging heavy investment from American oil and gas giants into the country. It is in this context that very recent changes to Venezuela’s…
A month ago, a series of news reports said oil flows out of Hormuz had recovered to pre-war levels, pushing oil prices lower. However, the rout did not last. Benchmarks are set for their fourth monthly gain in a row, and no amount of repeating that Gulf states are exporting even more oil than before the war can change that. Because barrels are not the whole story. “What is the price of oil? Eight months into the war with Iran, what should be a straightforward question has become surprisingly hard to answer,” JP Morgan’s head…
A new United States intelligence report warns that China is developing energy weapons and spaceplanes that it could use for military operations in outer space, with the capability of using directed-energy weapons in orbit by the end of the 2020s. The US Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) report, published on Sunday, includes a rare image of the newly developed reusable spaceplane. The DIA report, entitled Challenges to Security in Space, is the first time that the U.S. government has offered an estimated timeline for China’s development…
The results of the upcoming midterm elections will reveal just how much power global energy markets have over state-level politics – and how much changing political regimes can cost the global energy sector in return. As voters head to the polls, energy prices are blisteringly high. As of Monday, average gasoline prices in the United States officially edged higher than at any point of Joe Biden’s presidential term, according to a Politico analysis of AAA figures. This could pose a major threat to the Trump administration as well as…
A Malta-flagged tanker called the Agioi Fanendes left the Russian port of Primorsk on Oct. 22 carrying nearly 40,000 metric tons of ultra-low-sulfur diesel, and ship-tracking data has it arriving at the Port of New York and New Jersey on Nov. 7, four days after the midterm elections. Nobody has publicly said who bought the fuel, and Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., has asked the ship’s owner to identify the buyer and everyone else involved by Oct. 31. The cargo is the first visible piece of the deal President Donald Trump announced Oct.…
Last year, solar power quietly overtook nuclear power in the global energy mix. This is a stunning feat when you consider that just a decade ago, in 2015, global solar generation amounted to just 256 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2015, while global nuclear power generated ten-fold that amount at 2,576 TWh. And solar didn’t just overtake nuclear power in 2025; it surpassed it by a wide margin, producing 13 percent more energy worldwide. "[Solar] generating more electricity than all the world's nuclear power plants is a pretty insane…
Turkey has finally gotten both sides of a divided Libya to sign the maritime map it has pushed for seven years. Ankara signed the boundary deal with Libya’s Tripoli government in 2019, and the rival parliament in the east rejected it in 2020. On October 20, that same parliament, the Haftar-aligned House of Representatives in Benghazi, ratified the deal unanimously. Both of Libya’s governments now recognize a boundary that runs between Crete and Cyprus, leaving Greek islands in the area with no sea beyond their territorial waters. Ankara…
Oil and gas may be flowing through the Strait of Hormuz again, but the impacts of its months-long closure will be felt for years to come. For Asia, in particular, regulating markets and shoring up energy security to avoid the next energy shock will require trillions of dollars in the coming years as energy demand projection rates continue to rise sharply across the region. When traffic through the Iranian-controlled Strait of Hormuz stopped overnight back in February in response to a military offensive by the United States and Israel, one-fifth…
Reports about recovering oil flows in the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea have dominated headlines over the past couple of weeks. Yet oil prices have only moved higher, suggesting barrel numbers alone are not enough to convince the world everything’s back to normal. It isn’t. According to the latest Kpler numbers, October oil exports out of the Middle East in total are in fact higher than they were before the U.S. and Israel launched their first strikes on Iran at the end of February. Flows out of the Strait of Hormuz alone have averaged…
Singapore’s shipping-fuel market is adding another layer of cost to Asian trade. Disrupted supplies from the Middle East and Russia, resilient bunker demand and prohibitive freight rates have pushed high-sulphur fuel oil above the price of the crude used to produce it. Seasonal relief from Gulf producers and additional Chinese export allowances could ease the squeeze towards year-end, particularly for very-low-sulphur fuel oil. But with replacement cargoes expensive to transport and Russian supplies vulnerable to further disruption, a return…
The United States and Canada are locked in an energy trade war – sort of. Although United States President Donald Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney have lobbed plenty of blisteringly high tariffs, not to mention threats and insults, at each other over the course of their respective tenures, they have not touched one very important commodity – oil and gas. This is because the nations are simply too dependent on each other to sever the ties between their respective fossil fuel empires, making true independence a purely pyrrhic…
The energy demand boom being driven by the artificial intelligence era is placing unprecedented strain on global energy infrastructure. Not only are the world’s energy production capacities – and especially clean energy production capacities – dwarfed by projected data center energy demand curves in coming years, the physical infrastructure needed to build and sustain never-before-seen rates of electrification and energy consumption growth is woefully underdeveloped. At present, the world’s energy grids and transmission…
The world’s ongoing energy crisis is quickly turning into a global food security crisis. Ongoing conflict between some of the world’s most prominent economies on two major fronts – Russia’s war in Ukraine and the United States’ and Israel’s war in Iran – is creating geopolitical shockwaves through critical global trade routes and threatening some of humanity’s most essential commodities, from oil and gas to grain and fertilizer. A "multidirectional squeeze on world agriculture" is taking form,…
Inflation rates remain blistering high across the United States. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’s most recent Consumer Price Index, released last week, revealed numbers that were higher than most projections, indicating long-term pain for consumers and a nightmare election cycle for Donald Trump. And the reason for all of it is huge and persistent volatility in global oil and gas markets. The October 14 Consumer Price Index showed that overall, prices for goods and services across the United States have risen 3.7 percent over the last…
The ghosts of Baghdad and Kabul should be enough to silence any talk of sending American troops into Iran. Yet here we are, more than seven months into a war that began on 28 February with U.S.-Israeli strikes that killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and voices in Washington and Tel Aviv are again whispering that only boots on the ground can finish the job. Plans to seize Kharg Island, Iran’s main oil export terminal, or push inland to seize Iran’s enriched uranium have circulated since March. They are wrong. An invasion would be a…
The Hormuz crisis is not only hitting crude oil and gas, but also container shipping. It is also tightening its grip on global shipping through the fuel tanks of vessels carrying world trade. Disrupted exports, constrained refinery supplies, and increasingly unreliable deliveries are clearly at present pushing the bunker market into a dangerous position. Fuel remains available internationally, but securing the right grade at the right port within a commercially workable window is becoming harder. The consequences will be severe, especially for…
Despite the Iran war and the Hormuz crisis, the Middle East’s low-cost chemicals production is set to retain its long-term advantage over other regions. Near-term shifts in the sourcing of polymers are taking place due to the current constraints in the Persian Gulf’s industrial base, benefiting U.S. chemicals companies. But in the long run, the Middle East is likely to retain its buyers’ base because it still has the two levers to be competitive on the global market—an extensive production base and, most of all, low-cost…
Rystad Energy’s fifth edition of its flagship annual report, Global Energy Scenarios (GES) 2026, finds that global reliance on imported energy is projected to peak by 2034 as energy security concerns accelerate the shift towards electrification. Against the backdrop of two major energy crises in five years, the report highlights how a broader range of rapidly deployable technologies is helping the energy system withstand major disruptions to energy flows. It explores how energy import dependency could evolve under three possible future scenarios,…
The only commercial-scale uranium enrichment plant in the United States is now three-quarters of the way through its latest expansion, a milestone for the country's push to build out a domestic nuclear fuel supply chain. Urenco USA said Oct. 8 that the sixth of eight new centrifuge cascades at its National Enrichment Facility in New Mexico has started production, with the seventh due later this year and the last in spring 2027. As the Trump administration works to reestablish the country as the global leader in nuclear energy, cutting reliance…
President Donald Trump has announced a massive new energy agreement with Taiwan, claiming the island will purchase between $70 billion and $80 billion worth of liquefied natural gas from Alaska over the next two decades, as Asian importers scramble to secure supplies beyond the increasingly dangerous Strait of Hormuz. In a Truth Social post on Wednesday, Trump said Taiwan had committed to purchasing 30% of the planned Alaska LNG project's output for 20 years, alongside a $4.4 billion equity investment. The president described the arrangement as…
Permian producers spent much of this year paying buyers to haul away the natural gas that comes up with their oil. Waha Hub spot prices stayed below zero for a record 90 days in a row before turning positive on June 16, Reuters reported, and the hub had averaged minus $2.19 per million British thermal units for the year up to that point. Four of the five companies below still posted record results in the second quarter. Three of the five don’t drill at all, and one of the two that do works mostly in North Dakota, far from Waha. The U.S. Energy…
A new breakthrough in high-temperature heat pumps could provide a critical pathway toward relieving global reliance on fossil fuels in industrial contexts. A team of scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE (Fraunhofer ISE) in Germany tested heat pumps at 320 degrees Fahrenheit and proved that they can produce hot water and steam, showing promise for replacing coal in hard-to-abate industrial sectors. “Data collected from the test rig could allow manufacturers to design heat pumps and heat exchangers for high temperatures,…
