The tiny impoverished South American country of Suriname has been battling for six years to launch a petroleum boom, which pundits believe will replicate neighboring Guyana’s oil rush. A combination of poor drilling results, high gas-to-oil ratio, and mismatched seismic data delayed the emergence of what could be South America’s last great offshore oil boom. Suriname’s favorable regulatory environment and low break-even prices, coupled with the recent price shock following U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran, will drive greater investment…

Spiking LNG prices and reduced supply from the Middle East have prompted Japan and South Korea to raise coal power generation and coal imports in recent weeks. Gas-fired power generation in Japan and South Korea, the world’s second- and third-largest LNG importers after China, slumped to multi-month lows in April and early May. That’s because supply from the Middle East crashed with no Qatari shipment passing through the Strait of Hormuz between February 28 and this past weekend, when the first cargo cleared the chokepoint bound for…

As the world grapples with the most serious oil and gas supply crunch in history, energy security has come front and center for every government on the planet. Some have touted electrification as a way of weathering the crisis and avoiding future ones. Realists, both in politics and industry, however, are focusing on what the oil and gas industry has been warning about for years: the need for more investment in exploration.  “Production and recovery represent the most immediate path to incremental barrels, and as customers continue to…

Qatar has requested LNG vessels near its Ras Laffan LNG port to switch off their transponders as part of safety measures at the key export port of the world’s second-largest LNG exporter before the war, anonymous sources with knowledge of the plan told Bloomberg on Tuesday.   The de facto closure of the Strait of Hormuz has trapped about 20% of daily global LNG flows, mostly those previously shipping out of Qatar and part of the UAE’s LNG flows.  In addition, Iranian drone and missile strikes on energy infrastructure…

Qatar has requested LNG vessels near its Ras Laffan LNG port to switch off their transponders as part of safety measures at the key export port of the world’s second-largest LNG exporter before the war, anonymous sources with knowledge of the plan told Bloomberg on Tuesday.   The de facto closure of the Strait of Hormuz has trapped about 20% of daily global LNG flows, mostly those previously shipping out of Qatar and part of the UAE’s LNG flows.  In addition, Iranian drone and missile strikes on energy infrastructure…

The latest exchange between Washington and Tehran over a proposed path toward de-escalation has raised new questions about what comes next in the growing crisis around the Strait of Hormuz. President Donald Trump described Iran’s latest response to a US-backed proposal as “totally unacceptable,” even as both sides continue to signal interest in negotiations over sanctions relief, nuclear restrictions, and the future of shipping through the strategic waterway. Analysts in Washington say the standoff is increasingly testing assumptions…

Brazil more than doubled the volume of its oil exports to China, with export values also nearly doubling, in the first quarter of 2026 from a year earlier, as the Middle East conflict and the closed Strait of Hormuz are re-arranging global commodity flows.  The value of Brazil’s crude oil exports to China surged by 94.6% to $7.2 billion in the first quarter, per Brazilian government data compiled by the Brazil-China Business Council. The volume of oil exports, 16 million metric tons, was 122% higher compared to the first quarter of 2025,…

India may have to eventually reckon with how long its major state-owned fuel retailers could sustain losses amid soaring international prices and artificially lowered prices at home, according to Oil Minister Hardeep Singh Puri. India’s oil marketing companies (OMCs) are selling gasoline and diesel below market prices, as the world’s third-largest crude importer looks to shield consumers in the world’s most populous country from soaring prices at the pump. Eventually, the authorities may have to assess how long these fuel retailers…

Roughly 40 years ago, the United States made a decision that seemed perfectly rational at the time: it stopped processing rare earths. The economics didn’t make sense when China could do it cheaper, so U.S. facilities closed…the expertise scattered…and an entire layer of industrial capability mostly disappeared from North American soil. REalloys (Nasdaq: ALOY) is the company now working to undo the four decades of neglect that have followed…and the reason it matters is that the expertise it holds may be the single hardest…

After a series of failed and costly attempts to revamp its aging refineries, Nigeria’s national oil company, the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPC), has signed a new agreement with Chinese firms to revive its moribund facilities. The NNPC has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Sanjiang Chemical Company Limited and Xinganchen (Fuzhou) Industrial Park Operation and Management Co. Ltd for the completion, operation and maintenance of the Port Harcourt (210,000 bpd) and Warri (125,000 bpd) refineries under a Technical…

The oil market will take months to normalize even if flows through the Strait of Hormuz resumed today, as 1 billion barrels of oil have been wiped off the supply balance over the past two and a half months. That’s the verdict on the global oil markets of Amin Nasser, chief executive officer of Saudi Arabia’s state oil giant and the world’s single largest crude oil exporter, Saudi Aramco. “Reopening routes is not the same as normalizing a market that has been deprived of about one billion barrels of oil,” Nasser told…

As in all poker games, the player with the deepest pockets will ultimately win if he is prepared to stay at the table, and so with the high-stakes game of the U.S.-Iran War. The contents of a confidential CIA report relayed last week assessed that Iran can endure the current U.S. naval blockade in and around the Strait of Hormuz and Persian Gulf for at least 90 to 120 days, but after that it would face economic collapse. Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to benefit from dramatically increased oil production and prices on the higher historical side,…

Small Modular Reactors still won’t shift the Energy Transition, but for a different reason Last year, I argued that small modular reactors will not save the energy transition. The core reasoning was simple: timelines were too long, costs too uncertain, and grid issues too persistent for SMRs to meaningfully scale in the critical decade ahead. Today, as the UK’s flagship SMR programme unfolds and European policymakers cast fresh doubt on offshore wind targets by pointing to Rolls-Royce’s design, one thing is clear: SMRs remain…

Portugal just got a thorough energy policy review from the IEA, and the short version is this: the power sector has done its job. Everything else needs to get moving. The Portugal 2026 Energy Policy Review, released in Lisbon this week, covers the full picture, electricity, gas, transport, buildings, industry, and grid infrastructure, and lays out 10 recommendations for what the country needs to do next. It is more candid than these reports usually are. The Part That Worked Solar PV, hydropower, and wind have transformed Portugal's electricity…

I'm shocked, shocked, to find out that the Chinese are stealing America's agricultural technology! It can hardly come as a surprise that the Chinese government actively encourages and organizes the theft of intellectual property from other nations and their companies, in this case, agricultural technology in the United States. College students are some of the most active players in these thefts, as between 250,000 and 300,000 routinely attend U.S. colleges and universities in any given year, most of them studying in scientific and engineering fields.…

OPEC oil output has declined to its lowest level since 2000, with production falling by 830,000 barrels per day (bpd) to an average of 20.04 million bpd in April, according to a Reuters survey published Monday. Kuwait recorded the largest production drop, with reports indicating it exported zero crude in April thanks to its total reliance on the Strait of Hormuz. Saudi Arabia and Iraq also saw significant output decreases as they were forced to shut-in production. Saudi production dropped towards 7 million barrels per day (bpd) following attacks…

OPEC oil output has declined to its lowest level since 2000, with production falling by 830,000 barrels per day (bpd) to an average of 20.04 million bpd in April, according to a Reuters survey published Monday. Kuwait recorded the largest production drop, with reports indicating it exported zero crude in April thanks to its total reliance on the Strait of Hormuz. Saudi Arabia and Iraq also saw significant output decreases as they were forced to shut-in production. Saudi production dropped towards 7 million barrels per day (bpd) following attacks…

OPEC oil output has declined to its lowest level since 2000, with production falling by 830,000 barrels per day (bpd) to an average of 20.04 million bpd in April, according to a Reuters survey published Monday. Kuwait recorded the largest production drop, with reports indicating it exported zero crude in April thanks to its total reliance on the Strait of Hormuz. Saudi Arabia and Iraq also saw significant output decreases as they were forced to shut-in production. Saudi production dropped towards 7 million barrels per day (bpd) following attacks…

Donald Trump arrives in Beijing on Wednesday for his first state visit to China since 2017, heading into a two-day summit with President Xi Jinping that carries more energy-market weight than any bilateral meeting in recent memory. The talks, scheduled for Thursday and Friday, come as the world grapples with what the International Energy Agency has called the “largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market” — the near-total closure of the Strait of Hormuz following U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran in late February.…

India has officially declined Russia's offer to sell liquefied natural gas (LNG) from projects currently under U.S. sanctions, following April reports of an LPG-laden tanker en route to western India, according to Indian media reports on Monday. Last month, Reuters reported that the 138,200-cubic-metre tanker Kunpeng was heading from Russia's Baltic Portovaya plant to the Dahej LNG terminal in western India. This shipment involved U.S.-sanctioned Russian LNG, signaling a potential first such delivery to India, with Energy Intelligence reporting…