17 August marked the 240th anniversary of American folk hero Davy Crockett -- ‘King of the Wild Frontier’, as the old song goes. It also marked the official end of the 60-day period for negotiations to end the conflict between the U.S. and Iran. Whether U.S. President Donald Trump sees himself as King of his own Wild Frontier is anyone’s guess. And whether he will have an affectionate song written about him in the year to come remains to be seen. But, judging from the current situation in and around Iran, and its ongoing global…

An attack on an energy facility which was shut down for four days last month was carried out by hackers linked to the Iranian regime. The cyberattack, which is believed to be the first time Iranian-affiliated hackers have successfully infiltrated a UK energy facility, shutting it down. A government spokesperson for the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) said the energy facility was a “small scale energy generator.” The spokesperson added that “at no point was there a risk to the wider energy system” or the…

Natural gas prices in Europe need to jump by December for European storage to fill up with enough inventory for the coming winter if the Strait of Hormuz crisis persists and keeps spot LNG prices in Asia elevated, according to Goldman Sachs. Since the Middle East crisis began, Europe has started losing the competition with Asia for spot LNG supply amid spiking prices in the absence of most Qatari LNG term volumes. The Iran war and the intensified competition from Asia came just as Europe is trying to build in the spring and summer natural gas inventories…

Natural gas prices in Europe need to jump by December for European storage to fill up with enough inventory for the coming winter if the Strait of Hormuz crisis persists and keeps spot LNG prices in Asia elevated, according to Goldman Sachs. Since the Middle East crisis began, Europe has started losing the competition with Asia for spot LNG supply amid spiking prices in the absence of most Qatari LNG term volumes. The Iran war and the intensified competition from Asia came just as Europe is trying to build in the spring and summer natural gas inventories…

Natural gas prices in Europe need to jump by December for European storage to fill up with enough inventory for the coming winter if the Strait of Hormuz crisis persists and keeps spot LNG prices in Asia elevated, according to Goldman Sachs. Since the Middle East crisis began, Europe has started losing the competition with Asia for spot LNG supply amid spiking prices in the absence of most Qatari LNG term volumes. The Iran war and the intensified competition from Asia came just as Europe is trying to build in the spring and summer natural gas inventories…

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's push to bolster international support and receive additional air defenses continues on August 24 as the so-called Coalition of the Willing meets to discuss ways to pressure Russia to halt its invasion months ahead of another likely brutal winter. The summit -- with some leaders attending in person in Kyiv and others joining by video conference -- will be held on the day Ukraine is celebrating the 35th anniversary of its independence from the Soviet Union, and comes a day after a grouping of Baltic and Nordic…

Iran has blacklisted 45 oil, LNG, LPG and product tankers using the Strait of Hormuz, threatening fines, detention and cargo confiscation as Tehran retaliates against Washington’s looming “economic D-Day.” The list includes vessels owned by shipping companies tied to two of the Gulf’s biggest oil producers, including Saudi Arabia’s Bahri and ADNOC Logistics & Services and its Navig8 Tankers subsidiary, according to Reuters. Iran’s newly created Persian Gulf Strait Authority said the 45 vessels had violated…

Norwegian oil and gas firms Equinor and Aker BP have made a gas and condensate discovery close to the operating Balder field in the North Sea, the Norwegian Offshore Directorate, the regulator of the industry in Norway, said on Monday. Equinor and Aker BP had an exploration well drilled in a production license 16 kilometers (10 miles) northwest of the Balder field and 205 kilometers (127 miles) west of Stavanger, a major oil services hub in Norway. Preliminary estimates indicate the size of the discovery is between 0.1 and 2.1 million standard…

Norwegian oil and gas firms Equinor and Aker BP have made a gas and condensate discovery close to the operating Balder field in the North Sea, the Norwegian Offshore Directorate, the regulator of the industry in Norway, said on Monday. Equinor and Aker BP had an exploration well drilled in a production license 16 kilometers (10 miles) northwest of the Balder field and 205 kilometers (127 miles) west of Stavanger, a major oil services hub in Norway. Preliminary estimates indicate the size of the discovery is between 0.1 and 2.1 million standard…

Norwegian oil and gas firms Equinor and Aker BP have made a gas and condensate discovery close to the operating Balder field in the North Sea, the Norwegian Offshore Directorate, the regulator of the industry in Norway, said on Monday. Equinor and Aker BP had an exploration well drilled in a production license 16 kilometers (10 miles) northwest of the Balder field and 205 kilometers (127 miles) west of Stavanger, a major oil services hub in Norway. Preliminary estimates indicate the size of the discovery is between 0.1 and 2.1 million standard…

The Norwegian government is asking the country’s Supreme Court to overturn lower-court rulings that invalidated the development permits of three new oilfields in Norway’s North Sea. The case was brought to court three years ago by environmental organizations Greenpeace Nordic and Nature og Ungdom (Nature & Youth). In 2023, the campaigners challenged three administrative decisions of the Norwegian Energy Ministry, which had approved the plan for the development and operation of the oil and gas fields of Breidablikk, Yggdrasil, and…

The outlook for the Middle East war remains grim, the U.S. just threatened Iran with the “toughest sanctions in history,” and the world is running out of stored fuels. To make matters worse, refining capacity is down considerably, and even if the outlook for the war suddenly changed and the U.S. and Iran made peace, the fuel squeeze will last for months—and so will its adverse effects on the global economy. Watching crude oil prices, one would think everything is under control. Both Brent crude and West Texas Intermediate are…

Mexico’s state oil firm Pemex and Brazil’s national oil company Petrobras are joining efforts and expertise to drill prospects in Mexican waters in the Gulf of Mexico, hoping to unlock huge oil resources from source rock formations that are miles deeper and eight times older than the currently producing formations in the U.S. Gulf. Exploration in the Jurassic formations deep under the Mexican Gulf seabed in the Campeche Bay carries high risks, but the reward in case of a discovery could be enormous, geologists and analysts tell Bloomberg.…

The world is set to experience an extremely intense El Niño weather event this year, with warmer-than-normal sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific. This could disrupt typical weather patterns and lead to heavy rainfall in some regions and severe drought in others. While it is unclear whether the more frequent occurrence of El Niño is directly linked to human-caused climate change, it is certainly exacerbating extreme weather patterns in some parts of the world.  El Niño occurs every few years, but this year…

While it seems that Democrats and Republicans can’t agree on much of anything these days, there’s at least one common enemy that’s bringing both sides of the aisle together: data centers. Representatives on both sides of the aisle are increasingly pushing back against hyperscalers who are developing massive data center campuses on local energy grids, driving up energy demand and therefore causing electricity prices to skyrocket for everyone, whether they benefit from the artificial intelligence boom or not. The Trump administration…

A Seattle startup is seeking to revolutionize geothermal energy by tapping into undersea volcanoes. In September, a 100-kilowatt geothermal generator will be deployed to the seafloor off Oregon’s coast, where a hydrothermal vent emits temperatures of up to 750 degrees Fahrenheit. The pilot project – the fifth of its kind – will continue to test the viability of turning that heat into commercially competitive, round-the-clock, and totally emissions-free electricity.  The team behind the project at Endurance Energy believes…

The Rhine has slightly risen from its mid-August record low (when Kaub’s water level gauge – at the river’s decisive chokepoint – was below 10 cm), but the relief is mostly optical. Barges still cannot carry normal loads through it, leaving the industrial corridor from Rotterdam and Antwerp to southern Germany, eastern France and Switzerland short of transport capacity. The immediate result is expensive freight, constrained chemical production and uneven fuel supply. However, the more troubling conclusion is that Europe…

Order a heavy-duty gas turbine from GE Vernova today and it won’t arrive until 2031. That’s the company’s actual production schedule, confirmed on its July 22 earnings call, and it’s the fact sitting underneath every AI data center power plan announced in the last two years. It comes up far less often than the announcements do. Goldman Sachs put hard numbers on the demand side in May. U.S. data center power demand climbs from 31 gigawatts in 2025 to 41 GW this year and 66 GW in 2027. Year-over-year capacity additions accelerate…

Donald Trump is accidentally overseeing a massive buildout of the country’s renewable energy capacity and infrastructure. Not only are investments in renewable technologies soaring to new highs, the national energy grid is rapidly transforming to accommodate an increasingly solar- and wind-powered energy mix.  Despite massive rollbacks of Biden- and Obama-era clean energy incentives and financial supports, investment in clean energy tech keeps soaring to new heights, buoyed by market forces far outside of the federal government’s…

For six months the entire conversation about oil logistics has been about one strait, and you can hardly blame anyone for that. Hormuz has been effectively closed since late February, when the war between Iran and the U.S. and Israel started, and the EIA reckons only 4.9 million barrels a day of crude and liquids made it through in the second quarter. In the last quarter of 2025 that number was 21.6 million. Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf said in June that management of the strait “will never return to the way it was before the…