Europe’s benchmark natural gas prices jumped on Tuesday morning in Amsterdam as the Middle East crisis remains a major supply shock amid the European race against time to stock up for the winter. The front-month price at the Dutch Title Transfer Facility (TTF), the benchmark for Europe’s gas trading, rose by 2% as of 8.40 a.m. Amsterdam time, to hit the highest level since the 2022-2023 crisis. At $86.90 (74.820 euros) per megawatt-hour (MWh), the price now exceeds the January 2023 levels, when Europe faced the first winter without…

One of the reasons why the price of oil failed to soar during the "actively kinetic" phase of the Iran war, when shipments through Hormuz were effectively halted and the world faced a shortage of about 10-15 million barrels of oil per day, is that Chinese oil demand suddenly evaporated. Whether due to a sharp slowdown in the economy (which, after the sudden "recap" of China's banks, appears quite likely) or due to an aggressive drain of China's strategic reserve, the reality is that, as discussed here extensively, both Chinese oil imports... ...…

Suez Canal's revenue jumped by 42% in July from the same month last year as the number of oil tankers passing through the Egyptian gateway to the Mediterranean surged amid threats to shipping in the southern Red Sea and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. The revenues rose to $505 million in July, according to data from Egyptian statistics agency CAPMAS cited by Bloomberg. This is well above the $355 million revenue in July 2025 and $438 million in June 2026. The number of ships that transited the Suez Canal in July 2026 soared by 27% on the year to 1,340…

Kuwait’s crude oil exports have rebounded to about 1 million barrels per day (bpd), recovering to two-thirds of the 1.6 million bpd shipped through the Strait of Hormuz before the Iran war, according to a senior official at state-owned Kuwait Petroleum Corporation (KPC). Kuwait has managed to ramp up its crude oil shipments in recent weeks, including through ship-to-ship (STS) transfers outside the Strait of Hormuz, Shaikh Khaled Ahmad Al Sabah, managing director for international marketing at KPC, said on Tuesday at the Asia Pacific Petroleum…

Kuwait’s crude oil exports have rebounded to about 1 million barrels per day (bpd), recovering to two-thirds of the 1.6 million bpd shipped through the Strait of Hormuz before the Iran war, according to a senior official at state-owned Kuwait Petroleum Corporation (KPC). Kuwait has managed to ramp up its crude oil shipments in recent weeks, including through ship-to-ship (STS) transfers outside the Strait of Hormuz, Shaikh Khaled Ahmad Al Sabah, managing director for international marketing at KPC, said on Tuesday at the Asia Pacific Petroleum…

Saudi Arabia has temporarily halted some operations at energy facilities in its southern region bordering Yemen, following attacks on energy sites on Tuesday morning local time, the official Saudi Press Agency reported. “Several energy sector facilities and installations in the southern region of the Kingdom were targeted this morning,” the agency said, quoting an official source at the Ministry of Energy.  The attacks caused fires at several locations, leading to a temporary halt in some operations, Saudi Arabia said, adding that…

Global diesel fuel supply will remain tight into next year for lack of enough refining capacity to pick up the slack from Middle Eastern and Russian facilities, Reuters has reported, citing refining and commodity trading industry executives. “There's really a shortage of products because we're missing 2 million barrels a day from Russia, and we're missing nearly 2 million barrels a day from the Middle East,” said Russell Hardy, chief executive of Vitol, speaking at the Asia-Pacific Petroleum Conference. “When you're looking forward…

If Russia attacks a NATO member, Germany would have six months to move as many as 800,000 allied troops and 200,000 vehicles across the country toward the eastern flank. The ports, airports and railways required for that movement already carry military equipment through Europe and toward Ukraine. Germany says Russia attempted to bomb a Ukrainian cargo aircraft at Leipzig/Halle Airport, which houses NATO’s heavy-airlift program. Fires and incendiary devices subsequently reached European ammunition, drone and military-electronics companies,…

Five years after Indian Point’s last reactor shut down, Albany rediscovered the appeal of electricity that runs around the clock without burning fossil fuels. Governor Kathy Hochul wants 5 gigawatts of new nuclear capacity, with at least 1 GW developed by the publicly owned New York Power Authority, plus a separate 4 GW initiative.  There haven't been any announcements for the technology of choice, but the most likely candidates are the large Westinghouse AP1000 and the smaller 300 MW BWRX-300 from GE Vernova Hitachi.…

Washington’s takeover of more than a fifth of Venezuela’s oil reserves in a deal officially signed by U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright on 2 September was as unexpected as it was dramatic, with President Donald Trump’s comment a few days earlier that it is “the biggest oil deal in world history” looking justified from several perspectives. From a pure volume standpoint, the deal covers 65 billion barrels of proven crude oil reserves (out of Venezuela’s total 303 billion barrels) across 17 fields. To put that…

Rosneft has shipped the first crude oil cargo from the Vostok Oil project in Eastern Siberia, despite sanctions targeting Russia’s energy industry and the exit of Western business partners. At peak capacity, the project is expected to produce between 50 and 100 million tons of crude annually. The Vostok Oil project is Russia's largest new oil development, comprising a group of fields in Krasnoyarsk Krai, some already producing and the rest new discoveries. A total of 2,000 wells have been drilled at the site, Rosneft’s chief executive…

The biggest U.S. legacy automakers look to turn the losses from their underutilized electric vehicle battery capacity into a new profitable business to seize the soaring demand for battery storage energy systems. GM and Ford, which, due to poor demand, have written down billions of U.S. dollars of investments in the EV expansion push, are now pivoting to the energy storage business to meet the spike in demand for battery energy storage from data centers and infrastructure to support the electric grid. The underutilized electric vehicle battery…

The investigations published by The New York Times and The Washington Post should not be dismissed as another collection of allegations emerging from Sudan’s opaque civil war. Taken together, they present the most substantial publicly available evidence yet that elements of the Sudanese Armed Forces developed, stockpiled, and apparently used improvised chlorine weapons. If independently verified, this would transform Sudan’s conflict into a chemical-weapons and energy-security crisis directly connected to the Red Sea. The material reportedly…

I've been writing for more than a decade and a half about a broad category of metals often nowadays dubbed "strategic" because they are crucial to high-tech applications such as solar photovoltaic panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, flat screens, semiconductors, batteries, optics, aerospace and a wide array of military applications including night vision, radar systems, communications satellites, radiation shielding, vehicle armor, submarine hulls, precision weaponry, and on and on. It is the military applications that interest me here because…

Russia will remain a key crude oil supplier to India, Russia’s Ambassador to India, Denis Alipov, said in an interview with Asian News International, in which he also criticized the planned U.S. legislation to slap tariffs on countries importing Russian oil. Russia has become India’s single-biggest oil supplier in recent years, after the U.S., the UK, and the EU banned Russian oil imports and moved to increase sanction pressure on Russia following the invasion of Ukraine. U.S. Congress is trying to pass a “bill from hell”…

Russia will remain a key crude oil supplier to India, Russia’s Ambassador to India, Denis Alipov, said in an interview with Asian News International, in which he also criticized the planned U.S. legislation to slap tariffs on countries importing Russian oil. Russia has become India’s single-biggest oil supplier in recent years, after the U.S., the UK, and the EU banned Russian oil imports and moved to increase sanction pressure on Russia following the invasion of Ukraine. U.S. Congress is trying to pass a “bill from hell”…

Copper is riding its longest weekly winning streak since 1994, and the physical market underneath the rally keeps getting thinner. Benchmark prices on the London Metal Exchange notched a 10th straight weekly gain through last Friday, trading near $14,300 a ton and within reach of the record $14,527.50 set in January. On Comex, prices topped $6.70 a pound in August, a fresh all-time high. Behind the run sits inventory that keeps draining: LME warehouse stocks fell for 42 straight days through mid-August, the longest stretch since 2014, and nearly…

Back on June 4, Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev and Russian leader Vladimir Putin were all smiles amid the ceremonial groundbreaking for the construction of Uzbekistan’s first cluster of nuclear reactors, to be built by Russia’s nuclear entity Rosatom. “I am confident that you have chosen the best option for Uzbekistan out of all those offered,” Putin told Mirziyoyev at the time. Just three months later, it is clear that Mirziyoyev is having second thoughts about his selection of Rosatom. On September 2, his presidential…

The global power of most Middle Eastern countries remains dependent on their oil and/or gas output, so it is little wonder they try to maximise this, either by pushing production higher or by pretending it is higher, or by forecasting that it will be higher at some point soon. Iraq had historically fallen into the last of these categories -- having periodically promised large increases in oil production that never materialised. Saudi Arabia, the Middle East’s top oil producer, meanwhile, has fallen into the first category -- alluding to oil…

The prices of crudes from Canada, South America, and Africa have jumped in recent weeks as Chinese oil import demand is rising from a decade-low, benchmark prices rally, and Middle East supply remains disrupted. The Djeno crude from Congo, one of the smaller producers in OPEC, is being offered at a premium of $20 per barrel over ICE Brent, anonymous traders told Bloomberg on Monday. That's up from a $15 a barrel premium two weeks ago, according to the traders. The prices of crudes from Canada, Brazil, and Argentina are also rising amid increased…