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Oil tankers are diverting from their route to Venezuela; some are sitting idle at ports instead of setting off for Asia; discounts on Venezuelan crude are deepening; and PDVSA may soon start shutting down wells for lack of storage space. President Trump’s military campaign against Venezuela is threatening an $8-billion market. It started with one tanker seizure, a week ago. Then Trump escalated the rhetoric, threatening a blockade on Venezuelan tanker traffic and demanding that Venezuela returned “Oil, Land, and other Assets that they…
Tajik officials are proposing the creation of a regional mechanism in Central Asia to legally regulate “new technologies,” including artificial intelligence. Tajikistan, along with Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, have announced government programs to develop their respective countries’ IT/AI sectors. Kazakhstan has gone so far as to establish a Ministry of Artificial Intelligence, while Tajikistan’s digital infrastructure at present lags far behind its Central Asian neighbors. Speaking at a regional forum in Bishkek on December…
The tit-for-tat trade war between the US and China earlier this year cooled by late October after President Trump and President Xi agreed to a trade truce that, so far, appears to be holding. There are early signs that the truce is beginning to restore rare earth trade between China and the West, as Beijing has started approving some rare earth export license applications this week. EU trade chief Maros Sefcovic told Bloomberg TV earlier this week that industry chatter suggests China is granting so-called general licenses, a shift from a highly…
Lithium-ion batteries dominate the tech world. You probably have at least one within reach right this moment, considering that lithium-ion batteries now power a whopping 70 percent of all rechargeable devices, from your smartphone to electric vehicles, and even power utility-scale energy storage. And while the tech industry is eager to diversify battery design to relieve its dependency on this “white gold”, lithium continues to dominate the sector – and will likely remain essential for a long time to come. While lithium…
For years, perovskites have been hailed as the "holy grail" of solar energy thanks to their promise of highly efficient and cheaper solar cells. Perovskites are a class of materials with similar crystalline structures with high superconductivity, high magnetoresistance, and high ferroelectricity, making them a potential replacement for silicon. Perovskite thin-film PV panels can absorb light from a wider variety of wave-lengths, allowing them to reach efficiencies of around 40% compared to silicon's theoretical limits around 30%. Unfortunately,…
