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On 6 November, U.S. president Donald Trump hosted the C5 + 1, the diplomatic platform that brings together the U.S. and the five Central Asia republics, Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Trump hosted the leaders at the White House, the first time he met any of them except for Uzbek president Shavkat Mirziyoyev who he met at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) session in September 2025, and at the White House in May 2018. (Then-president Joe Biden met the Central Asian leaders at the UNGA session in…
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev are meeting in Moscow this week to discuss gas cooperation and the impact of U.S. sanctions on Russian oil majors with operations in Kazakhstan. The talks come as the Kremlin faces tighter restrictions on Lukoil and Rosneft, both sanctioned last month by the Trump administration. Lukoil holds stakes in Kazakhstan’s Tengiz and Karachaganak projects, which are operated by Western majors and remain dependent on the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) for exports. The CPC—controlled…
The global precious metals market is projected to grow by over USD 95 billion in the next five years, driven primarily by sustained investor demand for safe-haven assets and increasing industrial use in rapidly expanding technologies, according to a new report from Mordor Intelligence. The market size, which was valued at $290.34 billion in 2025, is forecast to reach $386.16 billion by 2030. This expansion reflects a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 5.87%, the research firm stated. Growth is being supported by a combination of investors seeking…
Oil from offshore Brazil, Guyana, Suriname, and Argentina’s Vaca Muerta shale play will be key sources of cost-competitive non-OPEC oil supply through 2030, Rystad Energy has predicted. Rystad has predicted that global liquids demand will peak in the 2030s at around 107 million barrels per day (bpd), maintain a plateau above 100 million bpd through the 2040s before declining to around 75 million bpd by 2050. According to the Norwegian energy consultancy, non-OPEC+ supply will be key to balancing the global market, with cheap oil from South…
Tory leader Kemi Badenoch has declared an oil and gas “emergency” in the North East of Scotland as she pushes the Labour government to overturn its ban on new oil and gas licenses. Badenoch has pledged to “get Britain drilling again” in a new campaign in partnership with the Scottish Conservatives. The announcement marks the Conservative leader’s growing focus on oil and gas, splitting from previous party leaders who were more critical of fossil fuels. Badenoch, who is currently in Aberdeen, has called on Chancellor…
A joint green-energy project involving Azerbaijan and Georgia has cleared an initial European hurdle, and its blueprint for exporting electricity from the Caspian Basin to the EU will now undergo a cost-benefit analysis. The European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity (ENTSO-E) opted to include the project, known as the Black Sea Green Energy Corridor, in a group of infrastructure projects under consideration within the framework of a Ten-Year Network Development Plan (TYNDP 2026). “Over the course of 2026, all projects…
Iraq Prime Minister Mohammed Shia Al Sudani has directed his ministry to halt imports of middle distillates such as gasoline, diesel and kerosene, claiming his country has achieved self-sufficiency through increased oil production coupled with ongoing additions of refining capacity. Iraq has ramped up oil production and exports, partly through the success of its Nasiriyah field as well as increased production quotas within the OPEC+ agreement. Specifically, production at the Nasiriyah field has increased to 80,000 barrels a day by bringing…
Global energy giant ExxonMobil reported third-quarter 2025 earnings last week. Those results delivered some eye-popping numbers for all the right reasons. The global energy supermajor announced a solid performance despite softer oil prices and a challenging operating environment. While Exxon’s Permian Basin assets are a key part of the story, Exxon’s Guyana operations are another important driver of this notable performance. Exxon made its first discovery in Guyana’s territorial waters in 2015 with the Liza-1 well in the 6.6-million-acre…
The surge in artificial intelligence and digital infrastructure has turned data centers into the fastest-growing source of new electricity demand in North America. Grid operators and policymakers are racing to keep up, and for energy providers, this wave of demand could open new frontiers of opportunity. Challenge 1: Capacity bottlenecks Data center developers are demanding power within tight timelines, while interconnection queues for new generation and transmission projects can stretch for years. Some operators are now building private…
Much of the hydrogen discourse over the past decade has been aspirational: visions of a clean hydrogen economy, deep decarbonization of industry and transport, and futuristic power systems built around electrolysis. In many of my earlier pieces on OilPrice, I warned that hydrogen was entering a “reality phase” — where hype must give way to execution, economics, and scaling. Now we are beginning to see real projects crossing the threshold, and the balance is shifting. But the path forward is fragile: execution, policy alignment,…
Concern has been rising that artificial intelligence is killing jobs, and there is evidence to support this. But in the energy industry, executives are loving AI. A fifth of energy companies are already using the technology, and an overwhelming majority of executives believe AI is a force for good. For energy, it has been. AI is driving energy demand much higher than ever before, and it has reasserted the reliability of supply as a top priority. In a report released this week, the UAE’s ADNOC and Microsoft reported that 87% of companies they…
Shipping and aviation are considered to be some of the hardest to abate sectors when it comes to decarbonization. Together, these two sectors account for a whopping 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and that figure is likely going to rise as more goods are shipped and more flights are booked each and every year. But a new biofuels breakthrough may provide a long-range fuel alternative for the heavy transport and aviation industries. Emissions from the aviation sector have quadrupled since the 1960s, even as flying has become more than twice…
After decades of stagnation, nuclear energy is staging a comeback — and it’s no longer the gigawatt-scale reactors of the past leading the charge. Small modular reactors, once dismissed as niche or speculative, have moved to the center of a global energy and geopolitical pivot. Their appeal lies in scalability, siting flexibility, and the promise of dedicated, carbon-free baseload power—a vital ingredient in an era defined by the AI energy demand surge and industrial decarbonization. The shift from ambitious blueprints to billion-dollar…
In the ongoing digital transformation of the energy industry, artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as one of the most discussed — and misunderstood — tools available to operators. While the promises of AI often stretch toward the speculative, the technology’s most immediate and profound impact is already visible in how companies organize, interpret, and act upon data. For national oil companies (NOCs), this impact is potentially transformative. Unlike many private firms, NOCs sit atop immense, often underutilized data reservoirs…
Trump has launched the United States’ most aggressive rare-earth and critical-minerals expansion in more than a decade, signing over $10 billion in supply-chain deals across Australia, Japan, Malaysia, and Thailand in less than a week. The flurry of agreements aims to cut China’s 90 percent grip on global refining capacity and establish a network of Indo-Pacific partners for mining, processing, and stockpiling key materials vital to defense and clean-tech industries.On Tuesday, the United States and Japan signed an agreement to secure…
US retail power prices have surged 13% since 2022, outpacing the Consumer Price Index (CPI) and driving higher costs for consumers. While many have pointed to rising demand from data centers as the culprit for the increase, Rystad Energy’s analysis shows that data centers have yet to significantly influence power prices in the current terms. Our research points to the full price impact of data centers emerging closer to 2030, driven by the completion of a wave of data center infrastructure and more centers coming online. Rystad predicts that…
Global satellite-detected methane emissions from the onshore upstream oil and gas sector ticked up late last year and into the first quarter of 2025, reversing a steady decline since 2020. Rystad Energy analysis, supported by satellite detection, highlights stark regional differences: China’s emissions surged nearly one-third year on year, while the US recorded a smaller rise of 4%. Russia, on the other hand, posted a 5% drop in the first quarter, largely due to the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict leading to lower production volumes. Detected…
The U.S. federal government this week declared sanctions on two of the largest Russian crude oil exporters, Rosneft and Lukoil, which together account for about half of the country’s total outflows. Oil prices jumped, traders got excited—then prices fell. But the supply security of some major importers just got problematic. Russia exports around 4 million barrels of crude oil daily. Some of the major producers have already been sanctioned earlier – Gazprom Neft, for example, and Surgutneftegaz. Rosneft and Lukoil are also the…
In an inflammatory social media post, U.S. President Donald Trump accused Colombia’s first-ever leftwing President Gustavo Petro of colluding with drug traffickers, calling him “an illegal drug leader”. Trump, in an increasingly hardline stance, called for the cessation of U.S. aid and imposition of further steep tariffs on Colombia. He even went as far as threatening military strikes if narcotics trafficking does not end. This is testing the historically close alliance between the United States and Colombia, which is Latin America’s…
Tony Blair’s think tank has called for the government to ditch its 2030 clean power target as it urged the Labour government to focus on making electricity cheaper in order to persuade Brits to use it over gas. In a report published by the Tony Blair Institute (TBI), researchers called for the government to “solve” problems including the decline of North Sea oil production, which had made the UK less secure. It is the latest indication that Blair has split from Keir Starmer’s government on key issues after the…
Annual conventional discovered volumes once averaged more than 20 billion barrels of oil equivalent (boe) per year in the early 2010s, but these have fallen to nearly one-third of that, with analysis by Rystad Energy showing global discoveries have averaged slightly over 8 billion boe annually since 2020 despite several standout frontier finds in Namibia, Suriname, and Guyana. Despairingly, the yearly average declines further to about 5.5 billion boe between 2023 and September this year. The contraction reflects a strategic change where the global…
Two drastically different trends in energy careers are taking place on either side of the Atlantic Ocean. While the Trump administration pulls back billions of dollars in clean energy funding and seeks to prop up coal careers, the United Kingdom is rolling out a plan to add 400,000 clean energy jobs to the national economy. Just this week Edward Miliband, the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change of the United Kingdom, announced a national plan to train hundreds of thousands of plumbers, electricians, carpenters, welders, HVAC installers,…
A study by X-energy Canada has confirmed the feasibility and benefits of repurposing an existing thermal generation site in Alberta with X-energy's small modular reactors, World Nuclear News reports. Funded by Emissions Reduction Alberta (ERA), the study found that the Xe-100 high-temperature gas-cooled reactor is uniquely suited to Alberta's energy needs. As well as producing electricity, it is specifically designed to provide 565°C heat and steam for industrial applications, unlocking a broad range of use cases for Alberta's industrial…
The last decade has been especially grueling for Ecuador’s economically vital oil industry. Plummeting investment, heavily corroded infrastructure, endemic corruption, violent protests, severe oil spills and rising insecurity are all weighing on operations. The sharp decline in oil production is weighing heavily on government finances at a time of increased spending due to a national security crisis. To rescue the economically crucial industry and boost fiscal revenue, President Daniel Noboa launched a $47 billion plan to revive Ecuador’s…
