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Copper slid to its lowest in almost four months on Friday and was heading for a fifth straight weekly loss, with traders blaming Nvidia’s (Nasdaq: NVDA) loss of Jensen Huang for the latest leg down. The exit is a convenient culprit, but the slide started before it. Copper has dropped every week since mid-October, and Goldman Sachs called the correction a matter of positioning in AI-linked stocks, not a sign that fundamentals have loosened. Three-month copper on the London Metal Exchange was down 0.5% at $13,519 a metric ton as of 1000 GMT,…
Yesterday the US Senate approved a preliminary version of a bill, the Bipartisan Affordability and Jobs Act, commonly referred to as BAAJA. We previously published an article in Oilprice titled, “The AI Power Grab That Could Upend America’s Utility Industry.” Our thesis was simple. Today’s AI giants (we referred to them as T-Rexes because economically they are akin to apex predators), thanks to their enormous size and political influence, will be permitted to build whatever electric power generating facilities they choose,…
Asian spot LNG is trading above $30 per million British thermal units and Europe is entering winter with its lowest gas inventory of the 2020s, yet Rystad Energy stops short of predicting a further rally. In its winter LNG outlook, published this week, the consultancy lays out as many ways for prices to fall as to rise and tells buyers to plan for a wide range of outcomes instead of one base case. EU storage sites were 71.6% full in Gas Infrastructure Europe’s Nov. 11 update, with Germany at 58%, and that is well under the five-year average…
China bought itself two more months on Monday by extending the pause on its sweeping October 2025 rare earth export controls to Jan. 10, Reuters reported, but the metal squeezing buyers hardest right now was never covered by it. That metal is yttrium, which sits under a separate set of licensing rules Beijing imposed in April 2025 on seven medium and heavy rare earths. When the pause began last November, the law firm Pillsbury listed those April rules among the measures still in force, which makes the extension a cheap gift: the October measures…
On Tuesday the Houthis launched another major missile salvo deep inside Saudi Arabia, however Saudi authorities have yet to acknowledge the fresh attack, or to publicly assess possible damage - though there are reports of missile alerts in the kingdom. The Houthi military spokesperson, Yahya Saree, announced the group once again targeted King Khalid International Airport, as well as multiple pumping stations along the kingdom's East-West pipeline. via Associated Press Saree further claimed fresh attacks on an Aramco facility in Abqaiq and the Riyadh's…
Sudan Is a U.S. National Security Interest, Not Just a Humanitarian Crisis by James Durso Sudan’s devastating civil war is often described as a humanitarian catastrophe. It is that, unquestionably, but for the United States, the conflict is also a strategic challenge involving Red Sea security, Iran’s regional influence, counterterrorism, international trade, and access to critical minerals. Washington should not treat Sudan as a distant crisis to be dealt with after more pressing matters. Its outcome will affect the security of a strategically…
The blue wave in the midterm elections that will put Democrats in charge of the House and Senate could reshape U.S. energy policies. Democrats in charge of both chambers of Congress and its key committees, Democratic governors in key data-center development states such as Ohio, Georgia, and Texas, a Democrat in Georgia’s utilities regulator, and the first Democratic member of the Texas oil regulator since 1990 would seek to stymie the Trump Administration’s pro-fossil fuel and unchecked data center expansion. Investigations into oil…
Finland and the United States are exemplifying two opposing approaches to managing the mounting problem of spent nuclear fuel. Finland is about to open the world’s first permanent nuclear waste disposal facility. The United States is stuck in a cycle of endless political turnover and resultant gridlock about how to address the more than 90,000 metric tons of spent fuel sitting in temporary facilities around the country, posing a mounting public health hazard and tax dollar sink. The Onkalo site (named after the Finnish for ‘cave’)…
The United States boasts the largest nuclear power production capacity in the world, but decades of insufficient funding and policy support is now posing an existential threat to the ageing sector. In the past decade, the United States has added just one new nuclear power plant to its fleet, while many more plants are drawing close to being decommissioned, at a time when clean, round-the-clock energy production has never been more needed. The Trump administration has been bullish about restoring the country’s nuclear energy sector to its…
Gas peakers have always had one decisive economic advantage: they were relatively cheap to build. A peaking plant could sit idle for most of the year, then start when demand and electricity prices surged. Its fuel was expensive and its efficiency often mediocre, but low upfront costs made that acceptable. The owner did not need thousands of operating hours to recover an enormous initial investment. Australia has now crossed an important threshold. The country’s CSIRO, working with the Australian Energy Market Operator, finds that batteries…
LNG spot market prices in Asia have tripled since the start of the year. Asia and Europe are locked in a race for a limited number of cargoes. The U.S. is exporting record volumes of the fuel. And QatarEnergy just extended a force majeure on its own LNG exports. The world is short on gas—and will remain so for a while. The Japan-Korea Marker, the Asian LNG benchmark, topped $31 per million British thermal units this month. In fact, the benchmark briefly rose above $33 per mmBtu, compared with a little over $9 per mmBtu in January this year.…
Canada’s proposed associate membership with the European Union is a first-of-its-kind political and economic partnership announced by Prime Minister Mark Carney and EU leaders during the October 2026 Canada-EU Summit in Montreal. The arrangement creates a multi-layered tie that goes well beyond a standard free-trade agreement (like CETA), while stopping short of full EU membership. The push is driven largely by a need to reduce economic and strategic reliance on the United States amid ongoing trade tensions, tariff disputes, and political…
U.S. President Donald Trump’s core vision of the future of global oil and gas is to have as much of that supply as possible coming from his self-proclaimed ‘Americas’ region, which is directly in the U.S.’s sphere of influence. Venezuela is one of the key countries from which this increased production is designated to flow, which is why Washington is focusing so much of its efforts on encouraging heavy investment from American oil and gas giants into the country. It is in this context that very recent changes to Venezuela’s…
A month ago, a series of news reports said oil flows out of Hormuz had recovered to pre-war levels, pushing oil prices lower. However, the rout did not last. Benchmarks are set for their fourth monthly gain in a row, and no amount of repeating that Gulf states are exporting even more oil than before the war can change that. Because barrels are not the whole story. “What is the price of oil? Eight months into the war with Iran, what should be a straightforward question has become surprisingly hard to answer,” JP Morgan’s head…
A new United States intelligence report warns that China is developing energy weapons and spaceplanes that it could use for military operations in outer space, with the capability of using directed-energy weapons in orbit by the end of the 2020s. The US Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) report, published on Sunday, includes a rare image of the newly developed reusable spaceplane. The DIA report, entitled Challenges to Security in Space, is the first time that the U.S. government has offered an estimated timeline for China’s development…
The results of the upcoming midterm elections will reveal just how much power global energy markets have over state-level politics – and how much changing political regimes can cost the global energy sector in return. As voters head to the polls, energy prices are blisteringly high. As of Monday, average gasoline prices in the United States officially edged higher than at any point of Joe Biden’s presidential term, according to a Politico analysis of AAA figures. This could pose a major threat to the Trump administration as well as…
A Malta-flagged tanker called the Agioi Fanendes left the Russian port of Primorsk on Oct. 22 carrying nearly 40,000 metric tons of ultra-low-sulfur diesel, and ship-tracking data has it arriving at the Port of New York and New Jersey on Nov. 7, four days after the midterm elections. Nobody has publicly said who bought the fuel, and Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., has asked the ship’s owner to identify the buyer and everyone else involved by Oct. 31. The cargo is the first visible piece of the deal President Donald Trump announced Oct.…
Last year, solar power quietly overtook nuclear power in the global energy mix. This is a stunning feat when you consider that just a decade ago, in 2015, global solar generation amounted to just 256 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2015, while global nuclear power generated ten-fold that amount at 2,576 TWh. And solar didn’t just overtake nuclear power in 2025; it surpassed it by a wide margin, producing 13 percent more energy worldwide. "[Solar] generating more electricity than all the world's nuclear power plants is a pretty insane…
Turkey has finally gotten both sides of a divided Libya to sign the maritime map it has pushed for seven years. Ankara signed the boundary deal with Libya’s Tripoli government in 2019, and the rival parliament in the east rejected it in 2020. On October 20, that same parliament, the Haftar-aligned House of Representatives in Benghazi, ratified the deal unanimously. Both of Libya’s governments now recognize a boundary that runs between Crete and Cyprus, leaving Greek islands in the area with no sea beyond their territorial waters. Ankara…
Oil and gas may be flowing through the Strait of Hormuz again, but the impacts of its months-long closure will be felt for years to come. For Asia, in particular, regulating markets and shoring up energy security to avoid the next energy shock will require trillions of dollars in the coming years as energy demand projection rates continue to rise sharply across the region. When traffic through the Iranian-controlled Strait of Hormuz stopped overnight back in February in response to a military offensive by the United States and Israel, one-fifth…
Reports about recovering oil flows in the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea have dominated headlines over the past couple of weeks. Yet oil prices have only moved higher, suggesting barrel numbers alone are not enough to convince the world everything’s back to normal. It isn’t. According to the latest Kpler numbers, October oil exports out of the Middle East in total are in fact higher than they were before the U.S. and Israel launched their first strikes on Iran at the end of February. Flows out of the Strait of Hormuz alone have averaged…
Singapore’s shipping-fuel market is adding another layer of cost to Asian trade. Disrupted supplies from the Middle East and Russia, resilient bunker demand and prohibitive freight rates have pushed high-sulphur fuel oil above the price of the crude used to produce it. Seasonal relief from Gulf producers and additional Chinese export allowances could ease the squeeze towards year-end, particularly for very-low-sulphur fuel oil. But with replacement cargoes expensive to transport and Russian supplies vulnerable to further disruption, a return…
The United States and Canada are locked in an energy trade war – sort of. Although United States President Donald Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney have lobbed plenty of blisteringly high tariffs, not to mention threats and insults, at each other over the course of their respective tenures, they have not touched one very important commodity – oil and gas. This is because the nations are simply too dependent on each other to sever the ties between their respective fossil fuel empires, making true independence a purely pyrrhic…
The energy demand boom being driven by the artificial intelligence era is placing unprecedented strain on global energy infrastructure. Not only are the world’s energy production capacities – and especially clean energy production capacities – dwarfed by projected data center energy demand curves in coming years, the physical infrastructure needed to build and sustain never-before-seen rates of electrification and energy consumption growth is woefully underdeveloped. At present, the world’s energy grids and transmission…
