Crude oil prices on Thursday settled at the highest in six months, with Brent crude topping $71 per barrel and WTI over $66. However, this may be just the start of a much stronger rally—it all depends on developments between the United States and Iran. The latest round of negotiations between the two on Iran’s nuclear program started well enough, with both sides signaling they wanted to make a deal. Iran’s Foreign Minister signaled there was progress being made, saying the negotiating teams had agreed on “guiding principles.”…

Last July, Ukraine started importing natural gas from Azerbaijan for the first time in history, just months after it officially stopped the transit of Russian natural gas through its pipeline network in January 2025. Ukraine’s Naftogaz signed a supply agreement with Azerbaijan’s SOCAR Energy Ukraine that saw the former Soviet nation export its natural gas through the Trans-Balkan Corridor, with Ukraine looking to diversify its energy supply, enhance energy security, and offset significant domestic production losses caused by a constant…

The United States is doubling down on its plans for expanding nuclear power, as one of the few clean energies that President Trump appears to be supporting. Trump has stated ambitious aims for the rapid expansion of the country’s nuclear power capacity, to be supported by both public and private funding. A wide range of projects, from conventional reactor development to the deployment of small modular reactors (SMR), will support this aim. While it will likely take a decade or more to meaningfully grow the nuclear capacity in the U.S., 2026…

Meta is paying roughly $6.5bn (£4.82bn) in extra financing costs to keep $27bn of AI infrastructure borrowing off its balance sheet, a costly accounting choice that captures the mood in Big Tech’s race to build the pipes of AI without spooking investors. The arrangement, known as special purpose vehicle financing (SPV), allows an external entity to raise debt, construct the data centre, and lease it back to the tech group. On paper, Meta books lease payments rather than traditional borrowing, but really, it has committed to decades…

As the tech sector expands, in line with the growing global demand for advanced technologies, it appears that many companies may be poaching workers from the energy sector. Hiring skilled employees from the energy industry could help tech companies to advance their ambitions for developing giant new data centres to power artificial intelligence (AI) and other technologies, without the need for retraining costs. Tech companies worldwide are investing heavily in the development and expansion of the data centres that they require to deploy advanced…

Solar power has grabbed a foothold in Romania, with installed capacity expected to surpass 7 gigawatts in early 2026, driven by high demand, EU funding and over 290,000 commercial and residential consumers. The Eastern European country is rapidly installing solar to transition away from coal, enhance energy security, and meet European Union decarbonization targets. While it is not among the top European countries for installed solar power — that, in descending order, is Germany, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and France — Romania is…

Copper prices rallied to a record high of over $13,000 per ton last month, but retreated to about $12,700 this week as expectations of long-term demand strength collided with massive stockpiling at the key exchange hubs in the U.S. and China. Despite an unchanged outlook of soaring copper demand in the long term due to electrification and surging power consumption, near-term prospects in the copper market appear more fragile than the gold rally. “While we expect long-term gold prices to rise further, we see more differentiated returns across…

Strife-torn Colombia is facing an energy crisis of gargantuan proportions. Decades of mismanagement and insecurity, coupled with radical changes to energy policy by Gustavo Petro, Colombia’s first-ever leftist president, are wreaking havoc with the country’s natural gas reserves and production. This is making the Andean country increasingly reliant upon costly natural gas imports while threatening the stability of Colombia’s energy grid and risking critical energy shortages. There are no signs of an easy solution for a country…

United States President Trump has been pushing for a return to fossil fuels, after the Biden administration spent several years increasing the country’s renewable energy capacity. Trump has signed several executive orders since his inauguration last January aimed at reversing the country’s most far-reaching climate policy, the Inflation Reduction Act, while making it easier for fossil fuel companies to increase the production of oil and gas. However, as Trump encourages coal firms to delay closures and continue producing coal, experts…

Around the world, competition for land and finite resources is leading to a new era of manifest destiny as political and industrial leaders look to the stars as the final frontier for resource extraction. From the Trump administration to the bigwigs of Silicon Valley, a new space race is on. Billionaire-backed ventures like Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin are making a far more diverse, competitive, and innovative playing field. At the end of last year, Trump issued an Executive Order entitled “Ensuring American…

Automakers have been gradually improving autonomous driving technology in vehicles, working closely with tech companies to enhance features to get them on the roads. Several cities have rolled out autonomous taxi and bus pilot schemes in recent years, demonstrating just how far the technology has come. However, there are still significant limits to how and where autonomous vehicles can drive. Now, as Nvidia has big plans to deploy more high-tech self-driving cars, some other automakers, such as Mercedes, are putting their projects on pause. When…

A geothermal revolution is unfolding around the United States in ways both flashy and quiet. As Big Tech becomes increasingly involved in developing alternative energy sources to meet skyrocketing energy demand driven by the AI boom, innovative and advanced geothermal technologies have been taking off – but so too have more simple and surface-level solutions like heat pumps. Together, these approaches could reshape the domestic energy industry by providing baseload clean energy solutions and shoring up energy security in urban and rural populations…

Denmark detained a container vessel previously blacklisted by Washington under last year's sweeping Iran sanctions on Thursday, amid suspicions it was operating under a false flag. The Nora was seized after authorities determined it was allegedly sailing under the flag of Comoros without authorization. The ship is now anchored in Danish waters pending further investigation, according to reports. It actually appears to be a box ship transporting containers at the time it was intercepted. It raised the Iranian flag under deeply suspicious circumstances,…

The total number of active drilling rigs for oil and gas in the United States stayed the same this week, according to new data that Baker Hughes published on Friday, keeping the total rig count in the US  at 551 this week, down 41 from this same time last year. The number of active oil rigs stayed at 409 during the latest reporting period, according to the data. This is 79 below this same time last year. The number of gas also held steady at 133, which is 34 more than this time last year. The miscellaneous rig count stayed the same at 9. The…

If there was any lingering doubt about what’s keeping Big Oil executives up at night, the fourth-quarter results cleared it up. It’s not slogans. It’s not transition optics. It’s whether they have enough high-quality barrels to avoid production decline in the 2030s. The majors are refocusing hard on upstream portfolio renewal for the next decade, according to WoodMac, who analyzed Q4 data. The near-term commodity backdrop isn’t exactly inspiring, and Brent looks soft. Refining margins are decent, petrochemicals less…

If there was any lingering doubt about what’s keeping Big Oil executives up at night, the fourth-quarter results cleared it up. It’s not slogans. It’s not transition optics. It’s whether they have enough high-quality barrels to avoid production decline in the 2030s. The majors are refocusing hard on upstream portfolio renewal for the next decade, according to WoodMac, who analyzed Q4 data. The near-term commodity backdrop isn’t exactly inspiring, and Brent looks soft. Refining margins are decent, petrochemicals less…

If there was any lingering doubt about what’s keeping Big Oil executives up at night, the fourth-quarter results cleared it up. It’s not slogans. It’s not transition optics. It’s whether they have enough high-quality barrels to avoid production decline in the 2030s. The majors are refocusing hard on upstream portfolio renewal for the next decade, according to WoodMac, who analyzed Q4 data. The near-term commodity backdrop isn’t exactly inspiring, and Brent looks soft. Refining margins are decent, petrochemicals less…

In late 2025, during his visit to Kyrgyzstan, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin declared Russia’s readiness to build a small modular nuclear power reactor (SMR) in Kyrgyzstan, thereby signaling Moscow’s intention to move beyond traditional trade relations toward projects in long-term strategic infrastructure. Russia’s proposal may be justified by the need to address Kyrgyzstan’s persistent problem of frequent energy shortages, caused by rising consumption, aging energy infrastructure, and overreliance on hydropower…

Nearly fifty seemingly separate companies have been involved in coordinating to mask the origin of Russian oil, moving crude worth at least $90 billion, an investigation of the Financial Times has found.  FT uncovered the network due to an IT blunder—the 48 identified entities all share a single private email server.  The oil smuggling network includes firms and persons linked to Russia’s top oil producer, state-controlled Rosneft, and these have been in coordination to mask the origin of Russian crude, especially of Rosneft. …

Nearly fifty seemingly separate companies have been involved in coordinating to mask the origin of Russian oil, moving crude worth at least $90 billion, an investigation of the Financial Times has found.  FT uncovered the network due to an IT blunder—the 48 identified entities all share a single private email server.  The oil smuggling network includes firms and persons linked to Russia’s top oil producer, state-controlled Rosneft, and these have been in coordination to mask the origin of Russian crude, especially of Rosneft. …