Previously, we reported that the U.S. Shale Patch has witnessed a big slump in corporate buyouts in recent years as premium acreage depletes and volatile energy prices keep buyers on the sidelines. Following a record $192 billion in mergers and acquisitions announced in 2023 and $105 billion in 2024, U.S. upstream oil and gas M&A activity totaled just $65 billion in 2025, despite a late-year rebound with $23.5 billion in deals announced in the fourth quarter. However, the situation could not be more stark in America’s neighbor to the…

Big legacy U.S. and European automakers are frantically dialing back their electric vehicle bets, scaling back once-hyped roadmaps to full electrification as demand for these vehicles implodes. The latest automaker to reverse course is not a mass-market sedan or SUV maker, but a luxury supercar brand: Lamborghini. CEO Stephan Winkelmann told the UK's The Sunday Times that he has ended plans to build EVs, saying customers are not seeking quiet supercars and that demand has collapsed. Winkelmann said that EV development risked becoming…

It’s been a volatile year for clean energy markets. Despite major policy shifts impacting green industries, global renewable energy investment hit a record high in 2025. A closer look at last year’s figures reveals a high level of ambivalence in the marketplace, with a sharp drop in clean energy investments in the United States in the last corner, but a surprising resurgence of clean energy dealmaking over the same time frame. The electric vehicles sector, in particular, is already showing signs of sharp contraction after the Trump…

The American Petroleum Institute (API) estimated that crude oil inventories in the United States rose by 11.4 million barrels in the week ending February 20, after falling by 609,000 barrels in the week prior. Analysts had expected a smaller build of 1.85 million barrels. Inventories in the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) keep climbing week after week. The Department of Energy (DoE) reported that crude oil inventories stayed at 415.4 million barrels in the week ending February 20. This is 310.1 million barrels shy of maximum capacity. US production…

The American Petroleum Institute (API) estimated that crude oil inventories in the United States rose by 11.4 million barrels in the week ending February 20, after falling by 609,000 barrels in the week prior. Analysts had expected a smaller build of 1.85 million barrels. Inventories in the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) keep climbing week after week. The Department of Energy (DoE) reported that crude oil inventories stayed at 415.4 million barrels in the week ending February 20. This is 310.1 million barrels shy of maximum capacity. US production…

Russia’s pipeline operator Transneft has cut crude intake into its system by roughly 250,000 barrels per day after damage at the Kaleykino pumping station in Tatarstan, according to Reuters sources. Kaleykino is a key blending and dispatch hub that can pump about 1 million bpd and feeds crude into the Druzhba pipeline network as well as export routes to Primorsk on the Baltic and Novorossiisk on the Black Sea. It is also where different crude streams are mixed into the Urals export grade. The Druzhba system alone has capacity of about 1.4…

The Winter Olympics are over, but their energy supplier, Enel, is rightly proud of the feat it pulled off: 100% low-carbon electricity supply for the games. But there is a twist. That 100% was only possible thanks to one thing: carbon credits. The energy major reported it was supplying 85 GW of electricity to the Olympics and Paralympics, yet not all of those gigawatts came from wind and solar installations. Some of them did, but the rest came from baseload generation facilities, “cleaned up” with so-called “guarantee of origin”…

A rethink of the European Union’s (EU) Arctic policy could keep Norway’s Barents Sea gas in play in the 2030s, offering Europe a nearby, low-emission supply option as its reliance on the global liquefied natural gas market grows, according to new Rystad Energy research and analysis. The European Commission is reviewing its 2021 Arctic policy and has opened a public consultation through 16 March 2026. With Barents projects typically needing five to 10 years to move from discovery to steady output, the signal the EU sends now will determine…

Tonight, when President Donald Trump steps into the House chamber to deliver his State of the Union address, it will undoubtedly be overshadowed by the prospect of coming conflict with Iran.  Tehran will be up late (or early), carefully scrutinizing every word of the US leader, anticipating the what's next at a moment of massive Pentagon build-up in the region, including no less than two carrier groups. Iranian leadership, looking toward the big Trump speech tonight, has just offered that it's ready to do anything necessary…

The presidents of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan attended the inaugural meeting of US President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace in Washington, DC on 19 February 2026. The Board has been promoted as the tool to rebuild the Gaza Strip, so why were two Central Asian republics in attendance? In an era when global institutions are strained, and geopolitical competition is intensifying,  Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan have emerged as unlikely but valuable contributors to the US President Donald Trump’s signature project now that the Abraham Accords…

Nigeria will launch exports of a new crude grade in March as OPEC’s biggest African oil producer looks to boost output and exports and seek a higher baseline in the OPEC+ agreements. The national oil company of Nigeria will start shipping the Cawthorne grade, a type of sweet crude similar to the country’s flagship Bonny Light crude, a spokesperson for NNPC told Reuters on Tuesday. The first loading of the new crude variety is set to take place in the third week of March, a source with knowledge of the plans told the publication. Cawthorne…

A review of data compiled by Chinese, Kazakh and Kyrgyz government agencies reveal large discrepancies in trade volume, raising questions about widespread smuggling and sanctions-busting. Trade in general has experienced explosive growth since the start of the Russia-Ukraine war, the data shows. In 2025, China reported supplying $48.7 billion worth of goods and services to Kazakhstan and $27.2 billion to Kyrgyzstan, whereas Kazakhstan only reported receiving $34.1 billion from the PRC and Kyrgyzstan $5 billion. The gaps indicate that tens of billions…

The surge in Russian crude sales in China and the simultaneous drop in Indian demand for Russia’s oil have prompted Moscow to turn to using a larger fleet of supertankers—vessels capable of carrying 2 million barrels of crude.  In recent weeks, several smaller tankers that left Russia’s Western ports transferred their cargoes to supertankers, the so-called very large crude carriers (VLCCs), in the Red Sea and then traveled to China instead of India, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday, citing ship-tracking data from Vortexa and…

For years, Silicon Valley took electricity for granted. The cloud sounded intangible, almost detached from the physical world. But now, artificial intelligence is ending that illusion. Behind every large language model and AI assistant sits a growing fleet of data centers that require enormous and continuous amounts of power. Industry analysts estimate that a single hyperscale AI data center can demand 300 to 500 megawatts of electricity, comparable to the consumption of a mid-sized city. Multiply that across dozens of facilities under construction,…

State-held Kuwait Petroleum Corporation (KPC) is considering following in the footsteps of its Saudi and Abu Dhabi peers by tapping major international infrastructure investors to buy a stake in its crude oil pipeline network in a deal that could be valued at about $7 billion, sources with knowledge of the plan told Reuters.  The Kuwaiti national oil company has held initial talks with several major investors about the potential transaction. The world’s biggest asset manager BlackRock, as well as Brookfield Asset Management, EIG Partners,…

State-held Kuwait Petroleum Corporation (KPC) is considering following in the footsteps of its Saudi and Abu Dhabi peers by tapping major international infrastructure investors to buy a stake in its crude oil pipeline network in a deal that could be valued at about $7 billion, sources with knowledge of the plan told Reuters.  The Kuwaiti national oil company has held initial talks with several major investors about the potential transaction. The world’s biggest asset manager BlackRock, as well as Brookfield Asset Management, EIG Partners,…

In this week’s newsletter, we will take a quick look at some of the critical figures and data in the energy markets this week.  We will then look at some of the key market movers early this week before providing you with the latest analysis of the top news events taking place in the global energy complex over the past few days. We hope you enjoy. Traders Go Full Bull as Brent Defies Oversupply Worries - Defying expectations for a year of enormous oversupply, oil prices have had their strongest start to a year since 2022, with ICE Brent…

Supertanker rates to ship crude on the key Middle East-to-China route have surged to a six-year high as Persian Gulf supply to India soars and traders rush shipments to precede a potential U.S. military campaign in Iran, industry data and sources tell Reuters. The daily rate for hiring a very large crude carrier (VLCC) capable of shipping 2 million barrels of crude jumped to as much as $170,000 on Tuesday, tripling since the beginning of 2026.   A number of factors have contributed to the surge, most notably the increased demand from…

Supertanker rates to ship crude on the key Middle East-to-China route have surged to a six-year high as Persian Gulf supply to India soars and traders rush shipments to precede a potential U.S. military campaign in Iran, industry data and sources tell Reuters. The daily rate for hiring a very large crude carrier (VLCC) capable of shipping 2 million barrels of crude jumped to as much as $170,000 on Tuesday, tripling since the beginning of 2026.   A number of factors have contributed to the surge, most notably the increased demand from…

The European Union has failed to agree on more sanctions on Russia, which were planned to be in place by the fourth anniversary of the Kremlin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The bloc's foreign ministers, meeting in Brussels on February 23, failed to clinch a deal following opposition from Hungary and Slovakia. "I really regret that we didn’t achieve agreement today, considering that tomorrow is the sad anniversary of the start of the war, because we need to send a strong signal to Ukraine that we keep on supporting Ukraine -- and also…