News
The oil market is heading into unknown spaces. To paraphrase Starship Enterprise, “Oil markets ('Space' the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its 5-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before”. As we can now see, there is a moment in every crisis when the language of markets, which is normally based on price discovery, marginal barrels, and supply-demand balance, quietly but dangerously stops making sense. For the oil…
In April 2026, a new 500 MW sodium-cooled reactor in Kalpakkam, India, attained criticality. The reactor maintained a nuclear chain reaction—which is a pretty big step for any new nuclear plant. There are a number of things that struck us about this news. The haters and skeptics will point out that this unit began construction in 2004 with a 2010 expected completion date. No cost escalation figures were provided by the Indian government. But the real question here is why a molten salt reactor? It’s not a new technology. President Jimmy…
By now, a familiar narrative has returned to Europe’s energy debate. The transition, we are told, went too far, too fast, and too blindly. Politicians chased climate headlines, imposed unrealistic targets, burdened households with costs, and pushed industry toward the exit. It is a compelling story. It is also the wrong one. Europe’s real mistake was not moving too quickly on clean energy. It was moving halfway. We invested in renewable generation, but underinvested in the grids, storage, flexibility, and electrification required to…
The Trump administration has grand plans for “ENSURING AMERICAN SPACE SUPERIORITY.” When NASA sent humans to the moon for the first time this century earlier this month, the organization made it clear that this is just the “opening act” for a new and revitalized era of space exploration. Under the Trump administration, NASA has enormous ambitions, going as far as to plan a permanent base on the moon, which will need never-before-seen energy innovations to maintain a secure source of power. This week, the federal government…
Empty supertankers have left Asia en route to the U.S. via the Cape of Good Hope in one of the biggest queue of vessels ever seen at sea, as Asian buyers rush to load U.S. crude to replace part of the supply lost in the Middle East. "Tankers are forming what looks like a fleet, an unbroken line heading to the U.S.," Kpler's analyst Matt Smith has told Nikkei. "The queue of VLCCs bound for the U.S. is the biggest we've ever seen, highlighting a squeeze in oil supply," the analyst noted. Asia is starved of crude as its biggest suppliers, the oil…
