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The deal with developer Invenergy includes a commitment to build geothermal generation in addition to natural gas.
That may be not be the case for long, though, as the AI company poaches energy talent from Google, Meta, the DOE, and others.
On carbon removal funding, Chinese nuclear, and Hawaiian solar
Or, the Senate releases its latest attempt at bipartisan permitting reform.
The Iran War laid bare the two energy regimes fighting for global dominance.
We have an Iran deal. We think. Since President Trump and Iran announced the arrangement on Sunday afternoon, its details have had a Heisenbergian quality — not even Israeli leaders seem to be sure what they are. From an energy markets standpoint, Trump told The New York Times on Sunday that the text guarantees “permanently toll-free” access to the Strait of Hormuz, but it remains unclear how and when the waterway will reopen.
What we do know is that some version of the deal is set to be signed on Friday. At the same time, the U.S. and Iran will start 60 days of “technical negotiations” to discuss Iran’s nuclear program and sanctions relief, according to Vice President JD Vance. “A lot of very important details” have yet to be figured out, Vance told reporters on Monday. If Iran doesn’t agree to give up its nuclear program in those talks, Trump told the Times yesterday, he would either order bombing to restart or make the United States “the guardian of the Middle East” in exchange for oil revenues. (So much for toll-free access! At least then CENTCOM could establish a hotline.)
Regardless, it may take weeks for Iran to remove its sea mines from the strait. Then ships and their exhausted crews will begin trickling out of the Persian Gulf. My colleague Matthew Zeitlin has the full rundown on what will happen next in Iran — and what it means for oil, natural gas, and the energy transition.
But let’s assume, for a moment, that the war really is over. What did we learn from the past 107 days of conflict?
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For me, the most astonishing thing about the conflict remains that China, which used to buy 11 million barrels of oil a day from global markets, only imported about 7.8 million barrels a day in May. That’s just over 3 million barrels a day of demand, seemingly vaporized overnight. (For context, the world used about 104 million barrels a day last year.) China’s enormous domestic oil and gas stockpiles and its high concentration of electric vehicles seem to have produced the cut — as did a domestic increase in energy prices that helped dampen demand on its own.
For the past few years, climate and energy journalists like me have hammered that China’s solar, battery, and electric vehicle manufacturing complex is the real deal. But the war clarified that the world now has two real and rivalrous energy regimes. There is the oil-and-gas regime, heavily concentrated in the OPEC+ countries and North America, and there is the electricity-and-batteries regime, located in East Asia and especially China.
These systems are linked and interdependent, yet in competition for consumer demand — as well as policy-driven and infrastructural lock-in from countries. The United States is the lynchpin of the former system: Not only is it the world’s No. 1 producer of oil and natural gas, but it also (allegedly) guarantees security and freedom of navigation in the Middle East. China anchors the electric regime: Not only does it dominate the manufacturing of solar panels, wind turbines, lithium-ion batteries, and electric vehicles, but it also owns or refines the minerals essential to their production. While America can boast better petroleum engineers than anywhere else in the world, China has the manufacturing know-how necessary to spin off new innovations. Each country, in other words, dominates the stocks, flows, and knowledge that drive these planet-spanning regimes.
To be clear, I don’t agree with the interpretation — sometimes in vogue — that the United States is a “petrostate” while China is an “electrostate.” America has a much more diversified economy than most petrostates; oil makes up 10% to 15% of our dollar-denominated goods exports and an even smaller share of our overall exports. In Saudi Arabia, by comparison, oil is more than 70% of goods exports. Nor do I think “electrostate” evokes the reality that China, notwithstanding its world-historic renewables buildout, still gets 60% of its power from coal.
Much still unites these systems too — notably the petrochemicals sector, which produces from oil and gas the necessary inputs to solar, batteries, and EVs. But that’s why China’s coal-to-chemicals sector — which I previously discussed on our podcast Shift Key with the energy analyst Lauri Myllyvirta — has played such an important role during the past few months, allowing the country to cut crude demand without slowing down production lines. Given that the coal-to-chemicals industry is more carbon intensive than the sector it ostensibly replaces — and that India is already looking at developing its own version of the sector — I suspect we’ve only heard the beginning of it. We’ll examine it more in the days and weeks to come.
And it’ll take energy markets even longer.
The United States and Iran have agreed on a process that could result in the end of their armed conflict and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. Both countries have signed the agreement, U.S. officials told reporters, though the text itself has yet to be released.
The markets, at least, are taking the deal and the promises that the strait will reopen at face value. Benchmark oil prices are now at around $83 per barrel, down slightly from $87 Friday, when traders expected that the U.S. and Iran would soon reach a deal.
“I hereby fully authorize the toll free opening of the Strait of Hormuz, and, simultaneously herewith, authorize the immediate removal of the United States Naval blockade. Ships of the World, start your engines. Let the oil flow!” Trump posted Sunday afternoon on Truth Social.
But that will not happen immediately. No matter what the United States and Iran say, it’s shippers and insurers who will make the final determination of whether the strait is truly open.
For that they will need assurances that Iran means it when it says that vessels are free to sail through, and that it won’t try to impose tolls or force ships through specific routes. “Are the Iranians going to try and control passage?” Robin Mills, chief executive officer of Qamar Energy and non-resident fellow at the Columbia University Center on Global Energy Policy, a consulting and advisory firm in the United Arab Emirates, asked me rhetorically.
This need for evidence of good faith on both sides was a theme of my conversations about the peace deal on Monday.
“The key problem isn’t whether or not the Iranians or the U.S. says the strait is open,” oil analyst Rory Johnston told me. “It is whether shippers — ships that are trapped in the Gulf, as well as ships that are waiting to move into the Gulf — have made the determination that the strait is safe for transit.”
Though some countries were able to divert substantial flows through pipeline networks to avoid the strait, that represented a relatively small amount of Gulf oil production. Johnston has estimated that of the 20 million barrels per day of oil and products that flowed through the Strait before the war, some 13 million to 15 million barrels per day worth of production have been “shut in,” meaning that they were never extracted from the ground.
Even with a peace process underway, the Gulf oil complex won’t be fully operational until ships can first get out of the Strait of Hormuz unencumbered, then get back in to pick up oil shipments, which Johnston estimates won’t happen until the beginning of next month. Some of this is just a judgement call, one that some shippers had already made before the weekend’s announcement.
“There’s been a fairly steady stream of ships that have been exiting the strait by going dark and traveling at night,” Johnston said, “so there is already an understanding for some shipping companies and some regional states that you can transit the waterway safely.”
The number of ships chancing a transit roughly correlates with the temperature of the rhetoric between the U.S. and Iran over the past few weeks. “A total of 29 verified vessel crossings were recorded through the Strait of Hormuz between 10 and 14 June,” according to the maritime analytics service Kpler said Monday. “The data aligns with reports of progress in U.S.-Iran discussions and supports the assessment that the Strait remains operational, although traffic volumes, route transparency and directional balance have yet to return to a clearly normalised pattern.”
The volumes getting through are still far off their pre-war totals, however. In the first two weeks of June, J.P. Morgan analysts estimated Hormuz flows at just over 5 million barrels per day, although about a sixth of that was likely Iranian shipments at risk of being interceded by the U.S. blockade. While that an improvement from around 3 million barrels per day in April and March, it was still well short of the 15 million to 20 million barrels per day of crude oil and petroleum products flowing through the strait before the war began in February.
The ships that have sailed the strait have largely hugged the Omani coast, according to Eurasia Group energy analyst Greg Brew, or else going through close to the Iran side, which is directly controlled by the country’s military. Three months’ worth of shooting (and mining), however, have made the central artery a no go. “There’s no certainty as to whether there are mines, how many there are, and where they are, and that matters in terms of restoring security of transit through the main waterway,” Brew told me.
The portions of the channel that offer safe passage “are not good routes for the largest ships, especially for big container ships and the largest tankers,” Brew added. Clearing the strait will likely involve navies from outside the region, including European fleets and “potentially” China, he said, many of which have ships in the area “specifically equipped for clearing mines.”
That process is likely to be iterative, Johnston told me. “It’s not like there are mines or there are not mines across the entire area,” he said. Instead, he told me, certain widths of the strait will be judged to be mine-free, allowing for safe passage, and that width will expand over time. Brew estimated that it will take two to three weeks to complete that process.
Getting the tankers back in should give oil producers the confidence to restart operations, Johnston said. “But then the challenge becomes how much upstream infrastructure was damaged,” he said. Even if the extraction infrastructure is functional, so-called “downstream” refining infrastructure could still be down, meaning that crude oil production could recover before refined products like gasoline or petroleum liquids begin returning to their previous levels.
As for how long it will take to get back up to full production, Brew told me that will vary country by country. In the short run, Gulf oil producers can pull from existing inventories of oil, with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which never fully shut down production, getting back to full flows in a few weeks. Iraq and Kuwait, which had to more severely curtail production, may take a few months.
Governments and companies will eventually have to rebuild their oil and natural gas stockpiles after drawing on them extensively to keep fuel prices from spiking. Among rich nations, inventories have sunk to levels not seen since depths of the post-9/11 conflict in 2003, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The United States’ Strategic Petroleum Reserve had around 415 million barrels of oil before the war began, and has since fallen to around 350 million barrels, the lowest level since 1983.
All told, Johnston told me, “well over” a billion barrels of global fuel reserves have been used up since the war began.
Refilling these inventories — or, for countries newly interested in energy security, establishing them — will be a long-run addition to demand for oil, which could keep prices from falling as sharply as they might have otherwise. “We’re probably going to have two, three years of structurally higher demand as people try to restock,” Johnston said.
But the course of the war has defied risks of prices spiking higher. “This war was the biggest supply disruption in history, and oil had a hard time staying above $100 a barrel,” Brew said. “That implies that the structural factors inside the market are more keeping prices low than pulling prices high.”
