Month: August 2026

As oil benchmarks crash and Brent slips below $80 per barrel, a growing number of analysts are sounding an alarm: Hormuz may reopen, but oil production in the region would not rebound immediately—and the world’s oil inventories are depleting. Back in May, Carlyle Group’s Jeff Currie warned that by July, parts of the world would face what he dubbed “minimum operational levels” of crude oil supply due to depletion resulting from storage withdrawals to avoid shortages amid the Hormuz crisis. Energy Aspects analysts also…

The Truck Exception Isn’t as Big as You Think When I recently argued that the internal combustion engine may already have passed its peak, many readers responded with a familiar objection. Cars are one thing, they argued, but trucks are different. Passenger vehicles can be electrified because they drive predictable distances, return home every evening, and increasingly benefit from lower operating costs. Long-haul trucking, by contrast, depends on heavy payloads, long distances, and energy densities that batteries supposedly cannot provide. While…

Despite historic political headwinds against the global decarbonization effort, clean energy spending continues to see a meteoric rise around the world. The International Energy Agency’s World Energy Investment 2026, published in May of this year, projects that of the $3.4 trillion dollars that the world will spend on energy investments this year, $2.2 trillion will go to clean energy, and just $1.2 trillion will go to fossil fuels. This marks a historic shift in energy spending and in energy security priorities on a global level. Worldwide,…

As readers of Adam Smith know, the market functions to provide consumers with goods and services at the lowest price (within limits set by law). Yet, several years ago, we submitted a piece claiming that restructuring the electricity industry had not produced noticeable consumer benefits, and the irate peer reviewer (we suspect a big shot restructuring maven ) retorted that you can’t prove a negative but added, “Who said that restructuring was supposed to benefit consumers?” On the first point, we simply opined that consumer benefits…

If you’ve been investing in the AI boom, you probably own most of the same names everyone else does. NVIDIA for the chips. Microsoft, Google and Amazon for the cloud. Maybe Meta for the consumer side. Maybe Palantir or one of the AI software names. Possibly TSMC for exposure to the manufacturing layer. And that playbook has worked well for investors. NVIDIA alone has minted more wealth in two years than most companies create in a century. The hyperscalers have all hit fresh highs. AI software stocks that were speculative bets in 2022 now trade…

Last year, South Korea’s Qcells set the world record for large-area silicon solar cell efficiency, a development that promised to dramatically shrink the size of solar projects and slash costs. Qcells, a subsidiary of South Korea’s giant conglomerate Hanwha Corp, set the world record after achieving 28.6% efficiency by combining a top light-absorbing layer of perovskite with a bottom silicon layer to capture a broader spectrum of sunlight. For some context, high-end commercial solar panels typically operate at 21% to 23% efficiency,…

The issue of energy dependence and its consequences has, in recent months, become a major topic of discussion. The Hormuz crisis has brought energy security to the political agenda with a vengeance amid fuel price caps, rationing, and warnings of severe shortages.  A lot of countries have been used as examples of either low dependence and therefore insulation against shocks, or high dependence that has resulted in a lot of economic pain. In the latter category, Taiwan stands out as a particularly noteworthy case: the nation depends on imports…

The American Petroleum Institute (API) estimated that crude oil inventories in the United States fell by 8.33 million barrels in the week ending June 12. Analysts had expected a 4.5 million draw. In the week prior, US crude oil inventories fell by a rather large 9.119 million barrels. Although inventories have been falling rapidly for the last 2+ months, shedding 52 million barrels over the last nine weeks, US crude inventories are only down 1.4 million barrels so far this year, according to API data. Inventories in the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve…

The announcement from Egypt’s petroleum and mineral resources minister Karim Badawi that the country has paid all its outstanding debts to foreign oil firms is as welcome to international oil companies and their governments as it is to the country itself. Egypt has become one of the West’s prime targets in the hunt for replacement gas supplies after the loss of Russian flows following the 24 February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Officially, it holds around 93 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of proven natural gas reserves, but unofficially, it…

In March, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, OpenAI, Oracle, and Elon Musk’s xAI joined President Trump at the White House. Together, they signed a document that will reshape how AI’s biggest companies operate for years to come. They committed, in writing, to pay for every megawatt of new electricity their AI projects will require and to cover all of the grid infrastructure those projects depend on. In short, the seven biggest names in tech told the President they would pay whatever it costs to keep AI running. And Bitzero (NASDAQ: AIBZ)…