Energy & Resources

Oil, gas, shipping and the infrastructure that moves the world’s energy and goods.

Sustainable aviation fuel is a waste disposal business wearing an aviation costume

The European Union's two per cent mandate took effect on 1 January 2025, and almost all of the fuel that satisfies it is made from used cooking oil and animal fat. Those are finite waste streams that road transport also wants, and the price of the fuel is now tied to incentives designed for trucks. The mandate rises to 6 per cent in 2030 and 20 per cent in 2035, and the feedstock that supplies the first two per cent cannot supply the next eighteen.

By Muhammad Mehdi · 25 October 2026 · 18 min read

Energy & Resources

The container alliances were redrawn in a week, and the ports absorbed the difference

On 1 February 2025 the liner shipping industry replaced one set of vessel sharing arrangements with another. Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd launched Gemini, MSC began operating alone, the Ocean Alliance extended its agreement to 2032 and a new grouping took the place of THE Alliance. The reshuffle was announced as a service change. It was really a bet about where cargo should be consolidated, and the bill for that bet is paid at the berth.

By Muhammad Mehdi · 24 October 2026 · 18 min read

Energy & Resources

The nuclear fuel cycle is four industries, and only one of them is short of uranium

A reactor needs uranium, but it cannot use uranium. It needs uranium that has been converted into a gas, enriched in a centrifuge and fabricated into a fuel assembly, and each of those steps is a separate industry with its own plants, its own skills and its own queue. The world has plenty of uranium and very little of the middle of the chain. That is why a fuel contract signed today can wait four years for a machine that spins at sixty thousand revolutions a minute.

By Muhammad Mehdi · 24 October 2026 · 48 min read

Energy & Resources

A four year queue for a 400 tonne box became the grid's binding constraint

Between 2019 and 2024 the quoted lead time for a large power transformer roughly doubled and then doubled again, from about fifteen months to something nearer forty. The box is not scarce because copper is scarce. It is scarce because a factory that winds copper around a steel core is slow to build, slow to qualify and sold out years ahead, and because the electricity system discovered all at once that it needs several hundred of them a year.

By Muhammad Mehdi · 24 October 2026 · 19 min read

Energy & Resources

Shipping's carbon bill is now charged on every tonne, not a fraction of one

The European Union's emissions trading system covered 40 percent of maritime emissions in 2024 and 70 percent in 2025. From 2026 it covers all of them, and from this year the reporting includes methane and nitrous oxide as well as carbon dioxide. The result is a cost that appears on a freight invoice, a routing decision that can move a port call, and a set of legal questions about who owns the obligation when the ship is not the company that pays for the fuel.

By Muhammad Mehdi · 24 October 2026 · 18 min read

Energy & Resources

The electricity grid, not the chip, is now the binding constraint on AI

A data centre can be designed in months and a substation can take five years. The queue that allocates grid capacity in the United States holds more generation than the country needs, yet most projects in it will never be built, and the ones that are built wait years for a study. The result is a market in queue positions, a reform agenda that is only half implemented, and a new argument about who should pay for the network that the next wave of computing requires.

By Muhammad Mehdi · 24 October 2026 · 18 min read

Energy & Resources

Europe enters winter with 11 billion cubic metres less gas, and a phase-out that moved into the LNG berth

European Union storage stood at 72 percent on 1 October 2026, about 74 billion cubic metres, against 83 percent and roughly 85 billion a year earlier. The terminals are not the constraint and the regasification capacity is not the constraint. What changed is the size of the cushion, and the route by which Russian molecules still reach the continent.

By Muhammad Mehdi · 19 October 2026 · 19 min read

Energy & Resources

The war economy of 2026: how three conflicts repriced a barrel, a route and a year

The year's numbers do not describe one crisis. They describe a barrel that costs more to buy, a route that costs more to use, a refinery that is no longer there and a policy that has been suspended. This report follows each of them from the source to the price a household pays, and finds that the three conflicts of 2026 have been quietly merged into a single economy, with one inflation rate, one set of buffers and one set of decisions left to take.

By Muhammad Mehdi · 17 October 2026 · 46 min read

Energy & ResourcesDeveloping

Nine ships in seven days: the tanker war is now the whole war

Between 11 and 17 October at least nine commercial ships were attacked in or near the Strait of Hormuz, a Singapore-registered container ship was sunk, and Brent settled at 109.86 dollars. The attacks did not close the strait. They did something more durable: they repriced the act of using it, for insurers, charterers and crews, and that price is now the negotiating position.

By Muhammad Mehdi · 17 October 2026 · 19 min read

Energy & Resources

The long way round: what the Cape of Good Hope detour actually costs, and who collects it

Ships stopped using the Suez Canal in 2024 and the canal's revenue collapsed with them. In fiscal 2025/26 the traffic came back, but not because the Red Sea reopened: it came back because the Strait of Hormuz closed and pushed tankers into the canal from the south. The reroute that moved the world's container fleet around the Cape of Good Hope is a cost story, and the record shows where the cost landed: fuel, ship-days, emissions and the effective capacity that kept freight rates far above their pre-crisis floor.

By Muhammad Mehdi · 13 October 2026 · 19 min read

Energy & Resources

The chokepoint economy: what the year of closed straits cost, and why the barrels could not fix it

The war with Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz in February and took the world's busiest oil route with it. What followed was not one shortage but four, in distance, risk, refining and policy, each with a different owner and a different clock. This report follows the year's verifiable numbers through the pipeline that carried the load, the canal that quietly gained traffic, the insurance market that repriced a stretch of water, and an emergency inventory that is now smaller than it was.

By Muhammad Mehdi · 12 October 2026 · 47 min read

Energy & Resources

Why diesel breaks before petrol: a barrel tells you in advance

The clearest proof that the 2026 oil crisis was a refining crisis comes from the country that tried hardest. American refineries ran at 97 percent of their capacity in the week ending 11 September 2026 and produced the most distillate since 2019, and diesel stocks still finished 13 percent below the 2021 to 2025 seasonal average. When maximum effort produces a deficit, the constraint is not willingness. It is the part of the barrel that no amount of crude can add, and the world had just lost a large share of the units that make it.

By Muhammad Mehdi · 8 October 2026 · 19 min read

Energy & ResourcesDeveloping

The diesel problem: how a war over crude became a shortage of one product, and what half a billion barrels of reserve releases can do about it

Crude recovered. Diesel did not. That single divergence explains why the world's largest emergency oil release of all time did not fix fuel prices and why, seven months into a war that began over a strait, the price at a British pump passed two pounds a litre for the first time ever. On 2 October the G7 agreed to release 100 million barrels over four months. Measured against what America alone exports, that is worth slightly less than a day. This report traces how a chokepoint closure became a refining crisis, why the barrels authorised in March have still not all arrived, who actually holds Europe's diesel, and what happens when a supplier uses its own market power as a negotiating instrument.

By Muhammad Mehdi · 3 October 2026 · 45 min read

Energy & ResourcesDeveloping

America threatened the one lever Europe could not replace, and then put it away

For most of a week the United States held the diesel market of its largest trading partners over a supply chain it dominates. American refiners produce four to five million barrels a day, Americans use 3.6 million of it, and the 1.2 to 1.5 million barrel surplus is what Europe depends on. On Friday the G7 agreed to release 100 million barrels over four months, Washington dropped the threat, and the president claimed Europe had simply done what it was supposed to do. The arithmetic of the release is smaller than the argument over it.

By Muhammad Mehdi · 3 October 2026 · 4 min read

Energy & ResourcesDeveloping

Putin priced Ukraine's refinery campaign at one percent of GDP. Diesel priced it at the pump

Ukraine struck an oil facility in Samara, a drone launch site in Oryol and a vessel in the Black Sea overnight on Wednesday, and Volodymyr Zelenskyy used the occasion to show a ballistic missile used for the first time. Vladimir Putin, speaking at Valdai the next day, said the campaign had cost Russia about one percent of gross domestic product. Neither number settles the argument Donald Trump is having with his own energy market, where diesel has gone to seven dollars a gallon and Europe is debating whether to open its reserve tanks again.

By Muhammad Mehdi · 2 October 2026 · 3 min read

Energy & Resources

The war closed one strait. Now the market has found the other one.

Seven months into the war with Iran, the world's oil system has learned to live without the Strait of Hormuz, rerouting roughly five million barrels a day through Saudi Arabia's pipeline to the Red Sea. That workaround has a fatal feature: its exit is the Bab al-Mandab strait, the 29 kilometre chokepoint whose Yemeni shoreline Houthi forces seized this month. Crude flowing through the strait has already surged from 5.4 million barrels a day in late 2025 to 8.1 million in the second quarter as traffic rerouted away from Hormuz. The war's next shock is no longer about whether tankers can leave the Gulf. It is about whether they can leave the Red Sea.

By Muhammad Mehdi · 22 September 2026 · 5 min read

Energy & ResourcesDeveloping

Oil is falling on peace hopes it has stopped believing in

Brent crude has dropped for four straight sessions to about 101.73 dollars a barrel on Monday 21 September, even though no agreement has been signed, the Strait of Hormuz remains effectively closed and the last serious escalation wave was ten days ago. The market is not pricing peace. It is pricing the discovery that a war premium survives only while it can still surprise, and the war has stopped being able to surprise.

By Muhammad Mehdi · 21 September 2026 · 5 min read

Energy & ResourcesDeveloping

A bottle of motor oil is now a front line of the Iran war

America imports roughly four in every ten gallons of the synthetic base oil that goes into its motor oil from the Persian Gulf. That supply has been largely offline since February, and on Friday the US price of Group III base oil hit a record $12.45 a gallon. Costco has capped customers at two cases a week. The arithmetic of how a war 7,000 miles away ended up rationing motor oil in American aisles, in numbers.

By Muhammad Mehdi · 20 September 2026 · 8 min read