Oil prices spiked in early Asian trade on Wednesday, erasing a significant portion of Tuesday's selloff on the back of renewed hostilities in the Middle East and a bullish U.S. inventory report from the API. At the time of writing, Brent crude had climbed to $87.95 per barrel, up 4.59%, while West Texas Intermediate was trading at $82.89, up 4.58%. Oil prices had been tumbling since the U.S. brought an end to 13 consecutive nights of attacks on Iran last Thursday, with both sides playing up hopes of a diplomatic breakthrough. Those hopes were significantly…

Just recently, in a span of about six weeks, one impressive company was selected by the U.S. Army to build and operate rare earth processing facilities on an American military base…the first time the Army has ever done this. That same company closed $100 million in institutional financing, giving it a war chest of roughly $130 million. It was also formally added to the Russell 3000 Index. And it locked in MOU’s for feedstock agreements covering billions of tonnes of rare earth-bearing material from sources across Wyoming, Appalachia…

Oil price movements since the start of March this year have become the topic of dozens of discussions. Many have been puzzled by futures prices and why they haven’t gone through the roof given the severe disruption in Middle Eastern supply. It appears the reason is sheer optimism and a bet on market adaptability. However, there is a problem with that. Adaptability has limits. Many commentators like to compare the current oil price—and supply—situation to 2022, when Russia’s incursion into eastern Ukraine prompted an actual…

Modern power grids require a constant, real-time balance between supply and consumption. Unfortunately, the integration of wind and solar energy makes power grids unstable due to the intermittent nature of renewable energy generation. To prevent localized grid blackouts or harmful voltage spikes, utilities are increasingly pairing renewables with battery storage and/or rapid-response natural gas plants to smooth out fluctuating supply. However, Finland has now come up with a rather eccentric method to store excess renewable energy and release it…

Oil prices have just come off a fresh two-month high as the crude oil market has tumbled this week amid signals of de-escalation in the U.S.-Iran conflict. Despite the slump in crude prices and the extreme volatility in the past five months, the refined product market continues to tighten with refining margins at record highs because the supply of petroleum products is much tighter than crude supply. Refining margins held at record highs even as crude oil prices soared last week to $100 per barrel. That’s because global gasoline, diesel,…

The American Petroleum Institute (API) estimated that crude oil inventories in the United States fell by 3.296 million barrels in the week ending July 24. In the week prior, US crude oil inventories grew by 2.603 million barrels. Commercial crude oil inventories excluding the SPR have lost just over 54 million barrels over the last fifteen weeks, with US crude inventories down just 3 million for the year, according to API data, kept in check by draws from the SPR. For the week ending July 24, another 3.7 million barrels left the SPR, bringing the…

Solar power is far and away the cheapest form of new energy to install in nearly every context around the world. Even in the United States, where the cost of solar additions has jumped up 18 percent since Trump’s tariffs took hold, solar remains the most affordable option for energy capacity expansion. It stands to reason that solar is therefore the fastest growing form of energy in the world, However, as the solar sector has gone gangbusters, profitability has been squeezed thanks to an increasingly competitive market. Developing more advanced…

President Donald Trump revealed on Monday that sales of Venezuela’s oil by his administration have generated more than $13 billion since the capture of former President Nicolás Maduro on January 3, claiming that the revenue has effectively “paid for that war many times over”.  Speaking to reporters on Air Force One, Trump was responding to a Financial Times’ report that came out a week ago that estimated that roughly $13 billion in Venezuelan oil revenue is held in frozen U.S. Treasury accounts as a black box…

OPEC+ is preparing to approve one more production increase for September and then put the monthly quota parade on hold through the end of the year. Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iraq, Kuwait, Algeria, Kazakhstan, and Oman are expected to raise their combined September target by about 188,000 barrels per day when they meet on August 2, sources told Reuters. That would match the increases announced for June, July, and August and complete the return of a 1.65-million-bpd voluntary cut agreed in 2023, adjusted for the UAE’s departure from OPEC in May.…

Uzbekistan appears to be hedging its bets when it comes to Afghanistan’s ability to serve as a trade corridor. Over the past year, Tashkent has ramped up its engagement with Afghanistan, setting an ambitious target of almost tripling annual bilateral trade volume over the next few years. Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev also recently stated that the government was “actively working” with the Taliban leadership to create a trans-Afghan rail route to speed the flow of Uzbek goods to Pakistani seaports. But according…