Kyrgyzstan has provided some clarity on the source of the recent blackout that impacted four states in Central Asia, while vigorously denying blame for the cascading outage.  Power outages were first reported in the Kyrgyz capital of Bishkek during the afternoon of August 14 before spreading to southern Kazakhstan and portions of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Kazakhstan’s Energy Ministry initially attributed the disruption, which lasted several hours, to a “sudden change in the power flow” of the regional grid.  Confusion…

The world’s largest battery-electric aircraft has completed its first flight using just $5 worth of electricity, with Heart Aerospace’s 25,000-pound X1 demonstrator flying for 27 minutes and putting a megawatt-scale electric propulsion system through its first airborne test. Heart Aerospace’s X1 demonstrator flew for 27 minutes from Plattsburgh International Airport in New York, climbing to 1,100 feet, with its electric propulsion system delivering more than one megawatt of power. The aircraft weighs more than 25,000 pounds at…

The Iran war has created an extraordinary earnings season for U.S. refiners. Brent crude has fallen to around $90 per barrel from a wartime peak of $126, but the shortage of refined fuels has only deepened. According to Reuters, Global refinery throughput in July was nearly 5 million barrels per day below year-earlier levels as Middle Eastern refineries remained constrained and Ukrainian attacks pushed Russian processing close to a 20-year low. U.S. refiners have stepped into the gap, running at or near record utilization rates and exporting more…

There have been perhaps a handful of events since the end of the Second World War that have fundamentally reshaped the world’s oil markets and consequently its geopolitics while remaining largely unnoticed at the time. The quiet agreement between U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Saudi King Abdulaziz bin Abdul Rahman Al Saud struck on 14 February 1945 that would define the energy, economic, political and military relationship between the two countries until the rise of American shale in the early 2010s is one, as analysed in my latest…

Palantir chairman and hedge fund owner Peter Thiel bought a 1% stake in one of the biggest companies operating in the Vaca Muerta shale formation in Argentina in the latest evidence of the play’s prospects as the world’s second-largest shale oil and gas deposit amid a global crunch. Thiel bought the stake in Vista in the form of American depositary shares worth $76 million, according to a security filing cited by Reuters. The purchase came four months after a meeting between the venture capitalist and Argentina’s president, Javier…

AI is changing energy systems, but data centers are only a small part of the impact. Much has been written and said about how the data center and AI boom are consuming and will consume increasingly higher shares of global electricity demand, and grids are struggling to meet soaring demand. Fossil Fuel Gains Could Outweigh Emissions Cuts from Renewables Arguably, a fundamental change in the energy system may not come from surging power demand, but from the efficiencies and productivity gains AI will help energy companies achieve, according to a…

The American Petroleum Institute (API) estimated that crude oil inventories in the United States fell by 328,000 barrels in the week ending August 14. In the week prior, US crude oil inventories rose by 9.072 million barrels on the back of increased imports, decreased exports, and a sizeable injection from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR). Commercial crude oil inventories excluding the SPR have lost just over 49 million barrels over the last eighteen weeks, with US crude inventories up 1.88 million for the year, according to API data, kept…

Green hydrogen research and development has found itself in limbo, once again. Enthusiasm for the resource’s potential as a clean energy solution in hard-to-abate sectors like steelmaking, shipping, and transportation has waxed and waned over the last decade as the technology has made incremental progress but largely failed to meet expectations. While the war in Iran breathed some new life into the sector as a potential alternative to oil and gas, that new wave of optimism faces major economic headwinds. Take the state of California. The…