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…

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.…

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…

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…

July 28, 2026 LNG Headlines

In 1937, the Army guarded the first shipments of a critical resource, U.S. gold, as it was transferred into Fort Knox. Nearly 90 years later, Washington faces a similar situation with a very different resource. The Army picked REalloys (NASDAQ: ALOY) to build a facility to process dysprosium and terbium at Utah’s Tooele Army Depot - two rare earths that keep high-performance magnets working in weapons, radar, sonar and electric motors. Gold went to Fort Knox because America was unsure they could protect it from threats abroad. Rare earths…

Crude oil prices are retreating after Brent hit $100 again last week as the United States and Iran took a break from hostilities over the weekend. Yet with the outcome of the war still highly uncertain, the outlook for stock markets has dimmed. Add to that Big Tech’s AI spending binge and fresh warnings about energy commodity shortages, and we are looking at extended market turbulence ahead. Last week saw a rare pile-up of adverse market developments that must have shaken the confidence of many a market bull. Besides the oil price spike,…

The fresh spike in jet fuel prices in July upended the profit guidance of U.S. airlines, whose management teams had to readjust earnings estimates for the year just days ahead of reporting second-quarter results. The re-escalation in the Middle East earlier this month resulted in a 20% spike in jet fuel prices during the two weeks in which air carriers were reporting their April-June earnings and attempting to guide earnings for the third quarter and the rest of the year.   The extreme volatility in crude oil and consequently, jet fuel prices,…

“I feel like a jackass caught in a Texas hailstorm -- I can’t run, I can’t hide and I can’t make it stop.” U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson’s desperate comment to aide, Bill Moyers, came after a massive and sustained aerial bombing campaign in North Vietnam -- codenamed ‘Operation Rolling Thunder’ -- had failed in its aim of pressuring the North Vietnamese leadership into peace talks to end the spiralling conflict that became the 19-year Vietnam War. Shortly after, on 8 March 1965, following advice…

The future of relations between Central Asian republics (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan) and Iran under a government now dominated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is likely to feature pragmatic economic and transit cooperation amid heightened caution, with short-term disruptions from the 2026 conflict and longer-term continuity driven by mutual interests in connectivity and multipolarity. Iran's Shift to IRGC Leadership (as of mid-2026) Following the assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and…