Energy Market

President Donald Trump’s response to Iran’s recent unrest appears to reflect a strategy of gunboat diplomacy: the use of military pressure, rhetorical escalation, and economic coercion to extract concessions without committing to war or formal regime change. Iran’s currency plunge in late December 2025 sparked nationwide protests that quickly escalated …

The Gap Between Potential and Performance Does Not Stem from Sanctions Alone Iran sits atop one of the world’s largest proven natural gas reserves, estimated at roughly 1,200 trillion cubic feet, second only to Russia. On paper, this should make Iran a major energy exporter and a consequential player in regional gas …

Iran’s Sanctions-Evasion Infrastructure Has Become Systematic Rather than Improvised In early February 2025, President Donald Trump issued National Security Presidential Memorandum 2 (NSPM-2), formally reinstating his “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran. The directive sought to deny Tehran any path to nuclear weapons, constrain its ballistic missile program, and dismantle support for regional proxies by …

A Fragmented Labor Force, Strict Security, and Other Factors Constrain Workers from Mobilizing, Not Apathy or Ignorance Iran’s latest wave of unrest has revived the expectation that sustained protests eventually will reach the oil sector and choke off the regime’s primary revenue stream. That escalation has not occurred. The absence …

Syria Holds an Estimated 2.5 Billion Barrels of Oil and 8.5 Trillion Cubic Feet of Gas but Reserves Do Not Guarantee Recovery Syria’s oil and gas sector once anchored state revenues and energy security. Before 2011, the country produced roughly 380,000 barrels per day of oil and about 25 million …

The project fits a long-standing pattern in Iran of improvisation rather than reform On December 6, Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian unveiled the country’s latest attempt to mitigate chronic water shortages: an 800-kilometer pipeline carrying desalinated water from the Gulf of Oman to drought-stricken Isfahan. The two-year, 350 trillion rial (about $300 million) …

Across the Region, Electricity Demand Surged with Extreme Heat, Population Growth, Desalination Needs, and Industrial Expansion In 2025, the Middle East’s energy sector held firm amid cooling global markets, geopolitical friction, and an uneven global energy transition. The region continued to underpin global supply, producing roughly 30 percent of global oil and …

With Energy Diplomacy, Ankara Strengthens a Partnership That Stretches Across Military, Cultural, and Now Economic Dimensions On December 2, 2025, Turkey signed hydrocarbon exploration agreements through its state-owned Turkish Petroleum Corporation (TPAO) with six Pakistani energy firms. The announcement came with almost no political theater, but the implications run deeper …

The Project That Once Balanced Russian Expertise with Iraqi Sovereignty Now Exposes the Fragility of This Set-up Western sanctions have reshaped Iraq’s oil sector. In October 2025, the United States and United Kingdom targeted Lukoil and Rosneft’s overseas operations to curtail Moscow’s war financing. Lukoil promptly declared force majeure at West Qurna-2, which …

Independent Certification of Reserves and Scaled-up Processing Would Elevate Turkey’s Role in Global Supply Chains of Critical Minerals Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan frames the supposed discovery of 694 million tons of rare earth element reserves in Beylikova, Eskişehir, as a strategic opportunity to place Turkey among the top global producers of rare earth …