Author: Arnes Biogradlija

Before the Hormuz closure, approximately 20 million barrels of oil transited the strait every day. By the time Fatih Birol sat down with Michael Liebreich at the IEA’s Paris offices on 19 March, that figure had dropped to roughly four million. The 16-million-barrel daily shortfall represents not merely a supply disruption but, in Birol’s characterisation, the mother of all energy crises, one that he explicitly argues is larger in scale than the 1973 and 1979 oil shocks that reshaped global energy markets for the following five decades. The IEA had one week earlier taken the extraordinary step of releasing 400…

The global green hydrogen industry is confronting a resource allocation problem that grows more acute as deployment ambitions scale upward. Freshwater electrolysis, the dominant production method for green hydrogen today, consumes between nine and ten litres of high-purity water per kilogram of hydrogen produced. At the volumes required to decarbonise steel, chemical, and long-haul transport sectors, the water demand becomes a genuine constraint in many of the regions where offshore renewable energy resources are most abundant. Seawater covers approximately 71 per cent of the Earth’s surface, and the offshore wind and solar capacity situated above it represents one of the…

Gray hydrogen, produced from unabated fossil fuels, currently accounts for approximately two percent of global CO₂ emissions. That figure alone justifies serious analytical attention to the technology’s role in the energy transition. Yet hydrogen policy and investment decisions across Europe and beyond have been shaped less by rigorous application-specific assessment than by a polarised expert debate in which the technology is simultaneously positioned as an essential decarbonisation tool and dismissed as an inefficient distraction from direct electrification. The Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research has now produced the most comprehensive attempt yet to resolve that debate on empirical grounds,…

Austria has committed €275 million to four national flagship hydrogen projects and is actively developing the diplomatic groundwork for a southern corridor that would transport green hydrogen from North Africa through Italy to Central Europe. The announcement, made by Economics Minister Wolfgang Hattmannsdorfer at the UNIDO hydrogen conference in Vienna, positions Austria not as a terminal consumer of imported hydrogen but as a transit and distribution hub for the broader Central European market. The strategic framing is deliberate: a country with no significant domestic fossil fuel endowment and a recent history of acute exposure to Russian gas supply disruption is…

Recent internal discussions at major financial institutions reveal a stark divergence between public narratives and institutional risk management. During a closed client briefing, a senior Goldman Sachs executive noted that private market participants view current Middle Eastern geopolitical escalations as a convenient distraction from mounting software-sector exposures and structural weaknesses in the private credit market. This candid assessment highlights a broader macroeconomic reality in which geopolitical volatility obscures systemic vulnerabilities in a highly leveraged shadow-banking ecosystem. WATCH HERE The private credit market has ballooned to an estimated $1.8 trillion and operates largely outside traditional regulatory frameworks. Structured around direct lending…

Welcome to the new world order. For the past twenty years, politicians in expensive suits have assured us that the global economy is a well-oiled machine, carefully managed by the responsible adults in the room. But as conflict intensifies in the Middle East and the global supply chain groans under the weight of inflation, those “adults” are starting to look a lot like toddlers holding a live grenade. We are fed a steady diet of comforting bedtime stories: the US military can project power anywhere at any time, and the glorious transition to green energy means we don’t even need…

The energy transition has a learning problem, not just a technology problem. Shomron Jacob, AI/ML expert and entrepreneur with over a decade of experience deploying production AI systems across enterprise environments, argues that the gap between what artificial intelligence can already do for grids, renewables, and industrial decarbonization and what utilities are actually deploying represents one of the most consequential missed opportunities in climate action today. With three filed patents in AI/ML technology and firsthand experience bridging hardware and intelligent systems at scale, Jacob cuts through the hype to assess where AI is delivering measurable results, where the promises remain…

Within hours of US and Israeli strikes on Iran on February 28, 2026, Brent crude surged toward $110 a barrel, European natural gas futures nearly doubled to around €55–58 per megawatt hour, and UK two-year gilt yields spiked 37 basis points in a single session, a move that rivalled the September 2022 turmoil triggered by the Liz Truss fiscal crisis. The speed and severity of these market reactions are not, by themselves, surprising. What is significant is that they represent Europe’s third major energy price shock in four years, and each iteration is proving more fiscally and monetarily corrosive than…

Japan imported approximately 87% of its energy in 2023, a dependency that has deepened since the Fukushima nuclear disaster and one that its domestic renewables landscape cannot structurally resolve. Against that backdrop, the establishment of the Japan–New Zealand Hydrogen Corridor on March 5, 2026, by Mitsui O.S.K. Lines, Obayashi Corporation, Kawasaki Heavy Industries, and Chiyoda Corporation represents less a commercial opportunity and more a strategic hedge against a future where green hydrogen demand outpaces any realistic domestic supply scenario. The Supply Gap That Necessitates a Pacific Corridor Japan’s energy self-sufficiency rate stood at approximately 15.3% as of fiscal year 2023,…

Record copper prices would ordinarily signal a healthy industry. Instead, the metal’s midstream sector is under structural strain, exposing fault lines that neither high prices nor by-product windfalls can paper over indefinitely. With the IEA projecting a potential supply deficit of 30% by 2035, and smelter treatment and refining charges (TC/RCs) settling at an unprecedented USD 0 per tonne in January 2026, the copper market is navigating a paradox that has direct implications for global energy security, defence supply chains, and the electrification agenda. When Smelter Fees Hit Zero, the Business Model Breaks The TC/RC benchmark is the price smelters…