Why China’s Teapot Refiners Can’t Sanction-Proof This War
A decade of financial sanctions barely dented China's discounted-Iranian-oil trade. Physical strikes on the tankers themselves might close it within months — because Beijing...
How Chinese Goods Reached Iran Despite Billions in Sanctions
Iran has created a barter-like system to bypass sanctions on its oil sales, allowing it to acquire billions of dollars in goods from China,...
Regime Change, Itemized: Inside the Venezuela Oil Deal
The 65-billion-barrel Venezuela oil deal is not proof that regime change was sold with a resource contract attached as its explicit precondition — the...
Iran’s Kharg Island: The Strategic Hub at the Heart of Its Oil Industry
Oil prices increased due to rising tensions involving Iran, sparked by a U.S. President Donald Trump's claim regarding Kharg Island oil hub, which an...
Brussels Can Now Sanction Any Refinery Buying Russian Oil. Why Did It Give the First One Six Months to Comply?
On July 23 the European Union used its newest sanctions tool for the first time. Buried inside its twenty first package against Russia was...
The Barrels OPEC+ Can’t Actually Deliver
On August 12th, Bloomberg reported a number that should unsettle anyone still reading OPEC+'s monthly quota announcements at face value: Russia's actual crude output...
America’s Global Oil Market Hegemony through Warfare
Authors: M. Abiya Emima and Edberg D. Cheeran
The global oil market has long played a pivotal role in shaping contemporary geopolitics, serving as a...
The First Major Test of OPEC+ After UAE’s Exit
For almost six decades, the United Arab Emirates had been a member of OPEC, but all of that came to an end on May...
Can OPEC Plus’s Watchdog Do Anything About Hormuz?
Three days before its 67th sitting, the OPEC Secretariat did something it rarely bothers to do: it told the market, in writing, not to...
US-Iran War Losses Still Trail the 1979 Oil Shock in Total Economic Impact
The ongoing war in Iran has caused the largest oil supply shock in history, resulting in daily production losses that are unprecedented. However, the...