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Many analyses of what the conflict in the Middle East means for China's energy security have rightly focused on China's oil and natural gas imports from the region.
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For years, the energy transition was discussed as a shift that would happen in steady, predictable increments. But the last 24 months have shattered that illusion. Energy providers...
Reports by Jason Bordoff, Antoine Halff & Akos Losz • May 30, 2018
The realities of the modern oil market have thrown into question the need for the US emergency oil stockpile. For more than 40 years, the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) has existed as a buffer between US oil markets and global supply shocks. A byproduct of the 1973–1974 oil embargo, the SPR was born in an age when US crude production was in decline, imports were rising, and the oil market was dominated by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). Over the intervening years, the reserve was tapped only a handful of times as the oil market has grown much larger, deeper, more liquid, and better integrated and thus more able to address shortfalls of various magnitudes that previously would have caused greater pain for oil-importing countries. In regard to US national oil supply security, however, perhaps the greatest change has been the boom in domestic production over the past decade due to hydraulic fracturing of shale and other tight oil deposits.
The new US energy fortune has thus given rise to a view that the SPR—which formerly enjoyed wide bipartisan support—could be sold off to plug spending holes without creating significant energy security risks. The US Congress has already passed several measures to significantly pare down the size of the SPR through a series of drawdowns staggered over the coming decade. The emerging and important discussion over whether the SPR has become too large or altogether useless, or whether it should be kept whole, prompted the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs to research how the SPR fits into the modern oil market—and indeed the wider global energy system—and whether the United States would benefit from modifying or eliminating it.
In short, the paper finds the following:
Two economic planning documents released at the March meeting of China's National People’s Congress include the term "energy powerhouse" for the first time.
Within days of the initial U.S. and Israeli attack on Iran on February 28, 2026, the world was plunged into an energy crisis.
The war in Iran is not just another energy shock. It is arriving at a moment when Europe is already under cumulative strain: a war on its eastern border, the lingering aftershocks of the 2022 energy crisis, industrial decline, political fragmentation, fiscal limits, and a widening debate over how much of its own security it must now provide.
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Reports by Jason Bordoff, Antoine Halff & Akos Losz • May 30, 2018