Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
It is more than a little careless for Donald Trump to hurl the Middle East into chaos without first filling up the US strategic petroleum reserve. Stocks are near their lowest level in 40 years.
It is even more careless to launch this war of choice when the Gulf’s oil industry lacks the pipeline infrastructure to replace dependence on shipping through the Strait of Hormuz and when there is zero spare capacity in the rest of the world.
Jim Burkhard, the head of oil markets at S&P Global Energy, said the war threatens to set off the worst oil supply crisis of the modern age, outstripping even the Arab oil embargo of 1973 or the first Gulf War in 1990. Never before has Iran shut down the choke-point controlling a fifth of the world’s oil and seaborne gas supply.
“If the reduction in tanker traffic continues for a week or so it will be historic. Beyond that, it would be epochal for the oil market,” he said.
Not a single tanker of liquefied natural gas (LNG) has run the gauntlet through the strait since the war began. The cargo tracking group Vortexa warned that there is no way of replacing the supply from Qatar.
“Destruction in the LNG market will be immediate and immense,” it said.
A few oil tankers have made it through but that trickle is unlikely to continue after the Revolutionary Guard Corps vowed to “burn any ship” that moves in or out of the Gulf.
Lloyd’s List said tanker rates on the VLCC index have exploded to $US420,000 ($598,000) a day, but that is academic because the route is now uninsurable. Helima Croft, from RBC Capital, said the Middle East’s energy exports are essentially “stranded assets” until the US comes up with a plan to protect shipping.
She advised markets to expect “cascading outages” of critical supplies. This risks pushing crude prices through $US100 a barrel, catching up with the wild spike already seen in the European gas market where benchmark TTF contracts have almost doubled since mid-February.
Goldman Sachs says global LNG prices could double again from here to $US25 per million British thermal units.
Should that happen, Europe faces a ruinous bill refilling its heavily depleted gas stocks in time for next winter, with much of the windfall revenue going to US shale gas frackers and liquefaction companies. Do we gnash our teeth or scream?
The US Navy was able to protect flows through the Gulf with convoys during the “tanker war” of 1987-88 – but that was to ship crude going mostly to the US and Europe. To do so today would be to protect supplies headed for China and India.
Experts know that the precise destination of each ship scarcely matters for the global price. Oil and LNG gas are fungible commodities, subject to instant arbitrage on electronic markets. But it would be very hard for Trump to explain to his MAGA base why he has got America entangled in a war where US warships must escort tankers going to Shanghai.
The problem is larger than the Strait of Hormuz in any case. Drone attacks by Iran have forced the closure of Qatar’s LNG export terminal at Ras Laffan, as well as the Saudi oil refinery at Ras Tanura. This is a foretaste of what could come as drones change the nature of modern warfare.
The Trump administration is learning the hard way that swarms of cheap drones can quickly exhaust the US arsenal of expensive air defence interceptors, a form of asymmetric attrition known as “firing gold at plastic”. The US is reportedly wasting Patriots worth $US4 million ($5.7 million) – badly needed in other theatres – to shoot down $US20,000 Shahed-136 drones.
What we don’t know is whether Iran has been able to shield a reserve of its most destructive drones for later attacks on Saudi Arabia’s energy infrastructure. The dangers are obvious.
The world’s greatest concentration of oil pipelines and processing facilities lies around Abqaiq in a region with a large population of marginalised Shiite Arabs, a community with longstanding religious ties to Iranian clergy. These plants have been attacked before by Iranian proxies and sleeper cells. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei may get his posthumous revenge.
It is astonishing that Trump precipitated this energy crisis while so badly prepared at home.
He promised to fill the US strategic petroleum reserve “right to the top” when he took office. Yet he failed to do so even when prices were low and the cycle was his friend.
The reserve remains heavily depleted at 415 million barrels. The US Energy Department says the minimum “safe” level in peacetime is around 500 million barrels.
Meanwhile, China has been filling its strategic reserve at a blistering pace of one million barrels a day for the last year. It has ordered commercial companies to fill their inventories as well. The country has at least 1.5 billion barrels in storage.
The giant stockpile is intended to reduce US energy leverage in a conflict over Taiwan, but it serves perfectly to cushion the blow from Trump’s Gulf war instead. Xi Jinping can comfortably tough out a global oil shock for longer than Trump can endure the political heat of exorbitant petrol prices in America.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard know this and – if they can survive – have every incentive to hunker down until Trump reaches his pain threshold. They know that he has no tolerance for oil prices anywhere near $100 a barrel in an election year, and no political tolerance for US military casualties.
They know that he launched this war without consulting Congress or making a plausible case to the American people and against the protests of allies. He did so at the behest of Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and on the basis of claims invented on the hoof and mostly in flat contradiction of earlier assessments by US intelligence agencies.
Trump said he had to act in the face of “imminent threats” to the US, but none is believable. The prize for the most daring lie goes to his negotiator Steve Witkoff, who said Iran was “probably a week away from having industrial-grade bomb-making material”.
Were we not told that the Fordow nuclear site had been “obliterated” last June by 14 bunker-busting bombs?
Trump says the military onslaught will continue for four to five weeks, or longer: until all his objectives, whatever they may be, are achieved.
The biggest casualty of all is going to be the global oil and gas industry.
One moment he is exhorting Iran’s youth to go out into the streets and brave the live fire of the Basij militia. We have seen that murderous movie before, in Hungary in 1956, or with Iraq’s Marsh Arabs in the first Gulf War.
The next moment, Trump is mulling the idea of keeping the killing machine in place after all, invoking the Venezuela model of decapitation and co-option as the “perfect, perfect solution”.
Either way, the Iranian regime has agency of its own. The replacement head of the Revolutionary Guard is the hardest of hardliners, the furthest you could imagine from Venezuela’s pliant and biddable Delcy RodrĂguez.
My assumption is that Trump will be forced to the table long before those four weeks are up – and perhaps within days – and will present a partial retreat as a giant victory.
For the 80 per cent of the global population living in countries that depend on net oil and gas imports, this wild episode is an unanswerable reminder of why it is folly to rely on a costly and technologically obsolete source of energy from the least stable region of the world.
China will accelerate its push for renewable and nuclear power and the total electrification of land transport. So will much of Asia. So will most of Europe, since it does not wish to depend on Trump’s LNG for a moment longer than it has to.
The biggest casualty of all is going to be the global oil and gas industry.
Telegraph, London
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