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The month in Global Energy & Infrastructure
Longest running story: 28 days
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The month began with US-Iran escalation threatening commercial energy traffic, then widened through attacks on Saudi routes and disruptions to the East-West pipeline. Escorts and rerouting restored some flows, but tanker shortages, insurance costs, and dependence on Hormuz kept global supply exposed by month’s end.
The energy disruption moved from crude into gasoline and diesel, with refinery constraints and export restrictions pushing prices to records. By the final week, a proposed US diesel export ban threatened to tighten overseas supplies further and raise costs for freight, agriculture, construction, and consumers.
Rapid data-center construction repeatedly ran into shortages of generation, transmission, equipment, and interconnection capacity. Utilities, regulators, and developers responded with flexible computing, dedicated power, large-load tariffs, and proposals that make data centers bear more of their grid and community costs.
Geopolitical risk drove European gas prices higher while AI demand and expanding LNG capacity increased the value of US gas infrastructure. Damage to Qatar’s LNG facilities then threatened years of lost output, leaving buyers more dependent on new US supply, shipping, and constrained domestic production.
Rising electricity demand and periods of renewable oversupply increased the need for transmission, storage, flexible demand, and interconnection. New projects gained funding and approvals, but financing disputes, equipment shortages, governance questions, and long queues continued to delay capacity.
China’s battery, mineral, and storage position made clean-energy supply chains part of strategic competition, even as India and automakers sought to reduce dependence on Chinese equipment. China also drew down oil reserves during the supply shock, while its coal dependence showed that its transition remains incomplete.
Calls to stop attacks on energy infrastructure became a reciprocal Ukraine proposal backed by the United States. The initiative still lacked a binding agreement, monitoring system, and consequences for violations, while competing claims about an energy truce remained unresolved.
Federal courts limited the administration’s emergency authority to delay coal retirements, but the administration then moved to remove greenhouse-gas limits on coal and gas plants. Together, the developments favored near-term fossil availability while weakening federal pressure to cut power-sector emissions.
Week’s Recap