I am back in NYC at the invitation of the Russian delegation to the United Nations. Unlike my previous appearance before the full UN Security Council, this was an Arria session. An Arria-formula meeting is an informal meeting called by one or more Security Council members to hear from people who normally can’t address the...

When the Strait of Hormuz closed at the end of February, Saudi Arabia had what almost no other Gulf producer had: a way out at scale. The East-West pipeline, known in the industry as Petroline, carries crude 1,200 kilometers across the desert from the oil fields of the Eastern Province to Yanbu on the Red...

Karl Miller’s new assessment: a seven-to-ten-year rebuild, a trillion-dollar bill, and a diesel crisis that Saudi Arabia can no longer cushion For most of this war, Saudi Arabia has been the shock absorber of the world oil market. When Hormuz closed, Riyadh pushed crude west through the East-West pipeline to Yanbu on the Red Sea...

For four years Republicans had a simple message on energy: prices were higher under Joe Biden. It worked. Voters remembered $5 gasoline in the summer of 2022, and Donald Trump promised to bring it down. The war with Iran has turned that argument on its head, and the evidence is in the government’s own price...

On Friday night Donald Trump announced that, after a call with Vladimir Putin, Russia would ship diesel to the United States and world markets. Treasury followed with a temporary general license lifting sanctions on Russian diesel until April 2027. The President promised that diesel prices would fall “in record numbers” and “fast.” With the midterms...

Introduction This is a follow-up to my previous piece on the economic effects of the Persian Gulf sulfur and urea cutoff. In that piece I argued that the public conversation about the Strait of Hormuz has fixated on crude oil and ignored the other commodities the Gulf supplies: LNG, urea, sulfur and helium. Having covered...

On the morning of September 30, flydubai flight FZ1073, a Boeing 737 MAX 8, left Dubai for Tel Aviv with 174 passengers aboard, 27 of them children. About two and a half hours into the flight, the first officer attacked the captain, Smit Machchhar, an Indian national. The aircraft dropped roughly 17,000 feet in one...

For seven months, the coverage of the war with Iran has been about oil: tanker counts, the price of Brent, how much is left in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Hardly anyone outside the fertilizer trade has noticed that the Strait of Hormuz also carries close to half of the world’s seaborne sulfur. Sulfur is not...

The global economic damage caused by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz is generally not understood by most policymakers. Public and policy discussion of the Strait of Hormuz closure has fixated on crude oil: tanker counts, Brent prices, strategic petroleum reserves. That focus is understandable, but it misses much of the damage. The Persian...