Sunday Gulf War III Week 2 – Tanker Passage, What Tanker Passage?

By Paul Sankey Published on March 8, 2026 at 7:56 PM

Well, that was quite a week. And there it is, oil through $100/bbl on the Tokyo open. It is blatantly clear that the Trump Administration had zero, nada, nothing, as contingency plan for Iran declaring the Strait of Hormuz shut to transit. Even now, their $20bn insurance knee jerk response has been completely ineffective. We are facing the largest overall oil & gas volume outage of my career, which started in 1990, Gulf War 1. …

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AI Chips: Taiwan, LNG, Helium, Qatar, and Hormuz

By Paul Sankey Published on March 7, 2026 at 3:44 PM

We covered Qatar in a note & conference call in this first week of Gulf War III. Who controls the Strait of Hormuz? Iran within the China axis, with Russian support. As of today. Arguably the US needs boots on the ground to control the Iranian side of the Straits. On Friday the head of QatarGas and Qatar energy minister Saad Sherida Al-Kaabi went front page in the Financial Times to highlight the sustained outage …

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Qatar LNG Shutdown: Global Energy Crisis (ex-US)

By Paul Sankey Published on March 4, 2026 at 10:03 PM

LNG superpower Qatar finds itself having been bombed by both Israel AND Iran within the past year. Now a gigantic oil and gas outage, and notably the unprecedented shutdown of the world’s single largest LNG facility, which is a multi-month outage, will roil markets far more than is currently being discounted in relatively muted energy and equity market responses. The world is sold out of LNG supply, and this gas would represent around 2mb/d of …

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