barrels

Spain’s plan is to release 115 million barrels

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Every time you start your car in the morning or a factory turns on its machines in Europe, the bill rises at the rate of conflicts that occur thousands of kilometers away. To give you an idea of ​​the hole: in 2023 alone, the European Union spent 427 billion euros buying energy abroad. We are talking about a drain of more than 1,000 million euros a day. This chronic dependency forces us to pay what the Transport & Environment organization (TEA) calls a “geopolitical bonus”. As we have analyzed recently in Xatakathe logistics bottleneck and the current crisis in the Middle East threaten to replicate the worst scenarios of shortages and volatility of the past. Cushioning the blow. Precisely to mitigate this premium and as an urgent response to this scenario – marked by the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and the war in Iran – the Government of Spain, through MITECOhas just authorized the release of up to 11.5 million barrels of oil from its strategic reserves. This measure represents the Spanish contribution (2.9%) to the historic contingency plan of the International Energy Agency (IEA) to inject 400 million barrels in the global market. The mobilization, which will begin immediately by putting into circulation the equivalent of four days of national consumption, seeks to contain price volatility and avoid panic in the face of a suffocated supply. The toll of European vulnerability. The repercussions of the war are falling directly on the pockets of families and the competitiveness of companies, creating a bottleneck in the great global funnel of fossil fuels. The figures from previous crises paint a gloomy picture: when a barrel of crude oil exceeded the $100 barrier in 2022, the bloc’s energy gap skyrocketed to 604 billion euros, an extra 500 million a day. The suffocation of the great global funnel. The economic weight of this European vulnerability is divided today into three major fronts: The hit to the driver: According to analysts TEAwith crude oil set at $100, EU motorists will pay an additional 55 billion euros in one year. This is equivalent to an average increase in costs of 220 euros per year per driver. In fact, the price of gasoline at the pumps threatens to consolidate around 2 euros per liter, an increase of 24% compared to the average recorded in 2025. Industrial asphyxiation: While the International Energy Agency (IEA) releases 400 million barrels of strategic reserves to buy time, experts warn that the barrel could be close to $200. The volatility has caused European gas futures to jump 30% in a single day, recording massive electrical fluctuations that push entire factories toward insolvency. Handcuffed governments: Unlike the massive social shield deployed in 2022, European governments today have a much narrower fiscal margin due to accumulated deficits. Despite this, given the fear of deindustrialization caused by this extreme volatility, Brussels already considering breaking taboos and intervene in the market through tax cuts and caps on electricity tolls. An electric shield against the crisis. Faced with this scenario of chronic vulnerability, the technological and energy transition is acting as a real financial firewall. In last analysis of TEA explains that The current energy crisis will affect gasoline cars five times more than the charging of electric vehicles (EV). The numbers behind the wheel leave no room for doubt. With the rise in crude oil prices, traveling 100 kilometers in an average gasoline car would cost 14.20 euros, compared to just 6.50 euros for recharging an EV. If we look at company fleets, the monthly extra cost derived from the crisis would amount to 89 euros per combustion car, compared to only 16 additional euros for electric cars. At a macroeconomic level, the electric vehicles that already circulate on European roads prevented the import of crude oil worth 2.9 billion euros in 2025. Since TEA They emphasize that maintaining climate ambition and accelerate the mass adoption of these vehicles would avoid the payment of 45 billion euros in foreign crude oil over the next decade. A clear winner: the geopolitical paradox. This situation redefines the energy map and yields a clear winner. The suffocation in global supply has caused an unprecedented geopolitical paradox: the United States has been forced to issue emergency waivers to prevent India’s collapse, allowing it to buy Russian crude oil stranded at sea. As a result of this crisis, Vladimir Putin’s crude oil has gone from being sold at huge discounts to commanding a historic premium in the markets. Despite the enormous economic pressure and the fact that the crisis directly benefits hostile powers, the European Commission remains firm in its veto. EU Energy Commissioner Dan Jørgensen has emphatically assured that they will not import “not one molecule” of energy from Russia. Geography is destiny. The current crisis in the Strait of Hormuz is a painful reminder that structural dependence on fossil fuels remains the great Achilles heel of the Old Continent. As Antony Froggatt warnsexpert of TEA: “Europe must prioritize electric vehicles, heat pumps and renewable energy to ensure this does not happen again.” As long as economies remain tied to the trade routes of an unstable Persian Gulf, the economic security of European citizens will depend on conflicts thousands of kilometers away. Accelerating the end of fossil fuels is no longer solely a climate imperative; Today it is the most pragmatic decision for national security and economic survival that Europe can make. Image | Unsplash and Moncloa Xataka | The industry is fighting over impure oil crumbs, literally: it bodes worst for the economy

is that we are missing 20 million physical barrels a day and there is nowhere to get them

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The entire planet has been paralyzed in a funnel of salt water just 33 kilometers wide. With the escalation of war in the Middle East, headlines from around the world warn that the price of crude oil has surpassed the psychological barrier of $100registering record increases of 36% in a single week. However, the price is only the fever; the real illness is much more serious. To understand the magnitude of this crisis, we must stop looking at the stock price and start looking at the physical barrels that are missing. Today’s fundamental and structural problem is scarcity: the market is drying up. Overnight, we face the disappearance of some 20 million barrels a day. It is a logistical catastrophe five times greater than the one we experienced in the historic crisis of 1973. The 20 million barrel hole. According to data collected by The Kobeissi Letter and confirmed by Goldman Sachsthis blockade takes about 20 million barrels a day off the board (approximately 20% of world consumption). To put it in perspective, this supply shock is the largest in history and is equivalent to adding, at once, the losses caused by the Iranian Revolution (5.5 million), the Yom Kippur War (4.5 million), the invasion of Kuwait (4.3 million), the Iran-Iraq War (4 million) and the invasion of Ukraine (2 million). We are not facing a reserve crisis, but rather an absolute logistical collapse. As we have explained in Xataka, just open the platform Marine Traffic to see a swarm of some 240 immobilized vessels, including at least 40 supertankers (VLCCs) loaded with two million barrels each. The chaos is not only physical, it is also electronic as there is severe interference in the tracking systems (AIS), showing ghost ships located inland due to signal hacking. The fear of sailing is justified, tanker traffic in Hormuz has fallen by 90% and freight rates for supertankers have skyrocketed by 600%. The domino effect. Unable to take ships out to sea, onshore storage tanks have been filled to the brim. Iraq has been the first major physical victim of this plug. The data of Bloomberg They give the actual measurement of the cap. Iraq has had to plummet its production by 70%, falling from 4.3 to just 1.3 million barrels per day. The shock wave has already reached the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait, which have begun to close wells for a very basic reason advance by Financial Times. They have simply run out of physical space to store the crude oil. Given this scenario, OPEC+ promised to inject an additional 206,000 barrels per day. However, analyst John Kemp explains in Financial Times that this is a mirage: almost all of the cartel’s surplus capacity is inside of the Persian Gulf. If the ships cannot leave, that crude oil does not exist for the rest of the world. Nor are alternative pipelines a panacea. Javier Blas, columnist of Bloombergexplains that Saudi Arabia and the Emirates have pipelines to bypass Hormuz to the Red Sea, but a report from Goldman Sachs warns that the actual diversion capacity It is only 0.9 million barrels per day compared to the theoretical 6.5 million. The shortage is already hitting critical sectors. As my colleague Alberto de la Torre warned about an unprecedented crisis in aviation fuel (jet fuel), whose price in Asia reached an anomalous record of $225.44 per barrel. It is estimated that 40% of the jet fuel arriving in Europe passes through Hormuz. Since airports have very small storage tanks, the supply chain is stretched. Airlines such as WizzAir already foresee losses of 50 million euros due to this extra cost alone. Panic has reached governments. According to reports Financial Timesthe finance ministers of the G7 and the International Energy Agency (IEA) are preparing an emergency meeting to release between 300 and 400 million barrels of their joint strategic reserves. It is a desperate measure to stop the global inflationary impact. President Donald Trump, facing US gas stations at $3.45 a gallon, downplayed the blow on his social media, stating that short-term prices are “a very small price to pay for peace and security.” China’s master plan against the US “Donroe Doctrine”. While the West panics, in Beijing there is the calm of someone who has done his homework. The US strategy was to suffocate the cheap crude oil (Iran and Venezuela) that the Chinese industry feeds on, in what some analysts call the “Donroe Doctrine” (the US attempt to control up to 30% of the world’s reserves together with Guyana and Venezuela). But China was anticipated. Last year it spent $10 billion absorbing excess global crude oil, building up strategic reserves for 96 days. Today it has 166 million barrels floating safely off its coasts. In addition, it has triggered the purchase of Russian and Saudi crude oil, and has accelerated its true national shield: the electrical transition. With a 50% market share in electric vehicles and 430 renewable gigawatts installed in one year, Beijing demonstrates that, unlike a ship in Hormuz, sunlight cannot be blocked by the US Fifth Fleet. ANDThe ghost of 1973. Comparisons with the 1973 Arab oil embargo are inevitable but misleading. In ’73, the cut was 4.5 million barrels; Today the hole is 20 million. The economic damage suffered by the world was seven times greater than the value of the missing oil, all because of the collective panic that paralyzed investment and consumption. Today, however, the physical scenario is so extreme that the structural blow is guaranteedWhether there is panic or not. The only current advantage is that the United States is today the largest producer in the world and its economy depends much less on crude oil than it did 50 years ago, which gives it a certain shield. The tyranny of geography. If the ships do not sail, signatures like S&P Global Energy They predict a brutal “demand destruction”: unaffordable prices that will force the world to forcibly stop consuming crude oil. In the … Read more

Saudi Arabia already knows the real price of Neom and it is not measured in billions, but in barrels of oil at $90

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Saudi Arabia is mired in a paradox that revolves around barrels of oil. Years ago the kingdom launched an ambitious program to reduce its dependence on ‘black gold’, a key element in its accounts and public treasury. Under the name of ‘Vision 2030’ basically proposed to diversify its economy with a rosary of projects which included large urban developments such as Oxagon, Trojena or the famous The Line. The problem is that the swings in the price of crude oil (the same one from which he wants to get away) is complicating the things. So much so that the kingdom has already been forced to moderate its expectations. What has happened? We told you a few days ago: Saudi Arabia has had to rethink the Neom megaprojects, the program with which the kingdom wants to promote works such as Trojena or The Line, a futuristic city 170 km long, 500 m high and 200 meters wide built from scratch in the middle of the desert. According to Financial TimesNeom’s president, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, is now considering a “much smaller” scale. In fact, there is already talk of a drastic cut in The Line and changes also in Trojena. Is it a novelty? Half. Despite the efforts of Saudi Arabia for showing how the works were progressing, the international press has been warning for some time the difficulties (technical, but especially financial) that the kingdom has encountered to carry out its projects. own FT posted a few months ago a report in which he talked about how Neom’s dream is “unraveling.” His last article It goes further however and helps to understand the context. The cuts come after Neom officials commissioned an audit of the project. And although its final conclusions are not yet known, they seem to be strong enough that there are already architects working on the redesign of The Line. Their goal: to turn it into a “modest” project that can take advantage of the infrastructure built in recent years. There is talk of a change in concept, of a Neom that (without giving up the diversification of the Saudi economy) stops focusing on the “cities of the future” to focus on something much more concrete: data centers. The kingdom insists in any case that Neom is a bet that “aims to span generations” and its discourse (at least the public) is far from being defeatist. What is the problem? Beyond the scale and enormous ambition of the projects (only The Line involves building a 170 km city), Riyadh has encountered a perfect storm. Not even her years of waste (or precisely because of them) have prevented her from being forced to rethink some milestones in her initial schedule. The clearest example Trojena leaves it. There, in its ambitious ski resort, the 2029 edition of the Winter Games was going to be held. A few days ago, however, the Asian Olympic Council and its Saudi counterpart announced that the appointment will have to be postponed indefinitely. Financial Times remember that in the medium term the kingdom also has important commitments that will require it to step on the accelerator. The first will arrive with the international fair Expo 2030. The second, with the 2034 World Cup. Click on the image to go to the tweet. And what does the oil look like? If something they usually repeat analysts trying to explain the development of Vision 2030 (and more specifically Neom) is how the price of crude oil is influencing it. The reason is very simple. Although the financing of Vision 2030 does not fall directly into the budget of Saudi Arabia, its implementation does depend on large projects funded by the State. And it receives a large part of its income through oil. Saudi Arabia is the main exporter of crude oil on the planet, which explains that in 2024 this will represent 60% of public income. In general, oil and natural gas accounted for more than 20% of its entire GDP that year. A few months ago Arab Gulg States Institute (AGSI) I remembered that the weight of the oil business in the Government’s tax revenue is today much lower than a decade ago, when it reached 88%, but it has still accounted for close to 63% in recent years. Not only that. Its technicians recognize that the health of Aramco (the Saudi national oil company) is “vital for the health” of the public coffers and the country. Why is it important? By a simple rule of three. The implementation of Vision 2030 depends largely on the Saudi kingdom and its PIF (the Public Investment Fund), sovereign in nature and chaired by Mohammed bin Salman. And the money they receive is closely linked to the progress of the global oil business. In April of last year, in a complicated context, marked by fear of the trade war and differences within OPEC, Reuters warned of how the fall in the price of crude oil would be reflected in Aramco’s dividends… and these, in turn, in the money that would enter the coffers of the Government and the PIF. “The Government and the PIF will receive 32 billion dollars and 6 billion dollars less, respectively,” collected the chronicle signed by Yousef Saba. Already at that time there were experts who pointed out that this snip would take its toll on some of the projects that the kingdom had in its hands. “Saudi Arabia is likely to depend on debt financing and will have to delay or reduce some planned contract awards,” insisted Karen Young of Columbia University, recalling the nation’s deficit. Is there more? Yes. A key fact that in recent months have slipped several analysts and in which affected these days Brad Setser, CFR researcher, following the latest news about Neom and The Line. It is not just a matter of the price of oil rising or falling in the market, it is that Saudi Arabia needs the barrel of Brent to remain at certain … Read more

200,000 abandoned radioactive barrels are sought off the coast of Galicia: we have only found 1,000

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The Atlantic Ocean is one of the world’s largest nuclear cemeteries. It is estimated that more than 200,000 barrels with nuclear waste sent to the seabed rest Between 1946 and 1990. The mission to recover them is already underway. First days of work. The French oceanographic ship L’Tarante has begun to work in the search for abandoned drums in Atlantic waters. It arrives with the work of locating some of these barrels and evaluating whether they have caused some kind of impact on marine ecosystems in the area. The team has enforced their work since the first day. According to The local press reportsthe researchers managed to identify the first 1,000 drums and map their location. They have not yet transcended the first images of these barrels. The mission, called Nodssum-I, has an expected duration of one month. The ship arrived a week ago in the area where it will perform its work, located in international waters about 650 kilometers northwest of the coast of Galicia. It is estimated that the more than 200,000 barrels distributed throughout the exploration area are found between 3,000 and 5,000 meters. 200,000 drums. According to Explain the responsible team From the project, barrels contain nuclear residues of low or medium radioactivity. These include sludge, contaminated metal parts, cation exchange resins and even office equipment. In order to resist the high pressures of the ocean fund, these materials would have been encapsulated in bitumen or cement, Add the American Society American. Throughout the years that these waste has passed underwater, their radioactivity would have fallen significantly, it is added from the project. However, some long -term elements could still maintain a good part of this radioactivity. In addition to identifying and locating these barrels, the mission will take photographs of these in order to evaluate their status and integrity. For now the plans do not include the possibility of recovering these barrels. Evaluating the impact. Locating and studying drums is just one of the objectives of the mission. The team will collect water samples, sediments and even marine life to study the presence of radioactive or radiosiopo isotopes in them. Thus they also intend to study the interactions between marine ecosystems and these radioisotypes; Also understand the transport of these atoms in the seabed through processes such as erosion and sedimentation, and also through marine currents. Uly X. For this work the team will feature the instruments aboard L’Anchantante, including a 4.5 meter autonomous submarine called Uly X. This vehicle will allow researchers to photograph and study closely the lost drums in Atlantic waters. Nodssum-i and nodssum-II. The mission of one month of L’Atalante will be only the first part in a project that will encompass two trips to the search area, Nodssum-I and Nodssum-II. For now, Nodssum-II is in the planning phase, but we know of it that it will be a monitoring mission that will take detailed samples thanks to a submarine remotely operated like the Victor ROV, or a minisubmarine like the Nautile. In Xataka | Japan’s energy gauge: after trying to become independent from its nuclear, it has had to back down Image | French oceanographic fleet / Navire Océanographique L’Tarante

Between 1946 and 1990, Europe sank 200,000 radioactive barrels in the Atlantic Ocean. France prepares to recover them

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France will undertake this month of June a mission to map and study the state of the more than 200,000 drums with radioactive material that several European countries sank at the bottom of the sea. The objective: evaluate their environmental impact and study if it is viable to recover them. A practice today unthinkable. For more than four decades, between 1946 and 1990, the norm for several European countries was to pour radioactive waste of very low activity in the oceanic depths. More than 200,000 barrels loaded with gloves, laboratory materials and nuclear samples were sunk in the northeast Atlantic abyssal plains, more than 4,000 meters under the surface of the oceanan internationally prohibited custom by the 1993 London Convention. Better late than never. Although a good part of the radioactivity has disappeared thanks to the short half-life of the CESIO-134 or iron-55 isotopes, so far there has been no state-level effort to recover them. The National Center for Scientific Research in France (CNRS) will be launched at the middle of June With the nodssum missionwhich does not have as its immediate objective the recovery of the 200,000 barrels (a task of titanic proportions), but an exhaustive analysis of the containers, the behavior of the radionuces in the deep ocean and their interaction with the marine ecosystems to make a decision on which one to recover and how to recover them. A robot submarine and fishing networks. The Nodssum project will take place in two major campaigns. The first phase will be a recognition mission that will sail on June 15 and will run until July 11. The protagonist will be the ULYX Submarine Autonomous Robot of the French oceanographic fleet, capable of descending up to 6,000 meters. In its first scientific dives, Ulyx will navigate about 70 meters above the seabed to map with a high resolution Sónar the main discharge zone and identify the location of barrels. Then, it will approach up to 10 meters to photograph them. This phase also includes the initial shot of water samples, sediments and fauna, but without approaching the drums. Scientists will use nasas to capture fish and crustaceans with which to determine the effect of waste on marine life. The barrels will not move until 2026. Taking advantage of the data collected in the first phase, the second mission will use a robot with remotely operated arms, Victor or Nautile, to directly observe the barrels and take samples around it for a more detailed analysis. These data will be those used to determine if necessary, and feasible, selective recovery operations in the future. Security will be the axis of the entire project, which includes a robust radioprotection protocol supervised by the France Nuclear Safety Agency. In addition to amending past errors, the mission will be a unique opportunity to measure the long -term consequences of storing at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean hundreds of thousands of radioactive waste. Image | CNRS, Greenpeace (1978) In Xataka | Thus, radioactive waste is “buried”: how are nuclear cemeteries inside

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