By Gavin Pitchford

I was absolutely gobsmacked earlier this week by just how pervasive certain myths are, and realizing how much work we in the clean economy have to do before Canadians will believe we can make the transition.

And before a critical mass of Canadians see the clean economy as a real option that can displace the fossil fuel industry as an engine for prosperity, employment, improved health, a better environment, and also, a little climate action.

At the invitation of greenwashing expert Dr. Wren Montgomery (Clean50 2026), I took the clean economy show down Highway 401 to London, Ontario and Western University, my alma mater. I was addressing two fourth year Honours Business Administration (HBA) classes at Ivey, arguably Canada’s top business school.

Before I began my description of Canada’s clean economy, I asked both classes a lead-off question: What percentage does Canada’s oil and gas business contribute to our GDP?

Their answers blew me (and Wren) away.

The students came back with a wide range of responses. The closest, from just one of the ~20 students who answered, suggested 35%. Most of the others? Between 50 and 65%. One said 40% and a couple came in at 70%, with one outlier suggesting 90%.

It was literally breathtaking.

Murmurs of ‘Wow’

These are very sharp students. Some of them have already spent summers working for banks and consulting firms. And from all the attention we pay to the fossil fuel industry, the FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) the industry spreads, and the amount politicians talk about it, students assumed its importance to Canada was literally 10 times bigger than it actually is.

Also of note, it’s only ~20% of Alberta’s GDP. Of course, if Premier Danielle Smith stopped making it impossible to roll out new wind and solar projects, that number would decrease quite rapidly.

My lecture then tabulated the clean economy numbers—clean/climate tech, renewable energy, green building, green fuels, biotech, venture investment, responsible investing, sustainability consulting. Counting only the numbers I could get with any accuracy, with lots of holes still to fill, the total for the clean economy was actually higher.

And so I was blessed to actually watch world views changing –and in real time!

We talked about where the fossil fuel industry is headed over the next 10 years (flat to down) vs. the clean economy (300% growth over next 10 years, if we keep pace with the rest of the world).

We talked about the incredible impact and massive risk of abandoned oil wells and the oil sands ($260 billion in estimated cleanup costs, with less than $2 billion held in reserve to do the job). How Big Oil offloads liabilities for cleanup by selling almost-depleted wells for pennies on the dollar to smaller companies that strip as much oil as possible—then abandon the business, the cleanup, and the liability, leaving taxpayers on the hook for yet one last VERY big subsidy.

To put this in perspective, the cleanup bill will get bigger, as 50% of existing wells are expected to become non-profitable/non-productive by 2030. And yet the cleanup tab is already half –HALF—of our federal budget for one year.

Solutions That Are Saleable World-Wide

They were dumbfounded all this information was not already well understood by Canadians. That no one had ever shared it with them. One perceptively compared the fossil industry’s misinformation to that previously spread by the tobacco industry.

And they wanted this information spread widely!

We had a couple of dissenting voices in the crowd. “I don’t want government support going to the oil companies—but I don’t want it going to clean tech, either,” said one. Several nods from the free market bros around the room.

So we talked about why clean tech companies should get government support and why oil companies should not: Because clean tech is in a start-up phase, because it’s where the jobs are and where many more will come from, and mostly because intellectual property is highly portable. Other countries want ours, and our best are being pursued with significant government support, matching and top-ups for building facilities, easier access to capital—the list goes on. It means tomorrow’s Canadian business leaders can be lured south to the United States, to Europe, and even to China. taking the jobs with them. And so Canada needs to keep pace with investment, or lose them.

Nods from the free market types. They got it now…

After a lot of further conversation, the students expressed genuine frustration that no one had ever shared these facts with them before, then asked what they could do.

And then they committed to calling their MPs. And I’m holding them to it!

If you want to add your comments, there’s a shorter version of this story posted on LinkedIn.

Gavin Pitchford is founder and executive director of the Canada’s Clean50 sustainability leadership award program and CEO of Delta Management. This post originally appeared in the weekly Clean50 newsletter, and has been edited to match Energy Mix style.

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By Mitchell Beer

On the heels of a new strategic partnership with China, and with Prime Minister Mark Carney planning a trip to India later this year, the plan to reduce Canada’s trade dependence on the United States is beginning to yield closer connections with the world’s first two electrostates.

As Trump threatened a 100% tariff against Canadian products in response to a deal with China that he initially praised, at least one Chinese electric vehicle manufacturer looked to be preparing for an expansion into Canada, while a federal official said Canada wanted to be the first country in North America to build an EV with Chinese know-how.

Meanwhile, just as China is receiving wide recognition as the world’s first electrostate, a small flurry of news and analysis had India rapidly emerging as the second, advancing farther and faster than China did when it had achieved the same degree of economic development.

‘Foreign Troubles’ for U.S. Automakers

In their strategic partnership announced Jan. 16, Canada agreed to sharply reduce tariffs on electric vehicle imports from China, while China offered up tariff relief for Canadian canola, peas, pork, and seafood. Canada will slash duties on up to 49,000 Chinese EVs per year, rising to 70,000 by 2031, to a “most-favoured-nation tariff rate” of 6.1%. Within five years, as well, more than half of those vehicles are meant to be affordable EVs with an import price of less than $35,000.

At the time, CBC said Ottawa would soon release a strategy to expand the auto sector and “leapfrog” the U.S., with “preferential access to foreign automakers that manufacture vehicles in Canada.”

Scarcely a week later, the New York Times reported that the U.S. industry’s “foreign troubles” now extend to Canada, after U.S. trade policy “devastated the Canadian auto industry and pushed the country to reach an agreement that will make it easier for Chinese companies to sell cars there.” That could make the Canada-China agreement “an ominous development for U.S. automakers that are already struggling to stay relevant outside North America,” the Times wrote.

“General Motors and Ford Motor—the two largest U.S.-based car manufacturers—have been steadily losing customers in Asia, Europe, and Latin America, as Chinese carmakers have gained ground,” the news story stated. “If they lose significant ground to Chinese companies in Canada, Mexico, and other countries where they once dominated, Ford and GM could gradually become niche manufacturers.”

“There’s a real danger that the market for U.S. carmakers is going to largely be the U.S., and only that part of the U.S. market that wants big SUVs and trucks,” Erik Gordon, a professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, told Times auto industry reporter Jack Ewing.

“Historically, U.S. trade policy regarding automotive has been mirrored in Canada,” added George Washington University engineering professor John Helveston, in an interview with the South China Morning Post. But now, “Canada is realizing that the U.S. industry is perhaps not the only one to be tied to,” a measure of both the impact of Trump’s tariff wars and the wider decline of U.S. leadership.

In Canada, the partnership has analysts arguing that lower costs will help consumers, although concerns about supply chains, industrial strategy, environmental impacts, and “strategic dependence” have yet to be resolved.

“The quota is too small to translate into a cheap-car bonanza for Canadian car shoppers,” the Globe and Mail writes. “But it is likely to increase competition among automakers, in China and elsewhere, to make $35,000 EVs fit for the Canadian market.”

The first imports will likely come from western automakers with Chinese production lines, notably Chinese-owned Volvo, Buick, and Elon Musk’s Tesla, the Globe says. But “China’s own brands won’t take long to show up in Canada,” the news story states, citing Canadian Black Book senior manager Daniel Ross, and they’ll want to build their profile “by focusing on models that meet North American expectations in terms of features, style, and size.” That will put them in competition “with compact and subcompact SUV segments, which, together, currently make up about half of the Canadian market.”

Late last week, the Globe reported that China’s Chery Automobile Co. Ltd. was laying the groundwork for a Canadian sales network, with at least three auto industry veterans saying they’d been contacted by recruiters who indicated they were working for Chery. The company is also considering building cars in a UK plant owned by Jaguar Land Rover, the Financial Times writes.

The Globe also reports on the difficulties that Chinese manufacturer BYD ran into when it tried to set up manufacturing operations in Ontario a few years ago.

The Two Electrostates

The trade deal earlier this month is just one part of an economic diversification strategy that had Carney concluding deals with the United Arab Emirates and Qatar over the last month. With International Trade Minister Maninder Sidhu now calling for closer trade ties between Canada and India, Carney is planning a visit as soon as March, Reuters reported in an exclusive this week, with indications of trade talks in Brazil and Australia later this year.

For a few years, China has been seen as the world’s first electrostate, with renewable energy and energy storage investments that far exceed the activity in any other country. Earlier this month, Carbon Brief talked to nearly a dozen leading experts in Chinese energy and climate policy to get a sense of what to expect in 2026—the year when the country will publish a set of five-year targets that “could boost—or moderate –the pace of its energy transition.”

For more than 18 months, analysis by Carbon Brief and others has shown China’s carbon dioxide emissions either flat or falling. This year, new non-binding emission targets and an expanded carbon market are expected to take effect, even as extreme weather increases the importance of climate adaptation “while also adding to the challenge of advancing clean energy.”

Already, though, renewable energy has already replaced natural gas as “the leading replacement for coal demand in China, with growth in solar and wind generation largely keeping emissions growth from China’s power sector flat,” Carbon Brief reports. Nikkei Asia says China installed three times more battery storage capacity than the U.S. in 2025.

Now India is “electrifying faster and using fewer fossil fuels per capita than China did when it was at similar levels of economic development,” Bloomberg says, citing analysis by the UK’s Ember energy think tank. “It’s a sign that clean electricity could be the most direct way to boost growth for other developing economies, too.”

The government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi “is considering new plans that would double India’s coal power capacity by 2047, and the country’s oil consumption growth was set to outpace China’s last year,” Bloomberg writes. “But the South Asian economy’s coal and oil consumption per capita is a fraction of what China’s was at similar income levels. In absolute terms, India’s fossil fuel consumption is growing at slower rates than China’s today.”

No More Engine for Oil and Gas Growth

Energi Media publisher Markham Hislop says the Ember analysis has wider implications.

“It suggests that India, the country long assumed to be the last great engine of global oil and gas demand growth, may already be bending away from fossil fuels faster than China did at a comparable stage of development,” Hislop writes. “That version of India’s energy future undermines the strategic assumptions underpinning energy policy in exporting nations from the Middle East to North America, including Canada.”

The driving force behind that shift is “simple and structural,” he adds, citing Ember. “China had to pioneer modern electric technologies at scale. India does not. It is industrializing at a moment when solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles are abundant, cheap, and improving every year. India is not taking a fossil detour because it no longer makes economic sense to do so.”

Which in turn leads Hislop to the implications for fossil fuel exporters. “If India’s oil and gas demand really is nearing a peak, or never reaches the levels long assumed, the implications ripple outward.,” Hislop says. “For global markets. For geopolitics. And for countries like Canada that have built their long-term energy ambitions on the idea that someone, somewhere, will always need more hydrocarbons.”

In his Electrotech Revolution newsletter, Ember strategist and report co-author Kingsmill Bond cites faster solar deployment, much lower per capita coal use, rapid growth of electric vehicles, much lower oil demand in transport, and a “similar rapid electrification pathway” as factors that could make India’s “electrotech fast-track” more effective than China’s “fossil detour” en route to electrostate status.

“This energy path avoids deep fossil fuel dependency while positioning the country to supply electrotech to the world,” he writes, in what amounts to a “new path for emerging economies. India is showing other countries how to take a cheaper, faster, cleaner pathway to the electrotech future.”

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It took Donald Trump less than a week after his bombing raid in Venezuela to raise the ire of one major group of fossil industry donors, while threatening to freeze his country’s biggest publicly-traded oil company out of the production boom he thinks he can set in motion.

In the 10 days since the raid, Trump has claimed that Venezuela “will be turning over” 30 to 50 million barrels of oil to the U.S., that he will personally control the revenue from selling that oil, and that the U.S. fossil industry will pile in to Venezuela to restore its decrepit, poorly-maintained production infrastructure.

But that isn’t sitting well with fracking executives in Texas—many of whom “bankrolled the president’s return to office”—who expect any increase in production to push global oil prices below the threshold where they can continue to operate, the Financial Times reports.

“Problems in Texas’s oil industry are mounting, as cheaper oil forces producers to idle rigs needed to keep production ticking higher,” the Times explains. So “Trump’s drive to open up Venezuela’s oil riches, potentially subsidizing investors, has further strained relations with oil executives in Texas, who have been angered by his dogged pursuit of ever-lower crude prices.”

In the 2024 general election in the U.S., the fossil fuel industry spent $219 million to elect the country’s next government, Yale Climate Connections reported afterwards, most of it on Republican campaigns. That was after Trump invited about 20 oil and gas executives to his Mar-a-Lago estate in April to present what one independent journalist called a “breathtakingly corrupt proposal: If they raised a billion dollars to help him retake the White House, he would roll back any policy they didn’t like when he took office.”

Now some of those donors sound like they’re questioning the return on their investment.

“We’re talking about this administration screwing us over again,” one exec told the Times. “If the U.S. government starts providing guarantees to oil companies to produce or grow oil production in Venezuela I’m going to be… pissed.”

Some industry sources are angrily calling it a “betrayal” after Trump “flew to Texas multiple times in 2024 to tap deep-pocketed oil barons for cash,” the news story adds. Their problem is that “only the biggest [fossil] energy groups, such as ExxonMobil, Chevron,  and ConocoPhillips, have access to the tens of billions of dollars in capital, teams of lawyers, and security protection needed for a foray into Venezuelan oil. For smaller U.S. operators, a revitalized Venezuelan industry—if Trump can pull it off—means worsening the market glut,” with prices already below the US$60 per barrel that shale producers need to turn a profit.

“To me, the signal from the administration is: we’d rather spend our American money on propping up a Venezuelan oil business than supporting our current independent businesses,” said Trump donor Kirk Edwards, CEO of Odessa, Texas-based Latigo Petroleum.

“I think it’s an appropriate reaction by U.S. shale to be miffed,” added Pickering Energy Partners founder Dan Pickering. “Not just because Venezuelan production might go up but because the U.S. government, in theory, is going to subsidize that.”

On the surface, colossal fossil ExxonMobil may be miffed, as well, after Trump took umbrage at CEO Darren Woods’ assessment that his production plan would be “uninvestable”. After meeting with fossil CEOs Friday, Trump said Woods’ bad attitude might disqualify the company from any new business in Venezuela.

“I didn’t like Exxon’s response,” he told reporters. “I’d probably be inclined to keep Exxon out. I didn’t like their response. They’re playing too cute.”

Woods maintained that Venezuela would have to make “significant changes” before Exxon would consider investing there. “We’ve had our assets seized there twice, and so you can imagine to re-enter a third time would require some pretty significant changes from what we’ve historically seen here and what is currently the state,” he said. “If we look at the legal and commercial constructs, frameworks in place today in Venezuela, today it’s uninvestable.”

He also told Trump he was “confident” those changes “can be put in place,” the Times writes.

But Venezuela’s oilfields may not be the prize Exxon is after—or even the main motivation behind Trump’s takeover. Drilled Executive Editor Amy Westervelt recaps Exxon’s extensive investments in neighbouring Guyana and recalls Venezuela’s escalating threats against those operations before the U.S. removed President Nicolás Maduro from office.

Most of the other oil execs who met at the White House Friday “delivered optimistic messages to Trump about the prospect of reviving Venezuela’s oil sector,” the Times says. But at least one U.S. news site is reporting that industry insiders “are mocking the president behind his back, predicting companies will string him along to get on his ‘good side’ and never follow through” on their promises to invest.

“The big oil companies who move slowly, who have corporate boards are not interested,” U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Politico, in a sequence republished by RawStory. “I can tell you that independent oil companies and individuals, wildcatters, [our] phones are ringing off the hook. They want to get to Venezuela yesterday.”

But that only shows that “the most enthusiastic are among the least prepared and least sophisticated,” said one industry official. “Anyone with a degree of international sophistication is taking a more measured approach.”

The post U.S. Fossil Donors ‘Pissed’ at Trump, Mock Him Behind His Back, as Venezuela Plan Takes Shape appeared first on Thoughtful Journalism About Energy's Future.

By Mitchell Beer

Alberta is demanding even faster federal approval of a bitumen pipeline to British Columbia’s west coast, even as a former provincial energy minister admits the project would have “zero” chance of attracting private investors without federal subsidies to “backstop” it.

The new demands came just six weeks after Premier Danielle Smith and Prime Minister Mark Carney signed a controversial memorandum of understanding (MOU) that envisioned an accelerated, two-year approval schedule for at least one new pipeline. Smith issued her latest letter to Carney after Donald Trump’s bombing and kidnapping raid in Venezuela became the latest pretext to demand ever-faster federal action on the pipeline plan despite a glutted global market for oil.

“Alberta intends to submit its application for a pipeline to the Major Projects Office by June—and [Smith] asked that it gets approved by this fall,” CBC reports.

“Within the current geopolitical context, timelines of up to two years are still woefully long and risk putting Canada at a disadvantage,” Smith wrote. “Any delay risks ceding market share, losing investment, and undermining Canada’s competitive position in a rapidly changing global energy landscape.”

When the MOU was signed in late November, impact assessment experts warned that even a two-year approval period would be too short to allow for thorough review of a major, new pipeline, or for engagement with Indigenous and other affected communities. Short-circuiting those steps could help land a project in court, where it would only face further delays.

Smith’s letter also sidestepped major questions about the years it would take to refurbish Venezuela’s decrepit oil production infrastructure, whether U.S. fossil companies are willing to invest, and whether there will significant global demand for new oil—from Venezuela, Canada, or anywhere else—by the time any new project could be completed.

A west coast pipeline would also need federal subsidies, Smith’s former energy minister, ex-pipeline lobbyist Sonya Savage, told a CBC podcast. Without taxpayer support, “I would say it’s not just diminishing, the likelihood of a private sector proponent.… I would almost say it is zero at this point,” she said.

While the MOU explicitly calls for any new pipeline to be built and financed by private companies, Savage said a federal “backstop” to cover cost overruns, like the massive, 584% budget increase that plagued the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, would not be a new concept for Canada.

“The TransCanada mainline gas line in the 1950s would not have been built without federal government intervention,” she told CBC’s West of Centre podcast. “They set up a Crown corporation, they backstopped it. Enbridge’s Line 9 in the 1970s would not have been built without a federal government backstop.”

In a release Monday, the Calgary-based Pembina Institute called on both governments to “stay true” to the language about “strong regulations that will drive down oil and gas emissions” that accompanied the release of the MOU.

“Alberta using this moment to lobby in public against what it is now calling an ‘overly aggressive’ industrial carbon price raises more questions about the outcome Alberta has in mind—especially given it already agreed in the MOU to strengthen its system,” said Executive Director Chris Severson-Baker. “This is in addition to the regulatory changes Alberta pushed through in December—days after signing the MOU—that weakened its industrial carbon pricing system and effectively moved the goalposts on the negotiation before it had begun.”

Severson-Baker added that, “far from being a reason to further expedite a pipeline proposal and weaken Canadian climate policy, the Venezuela situation should give further pause for thought and reassessment about the best economic bet for Canada going forward.”

“42 days after signing the ‘grand bargain’ MOU with the federal government, Alberta is trying to change the terms of the agreement, leveraging the current situation in Venezuela,” veteran climate analyst Dan Woynillowicz wrote on LinkedIn. “Underpinning the MOU is a commitment to ‘good faith’ collaboration,” but “I don’t see how seeking any and every opportunity to change the terms of the MOU or shift the goalposts can be seen as living up to this.”

On Substack, fossil industry analyst and communicator Bill Whitelaw praised Savage for “speaking her truth” on the taxpayer backstop that private investors would expect before pouring their own money into a new pipeline project. That “loadsa dough” subsidy won’t happen, he said, as long as there’s a chance that Alberta separatists will succeed in pulling the province out of Canada—much less making it Donald Trump’s sought-after 51st state.

“Ottawa will need to pony up big bucks to bolster an already-thin business case,” Whitelaw wrote. “Fellow Canadians would never countenance Ottawa forking over billions to a province that can’t be bothered with Confederation.”

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By Jake Bittle

Shortly after launching a dramatic raid in which U.S. forces abducted Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro on Saturday, President Donald Trump justified the action with a promise to revive Venezuela’s moribund oil industry. The country has by far the largest claimed reserves of crude oil in the world, accounting for almost a fifth of the planet’s remaining known crude oil, but its production has plummeted under Maduro, who has ruled the country since 2013.

“We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country,” Trump said during a press conference at Mar-a-Lago in which he announced Maduro’s capture.

This intervention comes at a pivotal moment for the global oil industry, which continues to stare down the prospect of a broad transition to renewable energy. For this reason, it’s not obvious that future markets can justify a surge of investment in Venezuela. On one hand, the country’s extra-heavy crude oil is perfect for diesel and jet fuel, which are helpful in hard-to-decarbonize industries. This makes it less threatened by the meteoric rise of electric vehicles displacing gasoline-powered cars. On the other hand, the world is already experiencing an overall glut of oil, and analysts expect demand to peak in the next decade. While there are buyers for additional oil that could be pumped in Venezuela — some of them on the U.S. Gulf Coast — experts say a total revival on the order that Trump is promising may not be in the cards.

“There’s a guaranteed market for it, but a market that has its limitations in size,” said Antoine Halff, the founder of the climate and data analysis firm Kayrros and a nonresident fellow at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.

As electric vehicles and renewable energy continue to expand, the world appears to be approaching a peak in oil demand. While the exact timing of that peak is disputed — it could happen within four years or in more than 15 years — almost all analysts agree that it is coming. At that point, there may no longer be sufficient demand to keep exploiting new oil fields, no matter how large. And given that it will take many years just to update the infrastructure that will allow for increased oil production in Venezuela in the first place, investors may decide that the juice is not worth the squeeze.

Then there’s the matter of predicting future prices in a notoriously volatile industry. Oil companies only make a profit when global oil prices stay above a certain level. For the U.S. companies that produce oil from Texas shale, for example, that number is around $60 a barrel, which is close to the current benchmark price. For Saudi Arabia, it’s closer to $90 a barrel, because oil revenues back almost all the kingdom’s government spending. In the newest oil fields, such as those offshore of Guyana, it’s as low as $30. There are already concerns that an oversupply of oil worldwide could send prices tumbling over the next year, making new fields less palatable to investors. If demand plateaus, a surge of Venezuelan crude would push prices even further down. Since Venezuela is a member of OPEC, it would have to coordinate production along with Saudi and other major producers, who would likely prevent Venezuela from flooding the market.

Even so, there will likely be long-term demand for the specific kind of oil that Venezuela produces. That’s because any energy transition will not happen at equal speed across all parts of the transportation sector. The expansion of electric vehicles will first replace passenger cars and mopeds, which rely on lighter oil from fields like those of the Texas shale. Larger vehicles like airplanes and heavy-duty trucks are harder to replace — they need more power than EV batteries can feasibly provide at present — and they rely on heavy oil like Venezuela’s. A report from the oil trading firm Vitol found that “the initial pace of decline [for diesel] is expected to be slow compared to gasoline, but begins to gather pace from 2035 onwards.” Few other countries boast the same kind of extra-heavy reserves that Venezuela has, and those that do, like Canada, have much higher production costs.

“These are the hard-to-abate segments,” said Halff. “It’s the part of oil demand that looks like it’s not going to shrink quickly.”

Venezuela pumped more than 3 million barrels of oil per day at the turn of the century, but production totals have plummeted since then. After the government of Hugo Chávez nationalized major oil infrastructure in 2007, the United States imposed financial sanctions that forced Venezuela to sell its oil at steep discounts. Under the Maduro government, the state-owned oil company racked up debts and saw an exodus of skilled workers. Pumps and pipelines decayed out of service, storage tanks collapsed, and production bottomed out at around 500,000 barrels per day during the COVID-19 pandemic.

President Trump has promised that his aggressive raid on Venezuela will lead to a revival of this industry, and he has reportedly urged U.S. oil producers to aid him in the effort. In remarks following the Maduro raid, he promised that American companies would return to Venezuela and help export oil to other countries. Given how inefficient the state-run oil sector has become, analysts believe it would be easy to restore some production in the short term with outside investment and sanctions relief.

“Our assumption is that there are a lot of wells that just need a workover,” said Adrian Lara, the lead analyst for the Latin American oil industry at the research firm Wood Mackenzie, in a brief published last month before Maduro’s capture. “You can boost production through opex [operational expenditure], without needing much new capex [capital expenditure]” — in other words, a tune-up rather than a full surge of new investment.

In the short term, there is ample demand. The oil in the country’s vast Orinoco Belt is very heavy and viscous, like molasses, in contrast to U.S. shale oil, which is about as thin as vinegar. This makes it more expensive and more carbon-intensive to produce, but also makes it well suited for conversion into diesel fuel in trucks and for other uses like asphalt. There are several refineries along the Gulf Coast that were built to process this kind of heavy crude, and these refineries are operating below capacity. Right now, Venezuela exports most of its oil to China, which would also likely purchase more for its own refineries. An industry expert who spoke to The Wall Street Journal said access to those reserves could be a “game changer” in terms of increasing Gulf Coast refiners’ profits.

“Right now there’s plenty of appetite for heavy crude globally,” said Robert Auers, a refined fuels market analyst at the energy consultancy RBN Energy. “Even if Venezuelan production were to come back real strong, the global market could easily absorb that.”

But a grand revival like the one Trump has promised would be a much taller order, given that it would take decades to unfold. The energy analysis firm Rystad Energy projects that a return to pre-Maduro levels would require an investment of $110 billion, and these investments would not bear fruit for a decade or more. Even Chevron, the only U.S. oil producer that operates in the country, would need to invest an estimated $7 billion in order to add another 500,000 barrels, according to a former executive who spoke with The New York Times.

The climate pollution stemming from this crude might also play a factor in its market appeal. Right now, the heavy oil extraction in the Orinoco Belt is some of the most carbon-intensive in the world, in part because enormous amounts of methane are flared during the process. As governments continue to pursue Paris Agreement targets, however fitfully, they might shy away from such fields wherever possible and instead import lower-carbon barrels. (The European Union has already committed to do this.) Many experts believe that oil majors will hesitate before taking the plunge on a resource that is far tougher to handle than the crude in U.S. shale fields or the Middle East.

That’s all in addition to the political uncertainty that has followed Trump’s attempt to depose Maduro. It remains unclear what shape the new government of Venezuela will take. Given that other producers like Exxon Mobil lost billions of dollars when the Chávez government nationalized their assets, it’s far from obvious that these oil companies would want to invest under continued political instability. Past U.S. interventions have demonstrated similar dynamics: Oil production in Libya has still not recovered since the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, and it took almost a decade for Iraqi oil production to rebound after the U.S. invaded in 2003.

“I do not believe in a significant increase in the short term,” said Rudolf Elias, chair of the supervisory board of Staatsolie, the state oil company of Suriname, which is pursuing an offshore oil project in the waters east of Venezuela. “It will take years before the industry is revived … then it is dirty oil, and heavy, so it will not be first in the row.”

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The trend reflects a broader energy-market environment in which production has outpaced consumption and inventories have swelled, creating downward pressure on prices and reshaping market expectations for 2026 and beyond.

The EIA attributed the price decline largely to global oversupply of crude oil, noting significant stock builds in 2025 that were among the largest on record outside of the COVID-19 pandemic period. In its Short-Term Energy Outlook, the agency estimated that world petroleum production exceeded consumption by an average of more than 2.5 million barrels per day in the second half of 2025, contributing to higher inventories.

Reuters reporting on global oil markets later in 2025 echoed this assessment, highlighting that some OPEC+ producers maintained robust output levels even as demand growth faltered, partly to defend market share and compensate for earlier cuts that had tightened balances. The resulting surplus contributed to a downward trend in spot and futures prices.

The EIA also pointed to slower than expected demand expansion as a factor. Although petroleum use continued to grow in 2025, the pace was below historical norms, reflecting broader economic headwinds in major markets, particularly Europe and parts of Asia.

Global energy agency reports from the International Energy Agency (IEA) have noted similar patterns: slower industrial activity and structural shifts in energy consumption have tempered oil demand growth this decade. In its recent World Energy Outlook, the IEA highlighted that while demand will continue rising in absolute terms through the mid-2020s, the growth rate has softened compared with prior forecasts — in part because of energy efficiency gains and shifts toward electrification in key sectors.

Market analysts say that each downturn in crude prices over 2025 occurred against a backdrop of sporadic geopolitical events — including conflicts in the Middle East and supply disruptions in parts of Africa — that temporarily supported prices. However, those interruptions were not enough to counterbalance the broader oversupply trend, according to the EIA.

Bloomberg analysts noted that the market’s sensitivity to macroeconomic signals — particularly Chinese economic data and currency fluctuations — helped accentuate the price slide. Bloomberg cited softening industrial output figures in China in late 2025 as a key factor underpinning reduced crude demand expectations, which in turn contributed to lower crude futures prices.

NPR’s coverage of U.S. energy markets in late 2025 highlighted how falling crude oil prices translated to mixed outcomes for consumers. While retail gasoline prices declined in many regions, utilities and households faced higher electricity costs due in part to weather events, transmission constraints, and regional fuel mix differences. NPR’s reporting underscored that lower oil prices do not uniformly reduce all consumer energy costs, particularly where electricity and natural gas markets are driven by separate dynamics.

For oil producers, the 2025 price slide and inventory builds raise questions about future drilling and investment decisions. Reuters noted that U.S. shale operators are already signalling more cautious capital spending plans if price forecasts remain flat, focusing on efficiency rather than aggressive production growth.

The EIA’s outlook suggests that market balances could tighten if production moderates or if demand surprises to the upside — for example, through unexpected economic growth or accelerated fuel consumption in emerging markets. For now, however, inventories remain elevated and prices subdued relative to recent years’ averages.

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By Christopher Bonasia

Chinese electric vehicle maker BYD was set earlier this year to release a model that will be able to drive up to 400 kilometres after just five minutes of charging, though experts warn of infrastructure challenges.

The company reported a record annual revenue of US$170 billion in 2024, overtaking Tesla’s $155.5 billion. These developments highlight the widening gap between the two companies as BYD’s technology continues to surpass Tesla’s, writes ABC News.

Riding on its success, BYD is looking to expand its production facilities in Europe by building a third manufacturing plant in Germany, which will help it reach European customers without the extra cost of import tariffs.

BYD’s new charging capacity is made possible by an “all liquid-cooled megawatt flash charging terminal system.” The charging system is matched with a 1500-volt next-generation silicon carbide power chip and a flash-charging battery with ultra-fast ion channels, which halves the battery’s internal resistance.

Those innovations enable drivers to recharge their vehicles at a rate of about two kilometres per second, faster than any other passenger EV. The next closest competitor—Li Auto, also based in China—can reach a 500-kilometre range in 12 minutes, while Tesla superchargers can charge to a 275-kilometre range in 15 minutes, Bloomberg writes.

Two vehicles with this capacity will be launched in April—the Han L and the Tang L sport utility vehicle. Starting prices for these options are C$53,224 (270,000 yuan) and $55,196 (280,000 yuan). In comparison, the extended range option for BYD’s Han EV costs $45,300 (229,800 yuan). Prices for a Tesla Model Y start at $64,990 in Canada.

The fast charging time will help some buyers move past anxiety over EV wait times, InsideEVs Plugged-In Podcast co-hosts Patrick George and Tim Levin said. But they added that the really important point about BYD’s progress isn’t just that its technology is better than that of other companies, but that it is available in vehicles that are accessible for average consumers. BYD’s cars are sold for a good value in China even though they are more expensive or unavailable in other countries because of high tariffs. George said BYD EVs are unassuming and normal, instead of looking like “high-tech spaceships.”

“It’s so crazy how they’ve normalized this stuff,” he added.

BYD has plans to install 4,000 of its chargers across China, but has not provided specifics on how that will unfold. Some experts say that while the charging systems can work on their own, it may be difficult to integrate them into the grid because they have large power needs that could demand costly grid connection updates. The advanced liquid-cooled system itself is likely to be more expensive than other chargers, which could mean higher charging prices for drivers, reports Wired.

Others question exactly how useful the new system will be, given that most EV drivers are able to charge their vehicles at night when charging times are less relevant. The super-fast charging could also pose some safety concerns and might affect the long-term durability of the battery, writes Bloomberg.

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Ford framed the move as a “decisive redeployment of capital” in a Monday announcement that accompanies its 2026 business plans, as part of its broader Ford+ strategy. The company plans to redirect investment away from larger EVs that have struggled to meet sales and profitability expectations, and toward products and technologies where it sees stronger near-term returns.

“The operating reality has changed, and we are redeploying capital into higher-return growth opportunities,” Ford President and CEO Jim Farley said in a company press release outlining the new strategy. That includes expanding its lineup of hybrid and extended-range vehicles, as well as a new battery energy storage systems (BESS) business, which Ford said will use existing battery production capacity in the U.S.

Major write-down underscores EV market headwinds

Ford’s nearly US$19.5 billion impairment charge — one of the largest in recent corporate history — reflects the cancellation of planned EV models, the dissolution of a battery joint venture with South Korean partner SK On, and other program-related write-downs. About $8.5 billion of the charge relates to scrapped EV projects, including large pickups and vans, while roughly $6 billion reflects the end of the SK On venture and $5 billion covers other program expenses.

Reuters reporting notes that Ford is discontinuing the fully electric F-150 Lightning and its next-generation sibling, the T3, in favour of an extended-range hybrid model that incorporates a gasoline engine to recharge the battery. Ford is also shelving planned electric commercial vans and repositioning its production lines to prioritize trucks, vans, and hybrid vehicles.

The retrenchment comes as U.S. EV sales have faltered — in part due to federal policy changes that ended consumer tax credits and relaxed emissions regulations — and overall EV market penetration has remained lower than earlier projections. According to Reuters, EVs now account for roughly 10 per cent of new vehicle sales in the U.S., compared with about 25 per cent globally.

Battery plants repurposed for grid and data-centre storage

One of the most notable aspects of Ford’s pivot is its intention to repurpose existing EV battery manufacturing capacity to produce large-scale energy storage systems. At its Glendale, Kentucky battery plant — originally built for EV battery production — Ford plans to invest roughly US$2 billion over the next two years to build lithium iron phosphate (LFP) cells and assemble them into 20-foot energy storage containers with at least 5 megawatt-hours (MWh) of capacity each. The company aims to produce at least 20 gigawatt-hours annually by the end of 2027.

The storage units are intended for grid operators, utilities and data centres, where demand for reliable power buffering and peak shaving is growing rapidly. Analysts say that as data centres and other large energy users seek to manage peak demand and integrate more renewable generation, the market for grid-connected battery systems is expanding quickly. One report projected that U.S. energy storage deployments will reach record levels this year amid surging interest.

In reporting by Canary Media, industry watchers say Ford’s strategy reflects broader trends in the energy transition. “They have built up battery manufacturing capacity, and now they need to do something with it,” Pavel Molchanov, managing director for renewable energy and clean technology at Raymond James, told reporters. “While EV demand is languishing, U.S. energy storage deployments are skyrocketing.”

Broader industry and market dynamics

Ford’s shift comes amid a broader reevaluation of EV strategies across legacy automakers. General Motors has also taken impairment charges related to EV production, while Stellantis has scaled back some EV plans in favour of hybrid platforms. Reuters coverage notes that many traditional carmakers — constrained by higher development costs, weakening demand and shifting regulatory environments — are returning to hybrid and traditional powertrain investments.

Analysts also point to weakening consumer incentives as a factor. The U.S. federal EV tax credit, once worth up to US$7,500 per vehicle, expired this year following legislative changes, removing a key subsidy that helped boost EV demand earlier in the decade. At the same time, average gasoline prices in the U.S. have fallen below US$3 per gallon in recent months, making conventional vehicles more attractive to cost-conscious buyers.

Strategic reset and future prospects

Ford’s revised approach prioritizes profitability and flexibility. The company says it expects its global mix of hybrids, extended range vehicles and EVs to reach roughly 50 per cent of total volume by 2030, up from about 17 per cent today, suggesting hybrids will play a major role alongside any future EV offerings.

The move also underscores widening divergence between the EV market and energy storage. Where EV sales have slowed, grid storage demand — particularly for data centres and utility applications — remains robust, driven by efforts to stabilise electricity systems and integrate renewables.

Yet Ford’s transition is not without risks. Energy storage markets are competitive, with established players such as Tesla already commanding significant shares of the grid-scale battery business. Whether Ford can carve out a meaningful position in storage while recalibrating its vehicle lineup remains to be seen.

For now, the Detroit automaker is betting that redeploying capital from struggling EV programs into hybrids, extended-range vehicles and energy storage will position it for more sustainable, profitable growth in a shifting automotive and energy landscape.

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By Mitchell Beer

With fossil fuel publicists touting decades of future demand, and those expectations baked into last week’s pipeline deal between Canada and Alberta, the global oil and gas industry already recognizes and is planning for its own decline, the UK-based Carbon Tracker think tank concludes in a recent review.

“A clear-eyed analysis reveals an oil and gas industry already conducting a quiet, rational, strategic retreat from long-term growth, despite public bravado from its supporters in the stands,” analysts Harry Benham and Guy Prince write in a Nov. 12 blog post.

“The cold data shows a sector preparing for plateau and decline, rewarding investors who push for harvesting with dividends and buybacks, and leaving investors who believe the growth rhetoric dangerously exposed.”

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This “say vs. do” chasm is playing out “in real-time company boardrooms and capital allocation plans,” Carbon Tracker concludes. The post cites four trends that contradict the “political rhetoric of robust future fossil demand”:

• Capital expenditure (“capex”) in the industry still stands at US$500 to $600 billion per year, but that’s about 40% below a peak of nearly $900 billion that now dates back more than a decade. “The industry has rationally concluded that this leaner, more efficient level of investment is sufficient to meet slowing demand and maintain a production plateau,” the blog post states. That makes the industry’s refusal to increase investment a “powerful vote of no confidence” in the notion of endless future growth.

• Spending on exploration for new oil and gas wells has fallen by about 60% in the last decade, and the major, new projects recently reported in Brazil are likely “more ornamental than truly productive and profitable”, with the world unlikely to need the new oil by the time the projects are ready to deliver it in 10 to 15 years.

• Credit agencies like Standard & Poors and Fitch Ratings have downgraded the sector after “listening to the numbers, not the speeches.” Those decisions show analysts “increasingly [treating] major new greenfield fossil fuel projects as potentially stranded from the day they are announced.”

• The continuing news of oil and gas mergers and acquisitions show a different kind of stranding, with bigger corporate players absorbing assets that aren’t meeting their revenue targets. “This is not production growth,” Carbon Tracker writes. “It is financial engineering—shuffling existing assets to cut costs and maintain dividends, and certainly not to expand a resource base.”

While not all companies are pursuing this new strategy, the ones that don’t “are increasingly punished by the market,” the authors state. “But legacy structures and political pressure still lead to capital misallocation at the margins—a key risk for investors to resist.”

Cooking the Books

Carbon Tracker posted its analysis just as the International Energy Agency was releasing its latest World Energy Outlook, long styled by the IEA as the “gold standard of energy modelling”. After months of intense arm-twisting from the Trump administration to cook the books and align its modelling with a “drill, baby, drill” agenda, the IEA resurrected its Current Policies Scenario (CPS) in this year’s WEO. It showed that rising oil and gas demand through 2050.

But that projection was just one of three in the WEO, and amounted to “a triumph of political gesture over foresight,” Benham and Prince state. “The CPS—which assumes no new climate policies at least until 2050—is a backward-looking relic that ignores the seismic shifts already reconfiguring the global energy system.”

That makes the CPS “a warning, not a forecast: it implies energy innovation stops in 2030, as if hitting some sort of intellectual brick wall,” they write. The reality on the ground is that “the pillars of oil demand growth are crumbling in real time, and irrespective of price—something front-line oil industry instinctively knows and can see.”

A Fossil Industry Collapse in Five Acts

Carbon Tracker says the collapse is being driven by these factors:

• Global gasoline demand is set to peak this year as vehicles electrify. “This isn’t a future prediction; it’s a present-day reality as EVs are on track to displace four to five million barrels per day of demand by 2030.”

• China is going through a “stunningly fast transition that undermines the core assumption of endless Asian fossil-demand growth,” with oil demand growth already declining and power sector emissions set to peak this year as renewables push coal below 50% of total generation.

• Growth in demand for petrochemicals and aviation fuels “cannot possibly offset the sweeping declines in road transport and power generation. They are a fleeting respite, not a revolution.”

• Liquefied natural gas (LNG) has drawn too much investment, so that any new expansion will threaten the financial viability of existing projects facing a global glut.

• Investors are voting with their dollars, with annual investment in renewable energy, grids, and electrification hitting $2.2 trillion per year, nmore than double the remaining capital expenditures in oil and gas.

“The market is already building the post-oil energy system, recognizing that fossil fuels, while important, are a diminishing part of a very new and different, larger energy mix,” Carbon Tracker states. And the pattern of the industry’s own investments “recognizes the very transition that industry supporters attempt to dismiss.”

That quiet retreat “is perhaps its most rational act in a decade,” Benham and Prince conclude. “The great irrationality now lies with investors who mistake this harvest for a rebirth, and with policy-makers who resuscitate outdated forecasts. The industry is no longer led by multi-billion-dollar, high-risk engineering megaprojects, but by sober capex reduction, and cash flow diverted into investors’ pockets.”

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Monthly throughput and available capacity on the NGTL system

Much of the WCSB’s output must transit through key delivery points such as East Gate 1 and West Gate 2 on the NGTL system, upstream of James River, and border-points on Alliance (Elmore) and Westcoast (Huntingdon).  The report notes that available capacity and throughput on the NGTL system have steadily increased in recent years, and also display a clear seasonal uptick in winter—when colder ambient temperatures compress gas molecules and demand for heating rises.

Monthly throughput and available capacity on Alliance and Westcoast Pipelines

This high-utilisation environment reflects a supply-side picture in western Canada that remains robust: producers are pumping, export pipelines are loaded, and market demand in the U.S. and beyond remains a primary driver.

The supply-demand dynamic: strong flows, underlying constraints
On the supply side, western Canada’s sustained production is feeding export corridors at full speed. The ability to ship large volumes reflects not only strong upstream activity but also favourable weather conditions in the U.S. that pushed heating demand. Cold spells in export markets added pressure to the pipeline system, enabling higher throughput.

Yet on the demand side and downstream of the pipeline system, the story is more nuanced. While export flows remain high, constraints are emerging. The CER report cautions that throughput occasionally exceeds reported “available capacity” because capacity estimates may not fully capture real-time operational conditions such as ambient temperature shifts, downstream bottlenecks or unplanned outages. This suggests that while flows are strong, the margin for additional throughput may be thin, and the system remains sensitive to weather, supply disruption or downstream demand shifts.

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