Inside the lush conference venue at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston on Monday, oil and gas industry elites wrung their collective hands about the global oil price shock set off by the Iran War. Outside, hundreds of colorfully dressed climate justice activists from across the Gulf South marched and demonstrated to call out those profiting from the war inside.
At S&P Global’s premier energy industry confab on Monday, United States Energy Secretary and former fracking executive Chris Wright characterized fallout from the war, including ongoing disruptions of tanker shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, as a “short-term disruption to end a multi-decadal problem” and encouraged oil and gas leaders to ramp up domestic extraction.
“Prices went up to send signals to everyone that can produce more: ‘Please produce more,’” Wright said of the war’s impact on fossil fuel markets in his opening speech at CERAWeek. “Prices have not risen high enough yet to drive meaningful demand destruction.”
Secretary Wright’s comments came as President Trump announced the administration would hold off on earlier threats to strike Iranian power plants and other energy infrastructure for at least five days to allow for diplomatic talks. The pause follows the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’ own vows to completely block the Strait of Hormuz if Trump followed through on his strike threat.
The news prompted a notable fall in oil prices on CERAWeek’s opening day, with the price of Brent crude, the international benchmark, hovering around $100. The U.S. benchmark, West Texas Intermediate, hovered around $89.
Wright pointed to a number of “pragmatic solutions” Trump has taken in recent days to try to tamp down surging prices following Israeli strikes on Iran’s South Pars natural gas field, the world’s largest offshore fracked gas reserve. The administration has also temporarily lifted sanctions on Iranian oil stranded at sea, waived trade restrictions at U.S. ports to allow foreign vessels to more easily transport fuel, and released 45.2 million barrels of crude from the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
Still, the C-suite oil and gas executives here are expressing alarm over sudden oil price shocks that, perhaps counterintuitively, threaten to reduce their revenues by cratering demand. Mega-multinationals like ExxonMobil and BP remain exposed in the Persian Gulf, and the broader industry is hesitant to make risky bets to drill new domestic wells amid uncertainty over the duration of the conflict—though they are exploiting the current high prices to ramp up production from existing wells.
Chevron CEO Mike Wirth said that hits to fracked gas infrastructure in the Middle East and disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz were already more damaging than the Russian-Ukraine war, and that it’s unclear how long it would take markets to recover. “Physical supply chains don’t respond immediately, so even if the Strait opens at some point, it will take time to rebuild inventories of the right grades of crude and the right types of fuel,” he said.
In a separate talk focused on disruptions in the Strait, S&P Global Energy Director of Global Refining Karim Fawaz characterized the oil shock as one of the biggest energy crises the world has faced, predicting that crude prices will remain elevated if the conflict were to carry on for another two to three weeks. If the war stretches on for months, he said the price of oil could reach as high as $210 per barrel.
At a local park across the street from the CERAWeek conference, over 100 people—including many directly impacted by fossil fuel and petrochemical pollution—danced to the jazzy sounds of local musicians and whacked a giant pinata depicting fracked gas giant Cheniere Energy CEO Jack Fusco. There, the protesters rallied against what they say is just another “fossil imperialist war for resources” in the Middle East.
“We can’t, obviously, deny that the main motive behind the U.S. in backing this war and being an active participant is for the sake of profit, specifically gaining as much oil as they can in the region,” Astra Nasr, an activist with the Youth Climate Finance Alliance, which works to disrupt financial services to oil and gas companies that profit from overseas conflicts, told the Texas Observer. Nasr pointed to Venezuela—where Trump consulted with Big Oil executives from Chevron and ExxonMobil a week before the U.S. military strike in January—as an indication that Iran will be yet another pretext for profiteering. “[He basically told executives regarding Venezuela], ‘We’re going to be making big money,’ and so that is a telltale sign of their true motives.”
Nasr and others are calling on Citibank to divest its holdings from Chevron and other oil majors benefitting from what she views as blood-for-oil conquests in both Iran and Venezuela. Nasr’s group also plans to protest again on Tuesday as Cheniere—among the players who stand to gain most from the removal of nearly 20 percent of the globe’s fracked gas supply—hosts a 10-year anniversary celebration of its first gas export.
James Hiatt, a former lab analyst at Citgo Petroleum, was also among the climate justice contingent that confronted oil and gas CEOs at CERAWeek on Monday, pointing out how rising stock prices for major gas players like Cheniere, Sempra, and Venture Global are coming at the expense of higher fuel, electricity, and consumer prices for the vast majority of Americans.
“Before this attack, there was a talk of massive gas glut, too much gas on the market,” Hiatt said. “The question that has been raised is: Can U.S. producers actually fulfill all of these purchasing contracts, especially when West Texas [Intermediate] was falling under $60 a barrel? They can’t. They can’t even break even. But if you inflate the price by attacking some supply somewhere else in the world, I think they see dollar signs.”
Nasr, Hiatt, and other climate justice organizers are calling for a renewable energy transition that would mitigate climate change while simultaneously ending the sort of fossil fuel dependency that leaves the nation vulnerable to global oil and gas price shocks.
“We see the problems of being so dependent on fossil fuels, and having fossil fuel folks in the White House pushing an agenda where we will shut down alternatives like wind farms and solar buildout and start a war that will benefit American companies,” Hiatt said. “A few do well. The rest of us around the world, not just Americans, are suffering because we are so dependent on this.”
For Nasr, a renewable energy future is synonymous with the end of resource conflicts overseas. “To have clean energy is to stand against wars on profit and seizing land and killing innocent people just for the sake of gaining their resources,” she said.
The post Climate Activists Confront Iran War Profiteering at Big Oil Confab in Houston appeared first on The Texas Observer.
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