How This Historic Oil Disruption Could Reshape …

Last week, Iran’s new supreme leader vowed to continue the country’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz as the United States and Israel continue to wage war in the Middle Eastern nation. The closure of the Strait, through which over one-third of the world’s crude oil trade passed in 2025, is causing oil prices to skyrocket at a global scale, surging over USD $100 per barrel. The economic fallout from this development will be enormous, throwing into sharp relief how petro-dependent global markets...

The blockage already constitutes the single biggest oil supply disruption in history, more than doubling the previous record set during the Suez crisis of 1956. However, the fallout will be much different – and much less severe – this time around. “There is little sign that the war with Iran will cause the kind of economic pain experienced about a half-century ago, when oil met almost half of the world’s energy needs,” the New York Times wrote in a report earlier this week.

Our global energy industry is much more diversified now, to the benefit of energy security the whole world over. The crisis has highlighted the economic and energy independence benefits of renewable energies, and particularly solar photovoltaics and batteries, which are now cheaper and more widespread than ever before. Already, renewables had become too cheap to fail. Now, the soaring prices of oil could further help to catalyze the green energy transition around the world.

“When a technology becomes cost competitive, you get to a tipping point on adoption,” Antoine Vagneur-Jones, head of trade and supply chains at BloombergNEF, was quoted in a recent LA Times report.

While forecasts had expected a flat growth rate for global solar installations this year, a prolonged conflict in Iran could quickly change that, pushing would-be customers toward solar and batteries. There is significant historical precedent for such a development. Past energy crises have been instrumental in the world’s continued move away from fossil fuels and toward wind and solar power. Energy sanctions on Russia in response to the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine pushed Europe to develop its own solar and wind power capacity. The same energy crisis hit developing economies much harder, and ongoing energy instability in Pakistan has led to the fastest-growing solar sector in the world.

While this transition has eased the world’s reliance on Russian fossil fuels and has somewhat diversified the global energy mix, it has greatly increased reliance on Chinese clean energy manufacturing. Cheap Chinese solar panels have emerged as the backbone of the global renewable energy boom, particularly in poor nations that were left with few options when LNG prices skyrocketed after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Moreover, China is incredibly well prepared for a major oil supply disruption. The that the country has “spent years preparing for the Iran oil crisis” by stockpiling massive amounts of oil, solidifying its trade relationship with Russia, and transitioning away from gas-powered cars to electric vehicles. “Their strategy has really given them a huge buffer,” said Michal Meidan, a researcher specializing in China’s energy systems at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies.

A global rush to build up renewable energy capacity in order to replace prohibitively expensive oil supplies could serve to increase China’s energy dominance and catalyze the country’s efforts to become the world’s first electro-state. However, this doesn’t mean that peak oil will happen overnight. “The post-oil world remains far in the future,” David Sandalow, a fellow at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, recently told the New York Times. “We’re in the early to middle stages of an energy transition, but energy transitions take time.”