For decades, Saudi Arabia played OPEC’s gate-keeper opening and closing its oil tap to keep oil 'reasonably' priced.  There were reasons for this: the threat from Iraq, the need to placate the United States as its biggest customer, and its ability to provide a  reasonable standard of living for a moderately sized population.  Today, Saddam Hussein is history, China has displaced the United States and the population of Saudi Arabia has nearly tripled since 1980.  Contributors Steve Yetiv and Lowell Feld postulate that we are in the midst of a paradigm shift in global oil with a transformation of the Saudis from oil ‘doves’ to ‘hawks.’ 

Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel's Spring assault on the country's nuclear power industry, if enacted, will reverberate through the German economy and society for decades to come.  'Germans for Germany' seems an apt phrase to describe such precipitous action with little thought given to the decision's impact on European energy security, German energy security, and on German foreign policy.  In fact, Merkel's plan to provide 'flexible power' alternatives to integrate non-existent wind and solar power into the German grid limits the country's options for safe and reliable base load electricity to either coal or natural gas and we know where Germany's gas comes from.          

The United States has long prided itself on its strong culture of innovation and technological advancement.  However in the field of nuclear energy it is  losing, if it has not already lost its leadership position.  Contributor Scott Cullinane points out that, "today 40% of the enriched uranium US power plants use is processed overseas and imported" from elsewhere. At the same time China is adding to its nuclear fleet, pioneering the new stage of nuclear technological development through its national strategy of 'indigenous innovation' with the resulting ability to export cutting edge nuclear technologies to the highest bidder.  The strategic implications of these developments on US national security and foreign policy are immense.

China's global thirst for energy resources to feed its economic expansion and increasingly prosperous citizenry is beginning to impinge on areas of geographic, and resource interest, to its Asian neighbors.  The South China Sea is one area of contention that has caused a flare-up in relations between China, Vietnam, and the Philippines in recent months.  Hooman Peimani at the prestigious National University of Singapore explores the roots of these regional disagreements and helps explain Chinese growing assertiveness in its foreign policy behavior and how we may be seeing more muscle flexing particularly where it believes it has a distinct upper-hand.   

Gazprom, like its Russian state owners, has pursued an effective, long term strategy of ingratiating and integrating its interests with those of its downstream customers.  It may have struck a coup though in moving closer to RWE Germany's second largest electricity producer.  The field of maneuver for a Gazprom ownership stake in RWE has been made perceptively easier with the Merkel government's decision to discontinue nuclear power as an entire class of power generating technology available to German industrial and residential consumers.  As a partial result of this decision, RWE has lost a reported 20% of its market value and is eager for the new investment that Gazprom can provide.  Vertically integrating Gazprom as a key player in Europe's largest industrial economy is really what is at stake in the short term.  Integrating Russian influence as a base-load factor in Germany's future is of longer term concern. 

The unconventional gas revolution has had its biggest impact on US gas markets but it would be erroneous to think the cascading impacts of this technology-lead sea-change in gas stop at America's shores.  Unconventional gas, shale gas, has helped create a global gas glut and in doing so is depriving  Russia of the leverage it exacts from European governments dependent on its natural gas. The idea of replacing an imported good with a domestic one may sound simplistic, but the overall political and economic implications of this new resource are global in scope.