B – Who Profits from the Gulf War?

The IEA Oil Market Report of May 2026 reads like a sober data document - yet between the numbers, a new global oil order becomes visible. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has not only driven prices to historic highs, but also shifted trade flows, created winners, and exposed strategic dependencies. While Asia comes under supply pressure, the United States, Brazil, Venezuela, and the UAE emerge as beneficiaries of a new Atlantic Basin rotation. What appears to be a crisis in the Gulf may in fact mark a strategic redistribution of the global energy system.

by Michael Hollister
Published at tkp.at on May 29, 2026

2.198 words * about 10 minutes readingtime
For those interested in the topic and wanting to go deeper: a full in-depth analysis accompanies this briefing, covering Russia’s silent profit from the war, the refinery crisis as a second bottleneck, the mine problem in the base scenario, and the Atlantic basin rotation beyond Brazil, Canada, and Venezuela. Read more here “Who Profits from the Gulf War?“

Three Breaks, One Logic

My grandmother had a saying for moments when words and actions diverged: don’t listen to what they say – watch what they do.

On April 7, 2026, the oil price reached a level the world had not seen before. North Sea Dated – the most important European crude oil benchmark – climbed to $144.68 per barrel, surpassing the 2008 record. Back then, the trigger was a speculative bubble with a subsequent demand crash. This time it is something different: a physical supply failure in a war whose front lines run not through trenches but through a 21-mile-wide strait.

Ten weeks after the start of the war, the International Energy Agency documents in its Oil Market Report of May 13, 2026 a global supply loss of 12.8 million barrels per day. Gulf state supply is down 14.4 million barrels per day from pre-war levels. The gap is being partially filled – but not randomly, and not by whom one would expect.

Whoever reads the IEA report against the grain finds three breaks that together tell a coherent story. It is not the one in the press releases.

Break One: America Pumps While Asia Rations

US total oil production reached a new all-time high of 21.9 million barrels per day in April 2026. In a single week toward month-end, US crude exports reached 6.44 million barrels per day – the highest figure since records began in 1991. With crude imports of 5.75 million barrels per day, the United States was a net crude oil exporter in that week for the first time in more than 50 years.

This capacity is not there by accident. The Trump administration has systematically dismantled production constraints since taking office. The Environmental Protection Agency loosened its guidelines on gas flaring in the Permian Basin – the central associated gas curtailment issue that had limited shale oil production for years. In parallel, almost 800,000 barrels per day of new LPG export capacity is coming online in 2026 – liquefied gas docking capacity for tankers that had previously been missing.

The result stands in the numbers. US LPG exports rose in April by 20 percent to 2.7 million barrels per day – equivalent to 69 percent of total global seaborne LPG trade. On jet fuel, the picture is similar. The Middle East was the world’s largest net kerosene exporter in 2025 at 400,000 barrels per day. In April 2026, it was delivering 70,000. The US and Nigeria – whose Dangote refinery is ramping up at the right moment – are filling the gap. US jet exports to Europe rose in April by nearly 120,000 barrels per day. The capacity was there. It was waiting for its moment.

The counterimage is Asia. India’s LPG deliveries in April ran more than 40 percent below January–February levels, despite rising US exports. Geography argues against it: ports near Hormuz, alternative deliveries take over four weeks. LPG in India is primarily cooking gas for households. There are queues at filling stations. Rationing so far is confined to commercial users – but the pressure is growing. At the same time, the weak rupee is eroding purchasing power for international crude purchases, and foreign investors have pulled nearly $20 billion out of Indian equities in the first four months of 2026 – already exceeding the record outflow of the entire previous year. The Reserve Bank of India faces a choice that is no choice: if they support the rupee, growth goes under. If they let it fall, oil becomes unaffordable.

Pakistan, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka have introduced four-day work weeks – a reminder of the 2022 energy crisis, when the same countries slid into full balance-of-payments crises and came under IMF oversight. China has reduced its crude oil imports from February to April by 3.6 million barrels per day. The petrochemical industry – Beijing’s industrial backbone – is running on minimum. Gasoline prices were at 9.56 yuan per liter in mid-April, roughly 30 percent above pre-war levels and near the 2022 all-time high. Japan has suspended weekly reporting of product inventory levels since the war began. Korea, the world’s second-largest naphtha consumer, recorded a demand decline of over 8 percent in March.

While India waits for cooking gas, Texas is exporting at record levels. That is not a market. That is redistribution.

Break Two: The Sanctions Follow a Logic

Three Washington decisions in April 2026 that, viewed individually, look like contradictions – and together form an architecture.

On April 13, the US Navy erects a naval blockade against Iran. Not an embargo through tanker marking but physical control of vessels approaching Iranian ports. Iranian crude exports through the strait subsequently fall by 1.1 million barrels per day to 530,000 barrels in April. Maximum pressure, militarily enforced. The message to Tehran is unambiguous: revenues will be choked.

On that same day, April 13, Chevron raises its stake in Petroindependencia in Venezuela from 35.8 to 49 percent. Three days later, on April 16, Repsol assumes operational control of the Petroquiriquire oil field with plans to increase production by 50 percent within twelve months. On April 28, Eni begins lifting crude oil from Venezuela in exchange for gas production. In parallel, oilfield service companies mobilize drilling equipment from storage in eastern Venezuela and on Lake Maracaibo. Venezuelan crude exports reach 1.12 million barrels per day in April – the highest level since the first quarter of 2019. The annual forecast for Venezuelan oil supply is revised upward by 70,000 barrels per day in the current IEA report.

In the same month: Washington grants temporary sanctions relief for Russian oil at sea. The EU passes its 20th sanctions package against Moscow and places vessels, ports, and Indonesia’s Karimun oil transshipment terminal – known as a sanctions-evasion hub – on the prohibited list. The formal sanctions remain. The factual market access is opened. Russian export revenues rise in April to $19.2 billion – $6.28 billion more than in April 2025. The discount for Urals crude relative to North Sea Dated narrows from $28 per barrel in March to $23.94 in April. Russia is selling more and getting more per barrel. Both simultaneously, in a war Russia is not winning but can finance.

The war’s paradox extends further: Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian refineries at Tuapse, Perm, Yaroslavl, and Kirishi reduce domestic consumption – thereby freeing up more crude for export. Russia also gains new markets. Egypt becomes a strategic outlet: via the Ain Sukhna terminal at the entrance to the Sumed Pipeline, Russian flows rose to 200,000 barrels per day in April, with a peak of 380,000 barrels in a single week. What Kyiv books as a military success is converted in Moscow into revenue growth. Nobody planned it this way. But nobody is preventing it.

Three decisions in the same month. Iran is strangled, Venezuela is unblocked, Russia is waved through. This looks like contradictory chaos. It is hierarchy. Iran is the target – the primary strategic adversary whose revenues are to be choked. Russia is the instrument – short-term used as a market buffer to prevent an inflationary cascade. Venezuela is the replacement source – unblocked because the supply gap must be filled.

All three serve the same purpose. Securing oil supply without Gulf dependence, without China finding alternatives that ease US pressure. Washington did not unblock Venezuela for humanitarian reasons. Washington activated a supply alternative.

Anyone who claims this is coincidence must explain why all three decisions have the same address.

Break Three: The UAE Have Left the System

On April 28, 2026, the United Arab Emirates left OPEC. After nearly 60 years of membership. The announcement caught most observers by surprise. On closer inspection, it was overdue.

The UAE had already been OPEC’s most problematic member before the war. In 2025, they produced an average of 300,000 barrels per day above their OPEC+ quota. ADNOC, the state oil company, is pursuing a target of five million barrels per day by 2027 – and the infrastructure to get there had long since been built. An OPEC membership imposing production constraints stood directly in the way of this investment logic.

On May 4, Energy Minister Suhail Al Mazrouei explained the exit with a sentence that reveals the full weight of the move: the UAE owed it to their investors to produce without quota restrictions. Abu Dhabi subordinates OPEC solidarity to capital interests.

Five days earlier, on May 3, ADNOC had announced an investment package of 200 billion dirhams – roughly $55 billion – for the years 2026 to 2028. This is not crisis management. It is strategic positioning at a moment when the UAE possess one of the few functioning Hormuz bypass routes: the Habshan-Fujairah Pipeline, which transports crude from Abu Dhabi directly to the port of Fujairah on the Indian Ocean without passing through the Strait of Hormuz. In April, oil exports from Fujairah rose to 2.3 million barrels per day.

While the remaining Gulf states are stuck behind the closed strait, the UAE are exporting via the bypass route at capacity limits. They do not depend on the reopening. They are leaving the organization that had been slowing their investments – at a moment of strength.

Behind this strength lies an industrial-policy finding that is rarely named in Western reporting. Saudi Arabia, through its In-Kingdom Total Value Add program – IKTVA – has raised the local value content of oilfield equipment to 70 percent. The UAE have built an integrated domestic provider through ADNOC Drilling. Both countries can draw on domestic production capacity and repair yards when it comes to resuming output after the war ends. Kuwait and Iraq, by contrast, are dependent on imported equipment, foreign EPC capacity, and international service companies – whose expatriate staff were largely evacuated at the start of the war. That translates to weeks or months of additional recovery time. Industrial sovereignty determines who reclaims market position after the war – and who loses customers that have in the meantime built entirely different supply relationships.

The medium-term question raised by the UAE exit has teeth. If a founding member leaves because quota constraints threaten its investment returns – what prevents other members with similar capacity targets from doing the same? This question concerns Iraq and Saudi Arabia themselves over the medium term, once the Hormuz crisis ends and the price falls. Those who want to secure market share at that point will produce – and OPEC quotas will become fiction.

If a founding member leaves because quotas eat its returns – what holds the rest?

Assessment

Three breaks, one story. America wins – at record levels, with capacity that was not there by accident but was built up deliberately over years and is now translating the Hormuz shortfall into market share. The sanctions follow a hierarchy – Iran as target, Russia as instrument, Venezuela as replacement source, all three decisions in the same month, with the same address. The old order loses its first pillar – the UAE have left OPEC at a moment of strength, with a bypass route, a $55 billion investment package, and the open question of who goes next. Three independently observable facts that together point in the same direction.

This crisis is not a disruption of the system. It is the acceleration of a shift that had long begun. The United States was on its way to becoming a global energy exporter since the shale gas boom. The UAE built Habshan-Fujairah for years. Russia had shifted its customer base to Asia since 2022. What the Hormuz closure does is not create a new world. It forces the old one to show itself.

The International Energy Agency formulates its report in the restrained language of a technocratic institution. It speaks of market shifts, of Atlantic basin exports, of revised forecasts. It does not call what is happening by its name. Whoever places the numbers side by side – Iran blockade, Venezuela licenses, Russia waiver, US record exports, UAE exit, all in April 2026 – can find that name themselves. The report provides the material. The conclusion is for the reader to draw.

Don’t listen to what they say – watch what they do. What Washington did in April 2026 tells a story. It is not the one in the press releases. It is the one written in the shipping manifests, the license numbers, and the bypass pipelines.

For those interested in the topic and wanting to go deeper: a full in-depth analysis accompanies this briefing, covering Russia’s silent profit from the war, the refinery crisis as a second bottleneck, the mine problem in the base scenario, and the Atlantic basin rotation beyond Brazil, Canada, and Venezuela. Read more here “Who Profits from the Gulf War?“

First published at tkp.at on May 29, 2026

Michael Hollister
is a geopolitical analyst and investigative journalist. He served six years in the German military, including peacekeeping deployments in the Balkans (SFOR, KFOR), followed by 14 years in IT security management. His analysis draws on primary sources to examine European militarization, Western intervention policy, and shifting power dynamics across Asia. A particular focus of his work lies in Southeast Asia, where he investigates strategic dependencies, spheres of influence, and security architectures. Hollister combines operational insider perspective with uncompromising systemic critique-beyond opinion journalism. His work appears on his bilingual website (German/English) www.michael-hollister.com and in investigative outlets across the German-speaking world and the Anglosphere.

Sources

Full source list and further documentation in the in-depth analysis.

© Michael Hollister – All rights reserved. Redistribution, publication or reuse of this text requires express written permission from the author. For licensing inquiries, please contact the author via www.michael-hollister.com.

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