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OIL inched higher after plummeting on Wednesday, as President Donald Trump said the US is in the “final stages” with Iran.

Brent was above $105 a barrel after sliding 5.6% on Wednesday, while West Texas Intermediate traded near $99. Trump’s comments to reporters stoked hopes for a deal between Washington and Tehran that would see a near-term restart of energy flows through the critical Strait of Hormuz.

Conflicting headlines about the status of negotiations have buffeted oil this week, and prices are still more than 40% higher than when the war started at the end of February. Still, traders have consistently priced in the possibility of an abrupt deescalation, including a deal under which Iran reopens the key shipping lane and unlocks millions of barrels stuck in the Persian Gulf.

Though a peace deal with Iran stands to sink prices, “the physical markets are still in disarray,” said Joe DeLaura, global energy strategist at Rabobank. “It takes up to 55 days to get oil from the Persian Gulf to its destination, which means inventories will still be drawing during that period.”

Even if the Iran conflict ended immediately, Middle East oil flows would not fully recover until well into 2027, Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. Chief Executive Officer Sultan Al Jaber said Wednesday. The Strait of Hormuz closure was the most severe supply disruption on record, he said.

US crude stockpiles slid by about 7.9 million barrels last week, broadly in-line with earlier estimates from a widely followed industry group. Exports were shy of recent record-high levels, as overseas buyers stock up on American oil to offset disruptions to Middle East supply.

Some nascent signs of higher flows through the strait are also siphoning risk premium out of crude prices. Three oil supertankers appeared to attempt to cross the waterway, the latest in a small uptick in traffic after a relative lull in recent days. Iran claimed 26 ships passed in the last 24 hours, though it has previously suggested far larger transit numbers than ship-tracking indicates.

Trump said on Wednesday “we’ll see what happens” with Iran, adding that a deal will be made or “we’re going to do some things that are a little bit nasty, but hopefully that won’t happen.” He has repeatedly threatened to restart strikes on Iran if it doesn’t agree to his peace terms.

Iran is reviewing the US’s new draft in response to Tehran’s 14-point proposal and is yet to give a response, the semi-official Tasnim news agency reported, citing a source close to the country’s negotiating team. Earlier in the day, Iran warned it would retaliate beyond the Middle East if the US or Israel attacks it again. –BLOOMBERG

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NEW YORK – Elon Musk’s SpaceX is set for the debut launch of its latest Starship iteration on Thursday, testing the most powerful version yet of the megarocket as the company targets a blockbuster initial public offering.

The massive rocket is set to take off from its launchpad in southern Texas as early as 6:30 pm eastern (2230 GMT) amid high stakes for the space company.

The planned launch comes a day after SpaceX filed with US financial regulators to go public, likely in June, in what is expected to become a record IPO.

The filing provides potential investors with detailed financial information, risk factors and business strategy.

Thursday’s launch will also provide a live-streamed look at SpaceX’s progress in developing its enormous Starship rocket, a key component of its own ambitious plans as well as US space agency NASA’s program to return to the Moon.

It will be the 12th Starship flight, but the first in seven months.

The latest design is bigger than its predecessor, standing at about 407 feet (124 meters) tall when fully stacked.

The company, which aims to make Starship a fully reusable system, says the primary goal of Thursday’s mission is to demonstrate its redesigns in flight — and will not attempt to return its booster to the launch site for a catch.

Instead, the so-called “Super Heavy” booster will splash into the water off the coast.

The upper stage is to deploy a payload of 20 mock satellites and two “specially modified Starlink satellites” outfitted with cameras, which will analyze the spacecraft’s heat shield.

The test mission is meant to last approximately 65 minutes after liftoff, as the upper stage cruises on a suborbital trajectory and eventually splashes down in the Indian Ocean, if all goes to plan.

The most recent Starship missions have gone down as successful.

But previous tests have ended in spectacular explosions, including twice over the Caribbean and once after reaching space. Last June, the upper stage blew up in a ground test.

The new test is proceeding despite the recent death of a worker who reportedly fell from scaffolding at the Texas site.

‘Huge’ stakes

The test flight comes at a clutch moment for SpaceX, both as Musk plans the buzzy IPO and NASA eagerly awaits development of a viable lunar lander.

SpaceX is under contract with NASA to produce a modified version of Starship to serve as a landing system.

The US space agency’s Artemis program aims to return humans to the Moon as China forges ahead with a rival effort that’s targeting 2030 for its first crewed mission.

And given private sector delays, anxiety is rising within President Donald Trump’s administration that the US might not get there first.

The stakes of Thursday’s launch are “huge,” said physicist G. Scott Hubbard, a former director of NASA’s Ames Research Center.

“There’s a lot riding on this,” the astronautics expert, who is now at Stanford University, told AFP.

“The government made the decision to go with these arms-length contracts for the human landing system, and now these people have to perform.”

For Antoine Grenier, a partner and global head of space at the strategy consulting firm Analysys Mason, “if the launch goes without any issues, then it really paves the way for more space infrastructure and lunar contracts.”

Both SpaceX — and rival Blue Origin, the Jeff Bezos-owned firm also vying to develop a lunar lander — have realigned their strategies to prioritize projects related to Moon missions.

NASA is aiming to test an in-orbit rendezvous between the spacecraft and one or two lunar landers in 2027, and carry out a crewed lunar landing before the end of 2028.

But a lot needs to happen before then — and industry experts have voiced repeated skepticism that SpaceX and Blue Origin can achieve benchmarks in time.

A major hurdle is proving in-orbit refueling capabilities with super-cooled propellant — an essential but untested step for carrying out deep-space missions.

“Let’s hope they succeed,” Hubbard said, “but it’s a major engineering challenge.”

NASA is scheduled to give an update on their lunar exploration plans Tuesday. –AFP

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BANGKOK – The world built and commissioned more coal power in 2025, but used the polluting fuel less, with the United States the only major economy to substantially increase generation, analysis showed Thursday.

Coal is a key contributor to planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions, and phasing it out is crucial to taming climate change.

The growing affordability and abundance of renewable energy means solar and wind power can now cover growing electricity demand in much of the world.

That helped push coal generation down globally by 0.6 percent in 2025 from a year earlier, according to a new report from Global Energy Monitor, which has tracked coal power for more than a decade.

But despite the generation drop, coal power capacity — plants that came online or were commissioned — jumped 3.5 percent last year.

The overwhelming majority of that — 95 percent — was in China and India, GEM said.

China’s coal capacity grew six percent last year, but coal-powered electricity generation fell 1.2 percent, in part because of soaring renewable capacity.

The same was true in India, where capacity grew almost four percent, even as generation fell nearly three percent.

In both countries, “many of the provinces and states leading coal development are major coal-producing regions”, said Christine Shearer, project manager of GEM’s Global Coal Plant Tracker and author of the report.

They have “strong industrial incentives to keep building coal”, she told AFP.

Infographic on year-on year percent change in electricity generation from coal in 2025 in selected countries, according to EMBER Global Electricity Review 2026. (Graphic by Nicholas SHEARMAN and Janis LATVELS / AFP)

US actively increases coal

China is the world’s top emitter, while India ranks third behind the United States.

Beijing sees coal as a reliable failsafe for intermittent renewable supply, particularly for after power shortages several years ago.

India, the world’s most populous country, is leaning heavily on coal to meet soaring electricity demand.

But coal’s persistence is also the result of infrastructure issues.

Non-fossil fuels already account for 50 percent of India’s installed capacity, but infrastructure and other issues mean the country still generates around three-quarters of its electricity from coal.

Globally, the retirement of coal power also slowed last year, with nearly 70 percent of units that were due to end operations instead staying online, GEM said.

In Europe, those missed targets were linked primarily to decisions taken during the 2022-23 energy crisis caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

In the United States however, retirement delays were due to a government push for coal, said Shearer.

“US coal-fired generation rose by more than 80 TWh (terawatt hours) year-on-year, a figure so large that no other country came close,” she said.

The surge “was not simply a function of (demand) growth, it reflected a policy environment that actively encouraged it,” she added.

Coal ‘favouritism’

The energy crisis sparked by the US-Israeli war with Iran has seen some countries turn back to coal, reactivating idle coal units or delaying retirements.

In China, coal-fired power generation also jumped in the first part of the year, in part due to “underperformance” by wind and nuclear.

“But the oversupply and favouritism of coal power is an important factor,” added Lauri Myllyvirta, co-founder of the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, and contributor to the report.

While figures from May suggest China’s coal generation may have dropped again, “the problem of excess coal capacity and entrenched favouritism of coal in the grid remain”, he told AFP.

Globally, coal-fired generation has risen 0.3 percent so far this year, Shearer said, while wind and solar generation has jumped 10 percent.

“Clean energy is absorbing most of the world’s new electricity demand, with coal barely growing at all,” she said. –AFP

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For crucial resources such as antimony, EU nations appear unable put up the money and act, leaving projects such as Trojarova open to being snapped up by rivals 

by JENNY LEONARD 

FOR the European Union (EU), the fate of a Cold War-era mine near Bratislava is becoming a litmus test for its ambition to break free from China’s chokehold over critical minerals. 

Sitting in a wooded range of hills in Slovakia known as the Little Carpathians, the so-called Trojarova project is where Soviet engineers first discovered a rich seam of antimony in the 1980s. Its owners, Canada-based Military Metals Corp, are pitching the facility as a chance for Europe to secure access to an uncommon metal used in military equipment. 

For crucial resources such as antimony, EU nations appear unable put up the money and act, leaving projects such as Trojarova open to being snapped up by rivals. So far, Military Metals hasn’t secured an offtake agreement from the bloc. 

As US President Donald Trump attended the summit talks in Beijing last week — and threatened to raise tariffs on Europe — the project serves to illustrate the dangers of getting left behind in a hotly contested race between superpowers. 

China imposed sweeping export controls on most critical minerals and rare earths last year. While the US has aggressively pursued partnerships with resource-rich nations and funded projects all over the world to catch up, Europe has lagged. 

“Member states are still reluctant to pool resources for mining and processing projects beyond their borders, even as geo-economic realities demand it,” said Sabrina Schulz, Germany director at the European Initiative for Energy Security (EIES). “Financing remains the central bottleneck.” 

The mine was first discovered and developed by the Soviets

The bloc’s formal strategy was articulated in the European Critical Raw Materials Act of 2023, which set targets that included extracting at least 10% of annual consumption of key elements, and processing 40% of them. Those goals spurred action to identify vulnerabilities and to funnel investment to securing supplies of metals crucial for batteries such as lithium. 

Global rivals have since pivoted toward resources with military uses such as antimony, gallium and germanium, but Europe has yet to follow suit. Brussels officials don’t have a mandate to pursue similar policies to the US, and lack money, people familiar with the internal deliberations said. 

That leaves niche mining projects owned by thinly capitalised companies struggling to take off, not least because of the difficulty for them to raise finance in private markets. 

With Europe, budgets are stretched, and many EU countries are unsure on how to engage. For example, in Germany there still isn’t consensus between the Economy Ministry, chancellery and Foreign Ministry of what exactly a de-risking strategy in critical minerals actually entails, the people said. 

The result is an administrative impasse that leaves European officials worried about getting squeezed, with the feeling in Brussels and in capitals described as a fear of missing out. 

Fretting about being left out of any deal Trump might cut with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping in their upcoming summit, the bloc last month reached an accord with the US to coordinate on policies to build secure critical minerals supply chains. For Military Metals, that’s a positive development that could result in joint US-EU investment and offtake partnerships for Trojarova. 

Frank Hartmann, the official responsible for Asia at the German Foreign Ministry, told a March 24 event in Berlin that Europe is being too slow and operating on a “too limited scale.” 

“What we have to do is longterm strategy, take money and funds into our hands to invest in these critical mineral funds for the next 10 years,” he said on a panel hosted by the German Council on Foreign Relations. “Otherwise, we never escape this dependency trap.” 

The Trojarova project, acquired almost two years ago by Military Metals, epitomises the challenge. The mineshaft there, protruding deep into the hillside, heads toward a murky gloom that seems endless, but a potentially bountiful opportunity might lurk within. 

A shiny white metal that is often explored for alongside gold, antimony is largely found in China, Russia and Tajikistan. It’s essential for military applications such as munitions, night vision goggles and infrared sensors, which make up as much as 15% of demand. Other uses encompass fire retardants, and nuclear and renewable energy (RE). 

“Antimony is a textbook example of a small-volume mineral with outsized strategic impact,” said Schulz at the EIES. “Europe is almost entirely import-dependent, and supply is highly concentrated.” 

She highlighted that China controls almost 80% of processing, pointing to another challenge. The Asian behemoth is pivotal not only as a source of such raw materials, but also as a refining hub. That’s one reason why Military Metals is pitching Trojarova’s riches to investors as a chance for Europe to catch up, with plans to produce ingots that can go direct to defence clients. 

Alternatively, refining in Germany and Sweden could assist in smelting, meaning the facility could ultimately help establish an entire supply chain, from mining and processing, according to CEO Scott Eldridge. 

The mine, situated near the winemaking town of Pezinok in southwestern Slovakia, was first discovered and developed by the Soviets. When the Iron Curtain fell, the 1.7 kilometres (km) long excavation was abandoned, but it remained one of Europe’s most significant deposits of antimony. 

Military Metals is too small a company to scale up the project on its own, and needs partners to invest and help develop an associated refining capacity. If activated, it could supply as much as a third of the continent’s annual demand, totalling about 6,000 tonnes, and be up and running in two or three years. 

But the company — which has a market capitalisation of less than US$30 million (RM117.87 million) — would need substantial funding. 

Moreover, critical minerals are prone to wild price swings, and even in markets like lithium, several major projects have stalled as owners sought out government funding. 

Military Metals Corp are pitching the facility as a chance for Europe to secure access to the uncommon metal antimony, used in military equipment

Whatever the merits of the company’s business case here, Europe’s money and resolve to secure such resources remain lacking. Germany’s own €1 billion (RM4.61 billion) raw materials fund has only supported two projects so far and creates more hurdles for companies to qualify than it eliminates. 

The EU Commission and member states have signed memoranda with producer countries — Spain agreed one with Brazil last month, for example — but US deals with the same countries are often bigger in funding terms and more ambitious on timelines for operationalising the plans. 

The Trump administration’s agreement with the EU reflects its push for so-called price floors, which guarantee minimum prices for producers that can’t be undercut by Beijing. European countries have been hesitant, but at some point might have little choice but to go along with the US-led initiative. 

Meanwhile the region’s momentum to act has essentially taken a backseat to other more urgent crises. By contrast, despite the Trump administration’s recent focus on conflicts such as the Iran war, the president’s team of aides has been busy identifying mineral projects and bidding to secure them. 

One American company has already approached Military Metals and asked to see the Trojarova project. Meanwhile just last month, the US government’s investment arm agreed on a US$5 million deal to restart another dormant antimony mine in Northern Macedonia. 

Thomas Hüser, the chairman of Military Metals, would like to prevent a similar outcome for Trojarova. The German native joined the company this year and was formerly a Glencore plc manager. 

“What we are still lacking is not ambition, but execution,” he said. “Europe’s raw materials strategy remains fragmented, slow and often disconnected from industrial reality.” — Bloomberg

• This article first appeared in The Malaysian Reserve weekly print edition

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