IEA revises down 2026 oil demand forecast

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IEA revises down 2026 oil demand forecast

Global oil supply, market balance tighten Global oil supply increased by 2.4 million b/d in July to 101.5 million b/d but remained 6.3 million b/d lower than the same period last year, with 8.3 million b/d of production still shut down in the Gulf region. “Renewed hostilities and maritime disruptions in July and early August […]

Global oil supply, market balance tighten

Global oil supply increased by 2.4 million b/d in July to 101.5 million b/d but remained 6.3 million b/d lower than the same period last year, with 8.3 million b/d of production still shut down in the Gulf region.

“Renewed hostilities and maritime disruptions in July and early August undermined the recovery efforts, reducing projected third-quarter 2026 oil supply by 1.7 million b/d compared with last month’s report,” IEA said. Global oil supply is now projected to decline by 4.3 million b/d on average in 2026 and rebound by 8.3 million b/d next year to 110.3 million b/d.

The global oil balance is now expected to show a deficit of 1.8 million b/d in third-quarter 2026, IEA said, more than double the estimate of around 800,000 b/d in last month’s report.

“Although the market is projected to return to surplus towards the end of this year, risks remain substantial and the urgency of reopening the Strait has increased, as previously available inventory buffers are rapidly depleting,” IEA said.

Refinery runs remain under pressure

Global refinery crude throughputs increased further in July, but remained nearly 5 million b/d lower than the same period last year, at 80.9 million b/d. Continued disruptions to Middle Eastern refined product exports and attacks on Russian refineries are expected to lead to a further decline of 370,000 b/d in refinery utilization rates in the third quarter of 2026.

Global throughputs are currently projected to decline by an average of 2.5 million b/d in 2026, before rebounding by 3.5 million b/d in 2027. Tightening supply in the light and medium distillate markets has pushed up crack spreads and margins in the Atlantic Basin to record highs.

Global monitored crude oil inventories plunged by 69 million b/d in July, due to renewed disruptions to exports from the Gulf and Caspian Sea regions, resulting in a significant decrease in offshore crude oil volumes. Meanwhile, due to a slowdown in the IEA emergency inventory releases and a continued decline in Chinese crude oil inventories, onshore crude oil inventories decreased only slightly by 6 million bbl. Currently, globally observed crude oil inventories are slightly below 7.9 billion bbl, a decrease of 410 million bbl since the outbreak of the war.

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Cisco rides ‘networking supercycle’ for strong Q4

Security revenue grew 14% year-over-year in Q4, with more than 1,500 customers adopting new products such as Secure Access, XDR, HyperShield, and AI Defense, bringing the total new customer count for these products to 6,400 since launch, Robbins noted. Firewall orders increased more than 30%, and AI security features like AI

Equinor lets stimulation service contract for NCS assets

Phillips 66, Kinder Morgan, HF Sinclair sanction Western Gateway pipeline

The partners will own 49.9%, 35.1%, and 15.0% of the venture, respectively. Western Gateway will create a new refined products transportation corridor linking St. Louis and expanded Gulf Coast supply points with markets in Arizona and California. The 1,300-mile system is designed for an initial capacity of 230,000 b/d and

Venture Global sees shift coming in ratio of capex to cash flows

The leaders of Venture Global Inc., Arlington, Va., have nudged their 2026 capital spending guidance to the top of their previous range but on Aug. 11 told investors that future investments will shrink relative to the cash flows from the company’s LNG plants. Chief executive officer Mike Sabel and his

Energy Secretary Announces Cancellation of Three Proposed National Interest Electric Transmission Corridors

WASHINGTON—U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright today announced that the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) will not move forward with designating the three proposed National Interest Electric Transmission Corridors (NIETCs) previously selected in December 2024 to advance in the review process. “Extensive review, including public feedback and stakeholder input, made clear that the current designation process for these three proposed transmission corridors should not continue,” said Secretary Wright. “Transmission policy must serve the American people—not special interests or a climate-alarmist agenda that drives up costs, worsens reliability, and disregards the concerns of local communities. The Trump Administration is committed to strengthening America’s electric grid with common-sense policies that prioritize delivering affordable, reliable, and secure electricity to American families and businesses.” The previous administration touted the Lake Erie–Canada Corridor, the Southwestern Grid Connector Corridor, and the Tribal Energy Access Corridor, as a means to advance their Green New Scam agenda and “accelerate decarbonization.” As the process unfolded, the current designation framework proved ineffective in strengthening grid reliability and reducing electricity costs. In some communities, it also contributed to confusion and concern about the scope and intent of NIETC authority. Thanks to President Trump and Secretary Wright, DOE has already taken numerous steps to build new transmission infrastructure and modernize existing infrastructure, including: In October 2025, DOE’s Office of Energy Dominance Financing (EDF) closed a $1.6 billion loan guarantee to AEP Transmission to reconductor and rebuild nearly 5,000 miles of transmission lines across five states. In February 2026, DOE’s Office of Energy Dominance Financing (EDF) closed $26.5 billion in loans to Southern Company subsidiaries Georgia power and Alabama Power to support generation and grid investments, including more than 1,300 miles of transmission and grid enhancement projects. In March 2026, DOE’s Office of Electricity (OE) announced the $1.9 billion SPARK funding opportunity to

Permian Resources lifts forecast on working interest gains, acquisitions

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Canada rig count down 3 units

The rig count in Canada fell by 3 units to 216 rigs working for the week ended Aug. 7, according to data from Baker Hughes. A 4-rig drop in oil-directed rigs in Canada was partially offset by a 2-unit gain in gas-directed rigs. There were 146 oil-directed rigs working in Canada this week, while those drilling for gas ended the week at 65 units working. The overall US drilling rig count was unchanged this week at 588 rigs working. That number is up 49 units from this time last year. In the US, 3 additional rigs were drilling for oil, bringing the total count to 454. That number is up 43 units from this time last year. The number of gas-directed rigs fell by 3 to 124 working for the week. This time last year, 123 rigs were drilling for gas in the US. There were 572 rigs drilling on US land this week, unchanged from last week and up 48 from the year-ago period. A 1-rig increase in offshore rigs offset a 1-unit decrease in rigs drilling in inland waters. There were 14 rigs drilling offshore and 2 in inland waters this week. Leading the major oil-and gas-producing states was Texas with a 2-unit gain to end the week with 275 rigs working. The count is up 32 units from this time in 2025. Pennsylvania and Wyoming each dropped a rig to bring the respective rig counts to 16 and 15 for the week.

Orlen’s Mažeikiai refinery to benefit from renewable electricity

Orlen SA has brought a 42.2-Mw solar photovoltaic (PV) farm online to supply renewable energy that will help to power operations at subsidiary Orlen Lietuva AB’s 10.4-million tonne/year refinery in Mažeikiai, Lithuania. Operable as of Aug. 11 and designed to generate about 45 gigawatt-hours (Gw-hr)/year of electricity, the Mažeikiai solar farm aims to reduce the refinery’s electricity procurement costs by about €4 million/year while supporting Orlen’s goal of increasing the share of renewables across its portfolio, the company said. Located on site across 60 hectares on the refinery’s grounds, the solar farm consists of about 68,000 bifacial photovoltaic modules. Each module is rated at 620 w, the bifacial design of the modules enabling the capture of sunlight on both sides to improve energy output during lower-light conditions on cloudy days, according to Orlen. The solar PV farm’s generation of about 45 Gw-hr of electricity will cover roughly 7% of the Mažeikiai manufacturing complex, where it will be dedicated to supplying power for day-to-day refinery operations, office buildings, and other critical infrastructure at the site. Completed at an overall investment of nearly €35 million, Orlen said the solar farm project received €2.5 million in support from the European Union’s Modernization Fund. Energy transition, efficiency Alongside strengthening the refinery’s energy security by providing an on-site source of reliable electricity, the new solar farm advances Orlen’s commitment to advancing regional energy transition initiatives. “This is an important step towards reducing the environmental impact of our operations and lowering the [Mažeikiai] refinery’s operating costs,” said Dariusz Zonenberg, Orlen Lietuva’s chief executive officer. “The project will increase the share of Orlen Lietuva’s electricity demand met by its own renewable generation, strengthening the company’s competitiveness and supporting the Orlen Group’s long-term strategy,” Zonenberg added. Orlen said the project supports its 2035 strategy to expand renewable energy

ADNOC Gas advances its largest-ever gas processing expansion

Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. (ADNOC) subsidiary ADNOC Gas PLC has let a contract to Tecnimont SPA—a subsidiary of Maire SPA—to provide a suite of services for the third phase of the operator’s broader multibillion-dollar, multiphased Rich Gas Development (RGD) project that aims to expand the company’s natural gas processing capacity to meet rising energy demand and secure the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) reliability as a global energy supplier. As part of the $4.3-billion contract officially revealed on Aug. 10 following intimations to the market in releases dated June 4 and May 20 that withheld the identity of the operator and project, Tecnimont will deliver engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) services for ADNOC Gas’ RGD Phase 3 expansion involving the addition of a fifth NGL fractionation unit at the Ruwais NGL complex in Abu Dhabi, Maire said. Alongside the NGL fractionation unit designed to separate various hydrocarbon components, as well as treatment and sweetening systems to remove impurities and ensure product quality, Maire confirmed Tecnimont’s scope of work also will cover EPC for a new regeneration gas treatment unit, a propane refrigeration system, ancillary systems, and associated storage installations of the RGD Phase 3 project. Scheduled for completion in 2030, the Phase 3 plant will have an output capacity of 23,000 tonnes/day, equivalent to about 8 million tonnes/year (tpy), according to the service provider. Confirmation of the Phase 3 contract award follows ADNOC Gas’ announcement earlier on Aug. 10 that it had taken final investment decision on both Phase 2 and Phase 3 of the RGD project, including the operator’s separate and concurrent award to Wison Engineering Ltd. for the project’s second phase. As part of the $3.9-billion RGD Phase 3 contract, Wison Engineering will deliver EPC services for a new 670-MMcfd natural gas processing train at the operator’s Habshan

Sonangol flow tests first non-associated gas reservoir in Angola

Sonangol Exploração & Produção completed drilling and testing of the Katambi-2 appraisal well in Block 24 of Benguela basin, offshore Angola, the National Oil, Gas, and Biofuels Agency (ANPG) said Aug. 6. Drilled 1.3 km from the Katambi-1 well, the Katambi-2 well crossed two production intervals, with about 331 m of total thickness, confirming the existence of good quality reservoirs. The intervals have 9-12% average porosity and good permeability, higher than that recorded in the Katambi-1 well drilled in 2014-2015. Initial tests recorded a stabilized production of 41 MMscfd of gas and 1,160 b/d condensate without water or H2S, reinforcing the economic viability of the development of the discovery and its potential contribution to the optimization of national production. This is the first full flow test carried out in a non-associated gas reservoir in Angola. A preliminary assessment of the test results indicated that the well has the potential to produce more than 100 MMscfd. Block 24 lies 370 km southwest of Luanda. Sonagol is operator of the block.

Five takeaways from Cisco’s Q4 and what they mean for IT pros

1. Agentic AI is driving a “networking supercycle” During the call, CEO Chuck Robbins repeatedly emphasized that accelerating agentic AI adoption is fueling a long-term “networking supercycle.” For years, network traffic was predictable: client-to-server or standard east-west data center traffic. Agentic AI upends those legacy traffic models. Autonomous AI agents interact continuously with application programming interfaces (API), databases, vector search engines, and other agents, driving massive increases in lateral bandwidth requirements and imposing strict low-latency constraints. Furthermore, as AI models grow in size, physical data center boundaries are proving insufficient. Hyperscalers and large enterprises are adopting scale-across architectures that link multiple physical data centers, enabling distributed GPUs to operate as a single logical cluster. Cisco noted that network traffic in scale-across environments is roughly 14 times higher than in traditional data center interconnects. What it means for IT pros: If your team still treats network capacity planning as an annual incremental upgrade, you will be left behind. Agentic workflows will overwhelm LANs, WANs, and data center networks with unprecedented volumes of multidirectional traffic. Network architects must immediately evaluate non-blocking topologies, high-density 400G/800G switching, and deterministic networking to prevent enterprise AI initiatives from stalling at the transport layer.

North American data center vacancy holds at just 1%

The shift is being driven largely by the industry’s growing need for electricity, land and infrastructure. Traditional markets such as Northern Virginia have become increasingly difficult to expand because of power constraints, land availability and lengthy utility interconnection timelines. But JLL cautioned that the industry’s continued expansion will depend increasingly on winning public support, at a time of significant pushback from residents. “Supporting the next phase of growth will depend on building trust, addressing local concerns and delivering lasting benefits to host communities,” the report said. In addition to residential pushback, power availability is becoming increasingly scarce. In primary data center markets, the average wait for a grid connection can exceed four years, pushing operators toward on-site generation, battery storage and other alternatives.

IT infrastructure shortages are real and lasting. Here’s how to cope

Look at alternatives, including AMD and cloud solutions, while staying mindful of how it all plays together. You may not be able to get Nvidia GPUs, but AWS, Azure, and Oracle Cloud have them, Kimball notes. Be strategic, perhaps by using cloud offerings to handle certain tuning or inference workloads, then bringing them back in-house when appropriate. “Have a better understanding of what absolutely has to be on prem and what can be in the cloud,” he says. That’s good advice, says Backblaze’s Thomas. When it comes to AI, think about performance tiers and the range of use cases you have. They don’t all need top-tier performance. “People get wrapped around axle of needing the top end. There’s a lot of flexibility in the edges, innovation in different hardware and software,” Thomas says. Gartner likewise advises companies to increase configuration flexibility and expand sourcing paths. That may include buying from secondary markets and lease-return programs to preserve continuity with existing infrastructure until the shortages pass, Forest says. Get started somewhere Even if you can’t acquire or have to wait for the infrastructure you need, don’t let that keep you from getting started with AI or other modernization projects. Options include public cloud and neocloud providers, Anderson says. WWT also provides capacity in its own lab so customers can get started with proof-of-concept projects. “Don’t just throw your hands up. We can help you find access to capacity,” Anderson says. “Production-scale AI may be delayed, but don’t let that derail your strategy.” Colocation providers may likewise be an option, especially if enterprises are struggling to acquire high-end networking equipment. Networking is a key value proposition for colocation providers, in that they have built-in connections to various cloud providers and other ecosystem players. Equinix, for example, has 280 data centers in 77 metropolitan

Polish data center plans to send its waste heat to the neighbors

As Europe swelters in a heatwave, residents probably don’t want to hear about ways to make their homes even hotter, but that’s what Polish property developer Citylink is talking about, with plans to dump waste heat from a new data center in Wrocław into the municipal district heating network. Citylink is designing the data center so that heat from servers can be recovered instead of being dissipated via cooling systems — and as the data center grows, any increase in computing power will mean more energy available for recovery. The collaboration with local power company Kogeneracja will provide “valuable experience in designing and operating modern data centers, with a particular focus on infrastructure dedicated to AI nodes,” said Michał Starybrat, development director at Citylink.

The Data Center Industry’s Permission to Build

The data center industry has spent the past several years announcing the future. Gigawatts. AI factories. New regions. New power architectures. Campuses at a scale that would have seemed extraordinary before generative AI reset the industry’s expectations. Now the public has entered the room. Communities are asking harder questions about who pays for electrical infrastructure, where the water comes from, how much noise reaches neighboring properties and what remains locally after construction crews leave. Utilities are being pressed to protect ratepayers from speculative load and costly system upgrades. Elected officials who once treated data centers primarily as economic-development wins are finding that the politics have changed. The defining question is no longer whether demand is real. It is whether the data center industry can keep earning the permission required to build at the scale it has promised. I mean permission in a broader sense than zoning approval, an environmental permit or a signed utility agreement. I mean the political and social room to develop infrastructure measured in hundreds of megawatts and billions of dollars—often in places whose residents have only recently begun to understand what is being proposed around them. That room is narrowing. A Different Kind of Constraint On July 18, opponents organized 142 demonstrations across 42 states in what Reuters described as the first coordinated national protest against the data center buildout. The movement crossed familiar political boundaries, bringing together environmental advocates, rural landowners and residents concerned about power prices, water, noise and the pace of development. A June Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 57% of respondents would oppose a data center in their community. Only 14% said they would be comfortable with one nearby. Those findings deserve the industry’s full attention. New York has imposed a one-year pause on certain environmental approvals for new hyperscale data centers while

NVIDIA’s Reported $50B Lease and the Nuclear-Powered AI Factory

Aalo and Crusoe Pursue the Nuclear-Powered AI Factory The Aalo-Crusoe partnership addresses the industry’s power problem by bringing power generation directly to the compute. In this case, skipping intermediary power stages such as minimal grid or custom BTM gas turbine solutions and going straight to nuclear. Aalo Atomics and Crusoe said they plan to deploy a Crusoe Spark modular data center running Crusoe Cloud at Idaho National Laboratory in 2027. The proof-of-concept project is intended to demonstrate an AI workload operating on power from an Aalo advanced reactor. Crusoe continues to expand their other data center campus projects. The companies then intend to deploy Aalo Pods, Aalo’s 50-megawatt-electric nuclear power plants, at Crusoe data centers by the end of 2029. Aalo has already begun work on a second reactor beside its initial test unit at the Idaho site. That reactor is expected to produce electricity for the Crusoe installation. On July 4, 2026, Aalo’s zero-power Critical Test Reactor reached criticality, sustaining a nuclear chain reaction without generating commercial electricity. The test reactor contains a full-scale core and components analogous to those planned for the 10-megawatt-electric Aalo-X power reactor being built next door, but it operates before sodium coolant and electricity-generating systems are added. Aalo plans to continue experiments with the Critical Test Reactor to refine its reactor-physics models, characterize control behavior and generate data supporting development and licensing of the full-power Aalo-X system. Advanced nuclear announcements sometimes blur the line between a successful test, an electricity-producing demonstration and a commercially licensed fleet. Aalo has achieved an important technical milestone, but substantial work remains before reactors can be manufactured, licensed, financed and operated at commercial data center sites. The pairing with Crusoe should be noted because it connects a reactor developer with a company that can provide the data center load,

Microsoft will invest $80B in AI data centers in fiscal 2025

And Microsoft isn’t the only one that is ramping up its investments into AI-enabled data centers. Rival cloud service providers are all investing in either upgrading or opening new data centers to capture a larger chunk of business from developers and users of large language models (LLMs). In a report published in October 2024, Bloomberg Intelligence estimated that demand for generative AI would push Microsoft, AWS, Google, Oracle, Meta, and Apple would between them devote $200 billion to capex in 2025, up from $110 billion in 2023. Microsoft is one of the biggest spenders, followed closely by Google and AWS, Bloomberg Intelligence said. Its estimate of Microsoft’s capital spending on AI, at $62.4 billion for calendar 2025, is lower than Smith’s claim that the company will invest $80 billion in the fiscal year to June 30, 2025. Both figures, though, are way higher than Microsoft’s 2020 capital expenditure of “just” $17.6 billion. The majority of the increased spending is tied to cloud services and the expansion of AI infrastructure needed to provide compute capacity for OpenAI workloads. Separately, last October Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said his company planned total capex spend of $75 billion in 2024 and even more in 2025, with much of it going to AWS, its cloud computing division.

John Deere unveils more autonomous farm machines to address skill labor shortage

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Self-driving tractors might be the path to self-driving cars. John Deere has revealed a new line of autonomous machines and tech across agriculture, construction and commercial landscaping. The Moline, Illinois-based John Deere has been in business for 187 years, yet it’s been a regular as a non-tech company showing off technology at the big tech trade show in Las Vegas and is back at CES 2025 with more autonomous tractors and other vehicles. This is not something we usually cover, but John Deere has a lot of data that is interesting in the big picture of tech. The message from the company is that there aren’t enough skilled farm laborers to do the work that its customers need. It’s been a challenge for most of the last two decades, said Jahmy Hindman, CTO at John Deere, in a briefing. Much of the tech will come this fall and after that. He noted that the average farmer in the U.S. is over 58 and works 12 to 18 hours a day to grow food for us. And he said the American Farm Bureau Federation estimates there are roughly 2.4 million farm jobs that need to be filled annually; and the agricultural work force continues to shrink. (This is my hint to the anti-immigration crowd). John Deere’s autonomous 9RX Tractor. Farmers can oversee it using an app. While each of these industries experiences their own set of challenges, a commonality across all is skilled labor availability. In construction, about 80% percent of contractors struggle to find skilled labor. And in commercial landscaping, 86% of landscaping business owners can’t find labor to fill open positions, he said. “They have to figure out how to do

2025 playbook for enterprise AI success, from agents to evals

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More 2025 is poised to be a pivotal year for enterprise AI. The past year has seen rapid innovation, and this year will see the same. This has made it more critical than ever to revisit your AI strategy to stay competitive and create value for your customers. From scaling AI agents to optimizing costs, here are the five critical areas enterprises should prioritize for their AI strategy this year. 1. Agents: the next generation of automation AI agents are no longer theoretical. In 2025, they’re indispensable tools for enterprises looking to streamline operations and enhance customer interactions. Unlike traditional software, agents powered by large language models (LLMs) can make nuanced decisions, navigate complex multi-step tasks, and integrate seamlessly with tools and APIs. At the start of 2024, agents were not ready for prime time, making frustrating mistakes like hallucinating URLs. They started getting better as frontier large language models themselves improved. “Let me put it this way,” said Sam Witteveen, cofounder of Red Dragon, a company that develops agents for companies, and that recently reviewed the 48 agents it built last year. “Interestingly, the ones that we built at the start of the year, a lot of those worked way better at the end of the year just because the models got better.” Witteveen shared this in the video podcast we filmed to discuss these five big trends in detail. Models are getting better and hallucinating less, and they’re also being trained to do agentic tasks. Another feature that the model providers are researching is a way to use the LLM as a judge, and as models get cheaper (something we’ll cover below), companies can use three or more models to

OpenAI’s red teaming innovations define new essentials for security leaders in the AI era

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More OpenAI has taken a more aggressive approach to red teaming than its AI competitors, demonstrating its security teams’ advanced capabilities in two areas: multi-step reinforcement and external red teaming. OpenAI recently released two papers that set a new competitive standard for improving the quality, reliability and safety of AI models in these two techniques and more. The first paper, “OpenAI’s Approach to External Red Teaming for AI Models and Systems,” reports that specialized teams outside the company have proven effective in uncovering vulnerabilities that might otherwise have made it into a released model because in-house testing techniques may have missed them. In the second paper, “Diverse and Effective Red Teaming with Auto-Generated Rewards and Multi-Step Reinforcement Learning,” OpenAI introduces an automated framework that relies on iterative reinforcement learning to generate a broad spectrum of novel, wide-ranging attacks. Going all-in on red teaming pays practical, competitive dividends It’s encouraging to see competitive intensity in red teaming growing among AI companies. When Anthropic released its AI red team guidelines in June of last year, it joined AI providers including Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, and even the U.S.’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which all had released red teaming frameworks. Investing heavily in red teaming yields tangible benefits for security leaders in any organization. OpenAI’s paper on external red teaming provides a detailed analysis of how the company strives to create specialized external teams that include cybersecurity and subject matter experts. The goal is to see if knowledgeable external teams can defeat models’ security perimeters and find gaps in their security, biases and controls that prompt-based testing couldn’t find. What makes OpenAI’s recent papers noteworthy is how well they define using human-in-the-middle

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