The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - The Energy Crisis: Downstream Impacts || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: April 15, 2026

The global energy crisis has moved from theoretical to very real. As the last shipments sent before the war begin to arrive, we are now hitting a turning point in the energy crisis. Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihan Full Newsletter: https://bit.ly/4sodi9N

For those with type 2 diabetes or high blood pressure, you may be missing a hidden signal from your kidneys, an SOS for an increased risk of cardiovascular events like heart attack or stroke. The mission? Detect the SOS. Start at DetecttheSOS.com. Learn how a simple UACR urine test can help identify kidney damage early. Talk to your doctor about getting screened. Go to Detect TheSOS.com to learn more about UACR urine testing today. Brought to you by Beringer-Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

Hey, Peter Zine here, coming to you from Colorado. Yesterday, we talked about what was going on with energy markets, primarily in the upstream, dealing with disruptions out of Russia and Iran. Short version, it's pretty bad, it's getting worse. Now I wanted to deal with things that are closer to the consumer where it's pretty bad and getting worse. It has now been five weeks, which means that there's a half a billion barrels of crude oil that hasn't made it to market. The final tankers from pre-war shipments from the Persian Gulf arrived in all of Asia last week. The final tankers will arrive in Europe this week. And starting next week, the disruptions from what the Ukrainians are doing to Russian oil exports will start to affect Europe as well. A mix of things here. Let's start with who's feeling what.

Because of the shortages in Asia, we already have widespread rationing. and the development of black markets. It's affecting different countries in different ways. So, for example, India has gorged on the thin stream of raining crude that's coming out and the legalization by the Americans of Russian crude that is out and about. And that has allowed them to avoid any sort of direct energy crisis as regards to oil and oil derivatives. However, almost all of their cooking, well, I shouldn't say all, but for about half the population, their cooking is done with propane, liquidified petroleum gas.

That is exclusively produced for them in the Persian Gulf. That has gone to zero. And so now they're seeing an energy shortage in that regard. Places like New Zealand and Thailand and Taiwan and the Philippines and Vietnam are all experience a degree of energy shortages and rationing already. The country that is most panicked and should be is Korea because their options are very, very limited and they're a major industrial player. Japan at the moment is avoiding this largely because they have access.

to sources from the Western Hemisphere and a Navy that can protect them if it comes to that. And at the moment the Chinese are okay, not because they're not experiencing an energy shortage. They absolutely are. But China has an overbuild of refineries. And so part of their economic model was to build refineries, absorb, crubed from a broad, refined into fuel, and then export that fuel. And so the way the Chinese have avoided an energy crisis by stop exporting fuel. So at the moment, China is okay, but those fuel exports now have stopped arriving in various places. And countries like Australia and New Zealand, which used to get their fuel from China, their refined fuel, suddenly aren't. So we have a different sort of rationing and energy crisis.

In Europe, it's going to hit them from multiple angles, but they do have a little bit more time. Like I said, the last tankers from pre-war Persian Gulf exports arrived this week. So it's only now that the crunch really begins. The problem will be in two or three weeks, because, They have this weird little setup where Russian crude can't be bought in Europe, but it's exported somewhere else refined a product and shipped back. So we're now starting the fuse on that. And in three weeks, the Russians will basically be a non-factor in European energy.

At the same time, the Persian Gulf becomes a non-factor in energy. And it's going to be a mess all around. A couple other things. Number one, there are more ships leaving the Persian Gulf. We saw 20 to 30 on both Saturday and Sunday, which brings up us to about one-fifth of pre-war levels. The difference is Oman, which is the country that controls the southern side of the strait. Last week we talked about how the Iranians had set up a toll booth system when we're charging about $2 million per vessel and then kind of sort of escorting ships through the northern part of the Strait of Hormuz in their territory. Oman's now doing the same thing in the south.

basically tankers, ships, whatever they happen to be, are either reflagging or changing the transponders to say Omani owned. And Oman has always been kind of the neutral power in the Persian Gulf. The Iranians have always kind of considered it in a different basket compared to Kuwait, Bahrain, Gutter, and Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which are more in the American camp. So far, the Iranians have not targeted these Omani vessels. I'm not saying that this is a safe path. It's not. but it has allowed some ships to get out. I will underline, however, that almost all of the ships that are using this route are leaving.

Very, very, very few are coming in. Those that are typically Iranian flagged using the northern route. So of the two, 300 ships that were stuck in the Gulf before, some of them are getting out, nobody's going back in. And that means that the oil production, even if it continued, even if it wasn't damaged,

still has no place to go. Let's see. Finally, the big achievement of the Trump administration in this war so far in energy markets has been ending the sanctions system on places like Russia and Iran. They have now lifted fully the sanctions on purchasing what's already on the water, and that has allowed basically the last four or five years of attempts to isolate the Russians and the last 10 to 15 years of attempting to isolate the Iranians economically to vanish into the ether. If there's going to be an effort by the United States or any other country to limit

the legal access to these crudes, they're going to have to start completely over. So the last five to 15 years of efforts to kind of squeeze these economies has now broken. Now, there's plenty of other things, physical damage, for example, that are drastically affecting both of these markets, primarily the Russians. But it is interesting to say that it took a war launched by Donald Trump on Iran in order to make Iranian oil legal again. Nobody does it better than Regent's seven seas cruises. Enjoy all-inclusive unrivaled luxury with unlimited shore excursions, indulgent cuisine, personalized service and more aboard spacious all-sweet ships.

Visit rsusc.com to experience the unrivaled. What does one Philly Hotel stay get you in 26, America's 250th birthday year? Free parking for starters, plus admission to five must-see attractions across the region. See the world premiere universal theme parks, the exhibition, at the Franklin Institute. Stroll through the beauty that is Longwood Gardens. Meet the animals at Elmwood Park Zoo.

Explore history at Mercer Museum. Discover American Art at the Brandywine Museum of Art. That's up to $446 in value. The Visit Philly Overnight Package. Book it now at visitfilly.com.