Gastech 2026 sessions to be hosted by yours truly

The Oilholic is delighted to be back speaking and moderating at Gastech 2026 being held this year in Bangkok, Thailand. One of the world's largest natural gas conference and exhibition of its kind will run here from September 14 to 17. 

Yours truly will be hosting three sessions at the event with distinguished industry leaders from energy sector and its entire value chain. 

Please do join if you can for some fantastic and insightful industry dialogues. Here are the details of the sessions:

Monday, 14 September 2026 | 13:00 - 13:20 ICT 

Empowering the world compassionately: Reimagining LNG’s role and resilience in Thailand2

Strategic Conference - Energy Talk Session 

With:

• Dr. Harald Link, Chairman, B.Grimm Power

Monday, 14 September 2026 | 16:15 - 16:45 ICT

Regulate or stagnate: The policy choices that will define the next decade

Strategic Conference Session - Executive Leadership Panel

With: 

• Dr. Poonpat Leesombatpiboon, Secretary General, Energy Regulatory Commission of Thailand
• Hasan Ozkoc, Secretariat Director, MEDREG
• Laura Swett, Chairman, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC)

Tuesday, 15 September 2026 | 12:15 - 12:35 ICT

Mobility in motion: What emerging markets teach us about real-world energy transitions

Strategic Conference - Energy Talk Session 

With: 

• Pras Ganesh, EVP & CISO, Toyota Mobility Foundation

More musings to follow soon from Bangkok. Keep reading, keep it here, keep it 'crude'! 

To follow The Oilholic on Twitter click here.

To follow The Oilholic on Forbes click here.

To follow The Oilholic on Energy Connects click here.

To follow The Oilholic on Critical Mass click here.

To email: journalist_gsharma@yahoo.co.uk  

© Gaurav Sharma 2026. Session details imagery © dmgevents, September 2026.

How much oil is getting through the Strait of Hormuz?

Another week, another round of skirmishes between US Navy and Iran, and another all-too-predictable geopolitical risk premium-driven oil price spike. 

In fact, the Brent front-month futures contract is back lurking around $100 mark on renewed fears of disruption in the Strait of Hormuz. 

For now, many in the market are wondering just how much oil is indeed getting through the strait at the moment. 

However, assessing that is proving pretty tricky. Data aggregators are reporting different numbers of ships now passing through the key maritime artery that Iran disrupted in the wake of the war, and continues to disrupt.

Versus a pre-war volume of 20 million barrels per day, down to near zero at the height of the war (in March and April) and back up in June during a short-lived ceasefire - latest empirical and anecdotal evidence from this blogger's sources puts the volume in the range of 5 to 9 million bpd. 

This is hotly contested, as noted by Kpler, in a blog explaining why figures vary and why its range is 5 to 10 million bpd. Nuances in data gathering aside, vessels also "go dark" switching their trackers off, travel in the dark and in protected convoys near the Oman coastline. 

That protection is near always provided by the US Navy which leaves its government the only source of concrete data. Figures published by it put oil transits at the upper end of the range around 10 million bpd. 

And on September 2, Energy Secretary Chris Wright put the figure above 17 million bpd whilst talking to the media - the highest since the war began. 

In other interviews, including one with Fox News, Wright defended US data quipping: "Why would we lie?" 

That is a fair point, because if the statistics on volumes are fiddled - they will eventually be found out. 

In the meantime, oil prices remain volatile contingent upon the news flow and will likely remain that way for now. Here is the Oilholic's latest Forbes post on the developments and more. Where its all going is anyone's guess. 

Well that's all for the moment folks! Leaving you all with two photos of the Strait of Hormuz (above) taken by this blogger from the Omani coastline some 13 years ago. It was a tad calmer back then. More market musings to follow soon. Keep reading, keep it here, keep it 'crude'! 

To follow The Oilholic on Twitter click here.

To follow The Oilholic on Forbes click here.

To follow The Oilholic on Energy Connects click here.

To follow The Oilholic on Critical Mass click here.

To email: journalist_gsharma@yahoo.co.uk  

© Gaurav Sharma 2026. Photo I & II: View of the Strait of Hormuz from Khasab, Musandam Peninsula, Oman. © Gaurav Sharma, August, 2013.

Back to a "highest since July" oil market

Another month of uncertainty in the Middle East has resulted in another round of wild price swings in the oil market, and often heard quips of Brent and WTI futures having hit their highest since July. That was literally just a month ago. 

US President Donald Trump's latest move is to hit Iran economically. With all else failing to resolve a safe and certain passage of energy (and other) cargoes through the Strait of Hormuz, and major regional exporters like Saudi Arabia and UAE exploring alternative transit routes, focus of the White House has now turned to crippling Iran's economy intertwined with its energy industry via non-military means. 

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent described the latest move as "an economic D-Day" and "the single greatest financial offensive ever" - the full details of which will follow over the coming weeks. Given the limited range of options available to bring a swift end to the tension, such a long shot is worth a try, even if the Islamic republic's capacity to ride it out and pass on the hardship to its people is pretty well documented. 

Meanwhile, the oil market is learning to live with the diplomatic deadlock of the past few months following on from the breaking out of hostilities on February 28. It has become a sort of a 'perma-crisis' or a permanent crisis as risk premiums subside only to rise again, and more of the same.

In recent weeks we have seen crude oil cargoes continue to move under the cloud of geopolitical uncertainty largely along the Omani coastline. Various data aggregators indicate the figure may be somewhere in the region of 9-10.5 million barrels per day. Now, even if taken at the upper end of the range, that's still only around half of the volume noted in February. 

As such the domino effect of all this will continue to be felt by the global market with elevated and volatile prices. But that hit is nowhere near the three-figure levels seen at the height of the conflict in March and April. 

Using Brent as a benchmark as the time of The Oilholic posting this blog - oil futures are trading down 0.6% on last week, up 6% on last month, down 3% on the past three-months but up 33% on last year, as trading on daily developments becomes the order of the day. Expect more of the same for now. 

That's all for the moment folks! More market musings to follow soon. Keep reading, keep it here, keep it 'crude'! 

To follow The Oilholic on Twitter click here.

To follow The Oilholic on Forbes click here.

To follow The Oilholic on Energy Connects click here.

To follow The Oilholic on Critical Mass click here.

To email: journalist_gsharma@yahoo.co.uk  

© Gaurav Sharma 2026. Photo: Oil production site. © Monika Wrangel / Pixabay, May 2015.

Speaking and moderating at Gastech 2026

Delighted to announce that The Oilholic will be speaking and moderating at Gastech Exhibition & Conference 2026 in Bangkok, Thailand, from September 14 to 17.

Explore the event's exciting agenda here. 

The year's event will serve as a vital platform for progressing the global energy agenda amid rising demand, accelerating electrification and growing energy security challenges. 

Convening ministers, CEOs, policymakers, investors, technologists and myriad industry movers and shakers, Gastech's multiple conference streams will address the partnerships, investments and strategic actions required to enhance resilience, secure supply and drive sustainable economic growth. 

Looking forward to the deliberations, meeting old friends from the industry and making new ones. Register here as a delegate and join The Oilholic, if you can, for some fantastic industry exchanges and networking in Bangkok this September. 

Keep reading, keep it here, keep it 'crude'! 

To follow The Oilholic on Twitter click here.

To follow The Oilholic on Forbes click here.

To follow The Oilholic on Energy Connects click here.

To follow The Oilholic on Critical Mass click here.

To email: journalist_gsharma@yahoo.co.uk  

© Gaurav Sharma 2026. Digital banner courtesy of dmgevents, August 2026.

On deep tech startups in the Munich-Dresden corridor

Markus Bohl, CEO of Ignite Next (right)
with Energy Analyst Gaurav Sharma,
in Munich, Germany.

For much of the year, the Oilholic has been researching how emerging deep tech startups in the energy and industrials space appear to find a natural home in Germany's Munich-Dresden corridor. 

This concluded with a Forbes feature on the subject available here, should you wish to read it. The initial focus of the research was on purely on the Munich's startup ecosystem. 

But scale-up and mentoring experts Markus Bohl and Alois Eder - the co-founders of Ignite Next - were pretty instrumental in convincing yours truly that Dresden should figure in the mix too, as part of an innovative 400 km-wide corridor. 

For context, Ignite Next helps startups connect, work and scale-up with multiple partners across a broad range of frontier technologies, from semiconductors, photonics, advanced manufacturing, robotics and artificial intelligence, through to quantum computing. Bohl and Eder believe the Munich-Dresden region provides the ideal setting for it. "The overarching idea has always been to give founders direct access to technical expertise, market insight, and investor readiness support in a wider deep tech ecosystem that we’re all a part of in Munich and Dresden," Bohl added. 

Quite frankly, as The Oilholic noted in the Forbes feature, the numbers speak for themselves. Munich remains the primary driver of valuation in Germany - outside of Berlin - securing around the €3 billion ($3.5 billion) mark in raises per year, with a total registered startup enterprise value of over €101 billion ($115 billion), according to Dealroom data.

That’s over a fourth of the combined enterprise value of all VC-backed German startups founded since 1990. The market in Dresden operates on an intertwined scale that’s a fifth smaller than Munich’s each year, but one that’s highly targeted.

As the region marches onwards and upwards, over a fourth of these startups describe themselves as energy, industrial, clean technology or zero-carbon mobility outfits and consider themselves to be increasingly instrumental in driving a Europe-wide "energiewende" or energy transition as their numbers continue to rise. 

(Left to right) Energy Analyst Gaurav Sharma, Kevin Berghoff, CEO and Co-founder of Quantum Diamonds, Alois Eder, CTO of Ignite Next and Fleming Bruckmaier, CTO and Co-founder of Quantum Diamonds, at the company's laboratory in Munich.

Via the good folks at Ignite Next, the Oilholic also met the founders of a couple of these startups. The first was Proxima Fusion, who's CEO Francesco Sciortino explained how his energy startup is developing commercial nuclear fusion power plants. 

Its core offering banks on commercialising "stellarator-based" magnetic confinement fusion technology. So far it has raised over €200 million ($230 million) in equity and grants. In simple terms, a stellarator is a fusion power device that confines plasma using external magnets.

And the second was Quantum Diamonds, a startup developing atom-sized quantum sensors carrying the potential to "redefine" measurement in various high-tech industries like semiconductors, according to CEO Kevin Berghoff. 

Both Berghoff and fellow co-founder Fleming Bruckmaier, also invited The Oilholic for a fascinating and informative tour of their laboratory and operational site in Munich, where their team is attempting to commercialise synthetic diamond-based quantum sensors with nitrogen-vacancy centers to provide non-destructive, high-resolution magnetic imaging of semiconductor chips. In today's fraught geopolitical climate that'll probably be deeply appreciated. 

Well that's all for the moment folks! Sincere thanks to Ignite Next, Quantum Diamonds and Proxima Fusion for their time for The Oilholic's wider research into the region, and here's wishing them all every success for the future. More musings to follow soon. Keep reading, keep it here, keep it 'crude'! 

To follow The Oilholic on Twitter click here.

To follow The Oilholic on Forbes click here.

To follow The Oilholic on Energy Connects click here.

To follow The Oilholic on Critical Mass click here.

To email: journalist_gsharma@yahoo.co.uk  

© Gaurav Sharma 2026. Photo I: Markus Bohl, CEO of Ignite Next (right) with Energy Analyst Gaurav Sharma. © Ignite Next, June 2026. Photo II: (Left to right) Energy Analyst Gaurav Sharma, Kevin Berghoff, CEO and Co-founder of Quantum Diamonds, Alois Eder, CTO of Ignite Next and Fleming Bruckmaier, CTO and Co-founder of Quantum Diamonds, at the company's laboratory in Munich, Germany. © Quantum Diamonds, June 2026.