China’s aluminum market is sending a more cautious signal than the global price rally might suggest. While the war around Iran has pushed aluminum prices sharply higher by threatening Middle Eastern supply, demand inside China has failed to keep pace, with primary aluminum inventories climbing above 1.3 million tons, the highest since 2020.

Fabricators are reportedly buying only what they need in the near term, and the usual post-Lunar New Year pickup has been weaker than expected. That matters because China is both the world’s largest producer and consumer of aluminum, so softness there can undercut the bullish narrative created by the supply shock abroad.

The fuel shock hitting Africa is exposing a structural weakness that has been years in the making: a continent that produces crude but, in many cases, no longer refines enough of it at home is now dangerously exposed to a single disrupted import corridor.

Around 600,000 barrels a day of refined products that normally flow from the Middle East to Africa are at risk as traffic through the Strait of Hormuz slows to a trickle. For some countries, those cargoes cover virtually all demand. That is why governments are not treating this as a normal price spike. They are treating it as a race to secure physical supply before richer buyers absorb the remaining available barrels.

Europe’s carbon market has become the central battleground in the EU’s attempt to contain the economic fallout from the Iran war, and Tuesday’s sharp price drop showed just how seriously traders are taking the prospect of political intervention.

The benchmark EU carbon contract fell more than 5% intraday after Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told EU leaders the bloc was considering releasing more emissions permits through the market’s reserve system, moderating the planned phase-down of free allowances for industry, and using a review due in July to rethink some of the supply tightening scheduled after 2030. The contract later traded around €66.33 a ton after touching €64.93, its lowest level since April 2025.

China’s decision to halt exports of diesel, gasoline and jet fuel is turning an already severe Asian fuel squeeze into something more dangerous: a regional shortage in which high prices are no longer just a market signal, but the beginning of physical dislocation.

Beijing’s ban, imposed from March 11 and running at least through the end of March, is removing a key balancing supplier from the market just as the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran has disrupted crude flows, shut Gulf refineries and severely constrained shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.

The war’s impact on fertilizer is becoming one of the most serious secondary economic shocks of the conflict because it threatens food production rather than just energy bills. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the broader disruption of Gulf energy infrastructure are severely tightening fertilizer markets, especially for nitrogen products such as urea, at the worst possible point in the agricultural calendar for the Northern Hemisphere.

About one-third of global fertilizer trade passes through Hormuz, and fertilizer production itself is heavily dependent on natural gas, which can account for as much as 70% of production costs. When gas flows are disrupted and Gulf plants go offline, the effect is immediate: less supply, higher prices, delayed shipments and a direct risk to planting decisions in import-dependent countries.

The current war-driven energy shock is exposing a hierarchy of vulnerability among the world’s major economies, and the broad picture is clear: the United States is the most secure in supply terms, Europe is the most exposed, and China sits somewhere in between with substantial protection but not immunity.

As the war enters its fourth week, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz since March 2 has driven up prices for oil, gas, fuels, fertilizers and other industrial inputs, forcing governments and companies to confront a basic question: how much of their energy system depends on domestic production and how much depends on imports.

Equinor’s new Barents Sea find is small in absolute terms, but it is strategically more important than the headline volume might suggest. Equinor, together with Vår Energi and Petoro, discovered between 14 million and 24 million barrels of oil around 16 kilometers from the Johan Castberg field in the Norwegian Arctic.

On its own, that is not a transformative discovery for Norway’s petroleum sector. But because it sits close to an existing producing hub, it has a much better chance of being developed commercially and relatively quickly than a remote standalone Arctic field would.

China’s latest offer to Taiwan was less an energy proposal than a piece of wartime political messaging. Beijing said it could provide Taiwan with “stable and reliable” energy security if the island accepted Chinese rule, framing “peaceful reunification” as a solution to Taiwan’s vulnerability during the Middle East war and the disruption of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.

Taiwan immediately countered with the opposite message: President Lai Ching-te said supplies for March and April were secure and that additional U.S. gas would begin arriving from June, emphasizing that Taiwan’s strategy is diversification rather than dependence on China.