In a decarbonizing world, Trump’s plan to control Iran’s oil, after an intervention with the same purpose in Venezuela, is reminiscent of a Wilson Simonal song that goes like this: “It doesn’t even come with a fork, today is soup day.” This does not mean that there are no short-term gains for the US, whose current administration sees oil not only as a tool of economic influence but also as a weapon of coercion to be used on rivals and allies. In the long term, however, the winner is China
It seems increasingly clear that the war that began a month ago against Iran is just one more in a series of risky moves by Donald Trump to ensure that the US is king and lord of the world’s oil. On the eve of the first attacks on Iran, the American president took to a platform in the coastal city of Corpus Christi, Texas, to congratulate himself on the fact that he was “consolidating the US status as the largest energy superpower on the planet”. A month later, this Sunday, he admitted (FT) that his greatest desire is to take Iran’s oil.
“To be honest, what I want most is to keep Iran’s oil, but some stupid people in the US say: ‘Why are you doing that?’. But they are stupid people,” he said, comparing the objective of controlling Iranian oil flows “indefinitely” to that of military intervention in Venezuela at the beginning of this year.
In the case of Iran, the objective is practically unachievable without the country’s main oil and natural gas export hub, and the Strait of Hormuz. Asked by the FT how he plans to carry out the plan, Trump responded: “Maybe we take Kharg Island, maybe we don’t. We have a lot of options. That means we would have to stay there [em Kharg] for some time. I don’t think they have any defense. We could take [a ilha] very easily.”
For experts, however, this would be a suicide mission. “If you look at Kharg, you see that the island is 20 square kilometers – and what does the US intend to do, take the island? And why? Because it receives hydrocarbons that Iran produces?”, asks António Costa Silva, mining and petroleum engineer and former Minister of Economy. “The island is very small. If the US invades, the military forces will be very concentrated, they will be a brutal target for everything that comes from the coast of Iran, 26 kilometers away.”
The problems begin, but they are far from ending there, because it is not only the coast of Iran that is a short distance from Kharg – as Costa Silva says, “the island is very close to the largest oil installations of the three large Persian Gulf countries”, Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. And if these facilities are partially or completely destroyed in retaliatory strikes by Iran after the capture of Kharg, including the Saudi crown jewel, which produces eight million barrels of oil per day, “we are going to have a very serious problem.”
“I don’t know what type of operation the US is planning and it is clear that Trump has the best prepared army on the planet under his command, but we need to see the risks – and we know that he doesn’t care about the risks, as was clear when he decided to go ahead with this intervention.”
This is what an article from the Wall Street Journal shows about how everything unfolded in the days preceding the first attacks on Iran, with sources indicating that General Dan Caine, Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces, warned Trump of the risks of starting a war against Iran – starting with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, to which Trump responded that this would not happen “because the regime will collapse before that”. A month later, the results are in sight.
“This is a president who acts and makes decisions based on egocentric and narcissistic impulses”, highlights Costa Silva, who provides the opposite with Dwight D. Eisenhower, 34th president of the USA – “the paradigm of the leader with sensibility, coldness and analytical sense: he was surrounded by hawks who wanted him to use nuclear weapons against China in the Taiwan Strait and he resisted; who wanted him to use nuclear weapons to end the Korean war and he resisted; not this one, Trump has uncontrolled impulses and I don’t think this will work.”
A “titanic struggle”
Supposing that Trump manages to take Kharg, supposing that, for some reason, Iran does not retaliate, supposing that the US starts to control the flow of oil and natural gas produced by the Iranians, would we be facing a paradigmatic change in the global energy market? With the United States being the largest oil and gas producer in the world, getting its hands on the first and third largest hydrocarbon reserves in the world, Venezuela and Iran respectively, seems like a masterstroke. But not everything is what it seems, starting with the viability of these reserves.
“Venezuela does not produce even one million barrels and the indication we have is that it is very expensive to open new production”, highlights Ricardo Marques, Financial Markets Information analyst. “At its peak, in the early 2000s, Venezuela produced two million barrels per day, now it was producing less than one million. What Venezuela has, yes, is many probable reserves, which with investment could increase production significantly, but this investment is expensive and which companies are going to open wells there? It’s one thing to explore what’s already there, another thing is to wait years for it to start yielding, without knowing what the situation will be like in a few years – just see what Exxon Mobil said so I was not interested in investing in Venezuela.”
In the case of Iran, the situation is similar, says the expert, and then there is the specific case of Kharg island, which is not an oil extraction site. “Kharg is where the Iranians refine their oil, it’s where the oil arrives to be refined and then exported. Will the Iranians send the oil there if the US controls the island?” asks Ricardo Marques.
“I don’t see that this will add much to the power of the US in relation to these resources”, predicts António Costa Silva. “When it comes to Venezuela, it is not clear that Trump will be able to capitalize on this, the potential is there, but oil production is one of the least significant in the world – and with Iran it is the same thing, it produces around 3 million barrels per day, especially because both were subject to sanctions, so they did not attract investment or develop technology.”
After a month, what the war against Iran has shown is the world’s deep dependence on the Strait of Hormuz, through which not only fossil fuels pass – on the order of 20 million barrels of crude oil per day before the closure, 5 million of them refined, and 20% of liquefied natural gas (LNG) – but also a third of the fertilizers used worldwide and a significant part of metals such as aluminum. And “attacking Kharg means setting the Middle East on fire even more,” considers Costa Silva, leaving US allies in the Persian Gulf with “great discomfort” about what Trump might decide next.
The other chess piece is the evolution of the oil market in relation to the electricity market, with the expert invoking a “titanic struggle” based on Trump’s risky moves. With the planet consuming around 100 million barrels of oil per day, this was not the market that grew the most in 2024, a “fundamental year” that confirmed a paradigm shift in the opposite direction to Trump’s bets.
“When Trump captures resources from Venezuela or Iran, this will make little sense if we look at the medium and long term, when we are in a process of decarbonization of the world economy”, points out the expert. “In 2024, global electricity consumption increased above average, 4.3% above the growth of the world economy, and what happened to oil? It remained stable, there was a slight increase, around 0.8%. The backdrop that has given rise to these interventions by the American president is a titanic struggle between petro-states and electro-states” – and it is the latter, with China as a great bulwark, that are winning the race.
Edison’s Revenge, China’s Victory
It will be a race like the hare and the tortoise, considering that dependence on oil and other fossil fuels remains high – in 1992, at the Rio Conference, countries were 86.5% dependent on them and this value has fallen but very little, to a mere 81% today. Still, there is no way to stop decarbonization – as Costa Silva says, “it is of global importance and all these crises show that economies have to electrify, otherwise we run the risk of being in a permanent crisis”. And China has already realized this.
While Trump occupies countries to control oil flows and invests billions in infrastructure and production at home, Beijing is today responsible for a third of global electricity generation and the country that invests the most in renewable energy – twice as much as the USA and Europe combined –, using the dividends from this to develop the industrial sector. At this moment, clean energy already represents more than 20% of Chinese GDP, alongside major technological developments, although it continues to be the largest consumer of coal in the world.
“We are in a great fight that is reminiscent of that extraordinary bet from the 1900s on the streets of New York between Thomas Edison and Henry Ford”, recalls Costa Silva. “Edison said electricity would win, Ford said it was oil – Ford won, but 100-odd years later, we are on the verge of a very big transformation.”
This does not mean, however, that in the short term the US will not gain from this – and not so much from an energy point of view, but from a strategic one. “The broader issue is that controlling Venezuela and Iran’s oil would give Washington not only economic influence but also coercive power over allies and adversaries,” says Houssein al-Malla, a conflict studies expert at the German Institute for Global and Regional Studies (GIGA).
“Importers from Europe, India and East Asia would be even more exposed to US political decisions at the very moment they are trying to diversify their economies to protect themselves from geopolitical shocks”, says Al-Malla. “That’s why the importance of what Trump said in the FT interview lies less in the viability of the project [de tomar Kharg] and more in what it signals about US grand strategy – an attempt to transform energy geography into political hierarchy.”
This is already evident, for example, in the way Trump cut off oil supplies to Cuba to subjugate it to his will, in yet another demonstration of force in which the force is oily, viscous and black. “A US under control of Venezuelan oil, which represents control of the Western Hemisphere, and Iran, which represents dominance in the Gulf, would not only influence the market – it would be much closer to the geopolitical control room of the global energy system.”
And the person who gains most from this is… that’s right, China, which is quiet but “paying full attention” to US movements, highlights António Costa Silva – China is seeing Trump make “error after mistake” in the Middle East and also in Asia, with the dismantling of defense systems in Korea and Japan to reinforce defenses in the Persian Gulf.
“Just on a day when the US was dismantling one of its bases in South Korea, more than a thousand Chinese satellites concentrated there, observing everything that was happening, were reported. China is studying very well everything that Trump does – and it’s like the theorists of the war industry, which in China is ancient, say: when your enemy is doing nonsense, don’t interrupt him.”
