Oxford Energy Forum Issue 148

Oxford Energy Forum Issue 148, titled 'Global Gas: Battling the Next Crisis', is the April 2026 edition of the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies' quarterly publication series. Its introduction by Bill Farren-Price frames the 2026 Iran Hormuz shock as 'potentially the most profound episode of energy market disruption since the early 1970s', placing it alongside the 1973 OPEC oil embargo in structural terms. The issue gathers five expert papers covering the multi-year consequences of the disruption across LNG supply, European industrial demand, and EU energy transition risk.

Contributing papers include Vitaly Yermakov's analysis of Russia-to-China LNG diversion identifying China as the global 'balancing market'; Anouk Honoré's assessment that European industrial gas demand recovery is 'very limited' after the 2022 shock; Samia Adel and Carole Le Henaff's treatment of storage resilience as the European energy security baseline; and Klaus-Dieter Borchardt's warning that a coming LNG wave at lower prices could undermine EU energy transition commitments.

The publication's significance in the current context is that it positioned the IEA Q2 Gas Market Report's multi-year LNG capacity delay inside an established institutional consensus rather than ahead of it, narrowing the analytical uncertainty band around at least two more years of European supply tightness. Policy makers, trade desks, and energy analysts treat the combined OIES/IEA alignment as removing the 'lone outlier' defence typically used to discount bearish long-dated price reads.