Sir Tony Blair knows what happens when energy, politics and the Middle East collide.
He entered Downing Street in 1997 with oil below $20 a barrel and left a decade later with it averaging around $70-$75 – three consecutive election wins bracketing a nearly fourfold rise in the price of energy. The morning he resigned, he became the Quartet’s special envoy to the Middle East, a post he held until 2015.
That makes the former British prime minister a particularly interesting figure to have in Bangkok this week, where he will join me on stage at the Gastech Gala Dinner.
Because this is no ordinary gathering of the energy industry.
“This war will end immediately after our election.” That was President Donald Trump on Wednesday, tying the end of the Iran conflict to the US midterms on November 3 – a remark that came the same day Brent crude broke back above $100 a barrel for the first time in six weeks.
Sources close to the White House have said petrol prices won’t fall before the vote either. Washington, in the meantime, keeps tightening the screw: a new sanctions package hit Iran’s aviation sector on Tuesday, days after the Treasury moved to dismantle what it called the regime’s remaining revenue streams.
Nobody thought we’d be here
The guardians of the energy industry gather in Bangkok this week at ground zero for the economic and social fallout from parabolic moves in oil, gas and fertiliser.
And it was gas that put a stranglehold on these economies, knocking Pakistan into a four-day working week, forcing Thailand to ration power and suspend fuel exports, and pushing China to ban its own refiners from exporting diesel, petrol and jet fuel.
As we convene, Asian gas prices have ratcheted up nearly 15 per cent in the past month and have more than doubled over the year.
That’s the backdrop: a tight market, no end in sight and a room full of people who actually have to answer for it. Few are better placed to do that than the panel I’ll sit down with on Monday – the heads of gas at ExxonMobil, Shell, Eni, Adnoc and Chevron.
Milan to Bangkok
Twelve months ago in Milan, the mood was dominance. Chris Wright, the US Secretary of Energy, called net zero a “colossal train wreck”, with Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior, beside him selling American liquefied natural gas (LNG) as the fix for Europe.
Bangkok is a different register.
And Blair is a rare thing at a conference like this – a politician who lived this exact swing in real time and then spent the following decade dealing with its geopolitics.
His Institute for Global Change argued last year that phasing out fossil fuels in the short term was “doomed to fail”, a case that reads less like contrarianism now and more like description.
The questions for him at Gastech: what does resolution actually look like from here, and what would it mean for global energy markets when it comes?
Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, has called this crisis a “major, major threat” to the global economy. Haitham Al Ghais, Opec’s Secretary General, insists it’s a “one-off event ”.
Both can’t be right. Bangkok is where that gets tested against the data.
'Long and variable lag'
Milton Friedman, US economist and statistician, gave central bankers the phrase. Usually it describes monetary policy. It works just as well for energy right now: the delayed reckoning for a war that hasn’t fully landed yet, more than six months on.
European gas storage is at a two-decade low, while TTF, Europe's primary natural gas pricing benchmark, is up more than 130 per cent this year. JPMorgan sees the next leg landing in fertiliser, with global food inflation set to climb from 2.8 per cent to around 5 per cent by early 2027.
That’s the real subject of Gastech 2026 – not the crisis behind the industry, but the one still working its way downstream.
I’ve covered this market as a banker, a broker and a television anchor, three decades watching Opec ministers and oil chief executives move it with a single sentence, from three different sides of the desk.
What isn’t familiar this time is a chokepoint itself becoming the headline.
Gastech was last in Asia in 2008. It returns to a region that has spent this war rationing fuel, not just talking about its price.
'The vase is broken'
The Strait of Hormuz carries almost one fifth of the world’s LNG, nearly all of it Qatari and Emirati. When Iran shut it, Qatar’s exports collapsed by about 96 per cent – an estimated $24 billion in lost sales, with Ras Laffan repairs alone projected to cost up to $20 billion a year for as long as five years.
Mr Birol put the deeper problem to this publication in July: the vase is broken.
Saudi Arabia and the UAE have clawed back close to 85 per cent of prewar export levels, but recovered volume isn’t recovered confidence. The IEA doesn’t see a full supply recovery before 2027.
The strait was a fact of life nobody had to test until this war did. Iran and Oman are now negotiating what amounts to a tollbooth, with Iran floating $1 million-$2 million a vessel and Oman countering with a “voluntary” fee structure.
The free-navigation assumption behind 60 years of energy trade is being renegotiated in real time.
That reframes Bangkok’s central question, and it’s the one I intend to put to the heads of gas this week: if the strait moves again – a second closure, a re-escalation, call it what you like – what happens to the market this time, now that buyers have seen the price of being caught out once?
Shell can lean on LNG Canada to redirect cargoes to Asia. Chevron has Gorgon and Wheatstone in Australia. Eni has Mozambique. ExxonMobil sits on the other side of that table, exposed through Qatar and the UAE while its new Golden Pass supply out of Texas heads mostly towards Europe. Adnoc, meanwhile, has spent months building pipeline and east-coast capacity that looks, in hindsight, like insurance.
The question isn’t only who has spare barrels. It’s who was exposed and who wasn’t – and who gets paid for having supply in the right place when Asia needs it most.
Emerging Asia queued for fuel, rationed gas and absorbed a price shock it did nothing to cause.
Eighteen years after Bangkok last hosted Gastech, the guardians of the energy markets are gathering here again, in the region that paid for a war it didn’t start – and with Washington now saying, in as many words, that the war doesn’t end before the ballots are counted.
