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Merryn Talks Money
Cambridge Professor Helen Thompson on the Iran War, Energy Markets and Britain’s Risks
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Professor Helen Thompson
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Maren Sumset Webb
Welcome to Marin Talks Money, the podcast in which people who know the markets explain the markets. I am Maren Sumset Webb and with me today I have Professor Helen Thompson. She is a Professor of Political Economy at the University of Cambridge and she concentrates on the political economy of energy, which is useful stuff at the moment. She is also the author of Disorder Hard times in the 21st century which is an excellent book I strongly recommend to all of you which will help us all get to grips with the multi crises of our age published in 2022 and no shortage of crises since then of course. I'm hoping that what you'll get from this podcast is a fuller understanding of exactly what is going on in global energy markets and how it is going to affect you. Basically perfect Easter weekend Listening Helen, thank you for joining us.
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Professor Helen Thompson
Absolute pleasure to be with you. Meron yeah.
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Maren Sumset Webb
Now we last saw each other at the Weekend of Mistakes in Hay on Wye a couple of weeks ago and I missed your session which was irritating for me. So I've asked you on so that basically I can have you all to myself for 40 minutes. No no one else here and that our audience can understand some of your amazing insights into what on earth is going on. So I guess let's start with that. This war with Iran, how do you see it? How is it going? How might it end and what will the long term consequences be? That is a huge question so take it from whatever angle you like.
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Professor Helen Thompson
Okay. I think that in part, the motives of the Trump administration are relatively straightforward and they're supported by Israel, and that is they want very seriously to deplete Iranian military power. And that goes beyond the nuclear weapons issue. It goes to destroying or trying to destroy Iran's ability to do the kind of things that it's done in the first part of this war, which is inflict significant damage on its neighbors from the Arab states, the Gulf Arab states, to Israel. The question of whether the Americans had a sustained and worked out ambition for regime change, I think is a lot more complicated question. And it could well be that in some sense, the way that the Israelis assassinated the Iranian leadership, the prior Iranian leadership, actually made that more difficult because they killed too far down, so to speak. And so it became more difficult to find somebody to do a deal with. I think, though, regardless of the military ambition, regardless of the regime change ambition, this is part of a bigger picture. It's part of an attempt by the Trump administration, or at least we should seriously consider at least the possibility that it's part of an attempt by the Trump administration to. To reset the energy part of the world geopolitically. And I think that has been a thread through Trump, too. I think it's what makes sense of the intervention in Venezuela and it makes sense of the attempts to destabilize Greenland, and that is that the Trump administration thinks through the lens of resource competition. It thinks through the lens of the vulnerabilities of itself and China to resource disruption. It experienced for itself a pretty significant resource disruption last year in the way that China handled the rare earths issue after Trump turned to the trade war. Indeed, I would say that actually they were taken aback by what happened there. And that in part there is a sense, I think, in which they have wanted retaliation for that of disrupting China's energy security in the way in which their rare earth security was disrupted last year. And it's not a coincidence in that respect then, that the major moves have been made this year, first against Venezuela and against Iran. And these are states in which China has had long term energy alliances and has some dependency, obviously more so in the case of Iran than in the case of Venezuela.
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Maren Sumset Webb
How dependent is China on Middle Eastern oil and on Venezuelan oil?
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Professor Helen Thompson
It's a tiny amount now on Venezuela or a relatively small amount on Venezuela. But China is the biggest single importer now of hydrocarbons through the Persian Gulf. Now, obviously, China's strategy is what China's doing in the Western hemisphere and it's in the Middle east and it's got this energy trade with Russia has been to have diversity of energy supply. So actually to disrupt China's energy security from this mindset, you have to do quite a bit of disrupting. And in terms of electricity, China can always fall back on coal and domestically mined coal. So this is quite a complicated long term issue. I do think though, if we put these things together, we can say that the situation in the Persian Gulf has been unstable for some time. There was a big crisis in 2019, September of 2019, when the Iranians hit major Saudi oil facility. In the end that's what led a few months later to the Trump administration assassinating Soleimani. But a situation in which you have a nuclear ambitious Iran, plus the preponderance of hydrocarbon exports from the Persian Gulf going to Asia and particularly to China, whilst the United States is the maritime power in the Persian Gulf and has the majority of the bases in the military bases in the Persian Gulf. I think that was never going to be a stable scenario and certainly not one when you also bring Israel's interests into play. And in a situation in which Iran had taken a major strategic blow really certainly from 2024, from the Israeli pager attack on Hezbollah, but one could argue really in a way, from the moment of the Hamas attack on Israel in October of 2023, things have been going wrong for Iran. I think it would have been quite surprising in some ways, whoever was the president, for there not to have been a US move to try to reconfigure the situation, the balance of power in the Persian Gulf.
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Maren Sumset Webb
How do you think it ends? For someone who is not expert in the Middle east, not expert in warfare, not export in any of those things, it's very hard to tell because so much of the analysis of this war seems so political and based on opinion rather than actuality. It's very hard to see exactly how this is going and how it might end.
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Professor Helen Thompson
Well, I think there's another reason that isn't really being commented upon as much as it should be, as to why it's hard to work out how it ends. Is what is it that the Iranian regime is now, is there an Iranian regime in a strong sense of the meaning of the word, are there actually a lot of decentralized bits of power around the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps? And if there isn't actually a meaningful regime in Iran any longer, then reaching any kind of settlement becomes actually extraordinarily difficult and it becomes a situation in which you can expect there to be chaos I think for some time to come. So I think that if we think about it in those terms then even the idea of the war ending becomes quite difficult. It can be much reduced in terms of hostilities, but without a cohesive regime in Iran, then the idea of there being peace, I think a settlement is quite hard to imagine.
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Maren Sumset Webb
Okay, so we should, when we think about the world and energy, we should think about this going on for a long time. We should stop thinking that this is a six week business or an eight week business, that this supply crunches long term.
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Professor Helen Thompson
I think that there's various bits to this that go on in a way on the energy side, regardless of, even if it weren't true what I've just said about the, what is the nature of the Iranian like regime and that is the energy infrastructure that has been hit. It's particularly, I think significant for Qatar in terms of its liquefied natural gas facilities. That's why it's declared like force majeure on some of its contracts. It's insignificant in terms of the facilities, the refining and processing facilities in the, in the Gulf States, including the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait. The Saudis have got thus far in a way the best way out in terms of their immediate interest because they do have a pipeline to the Red Sea, albeit that it does not. It can't fully compensate for what they would export through the Strait of Hormuz. But I think that they're not going to go back to the idea that exporting through the Strait of Hormuz is something that they can take for granted. In the same way, I think China is not going to go back to assuming that importing through the Strait of Hormuz is something that they can take for granted. They have, I think, quite a strong incentive now where gas is concerned to think again about doing the Power of Siberia 2 pipeline with the Russians. I think we have to understand is that a shock in the Strait of Hormuz is not something that the world economy has experienced like this before. And that affects the calculations of all the players, the exporters, the importers, and the possibility that it can happen again is something that they will have to adjust to. And that's before, as I say, we get onto the actual damage to the oil and gas industry in quite a number of countries in the Gulf.
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Maren Sumset Webb
Yeah. So even if the whole thing by some kind of miracle, everything stopped tomorrow, there is no returning to normal from here.
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Professor Helen Thompson
I don't think there is. There's certainly not. I think in terms of the geopolitical assumptions around it. And for Qatar, I think that the, from what we can tell anyway, is that the damage looks quite considerable. And I think for Qatar as well, I think we really should focus on Qatar because for them this is like, not just a material blow, but it's a staggering, like, existential psychological blow. Qatar has been a nominal, at least Iranian ally, and the Iranians hit major targets. Not like they did in the, the war back in June of 2025 when they hit a US air base in, in Qatar. No, they hit the Qatari's own gas facilities. And I think if you look at the ways in which the Qatari government have talked about that, in the days after that attack, one of them said something like, never in his wildest nightmares has it occurred to him that a fellow Muslim country in the month of Ra do that to Qatar. That is a major turning point, I think, for the way in which Qatar can think about the geopolitics of the Middle East. It can't go back to assuming that there's some normality to which it can return.
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Maren Sumset Webb
And again, as you say, it's very hard to imagine what the motives of the Iranian regime is because we're not sure there is a regime.
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Professor Helen Thompson
Absolutely. Yeah.
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Maren Sumset Webb
Okay, let's talk about the consequences that we can see now, and we can already see across Southeast Asia, fairly major fuel and energy rationing going on. So we've seen that, and we can begin to feel that wave heading towards Europe. And one of the things that we're already saying that you can see people talking about on social media, for example, is the very sharp rise in the price of flights. So we know that there's a shortage of jet fuel coming, and we're already in the UK beginning to see lines at fuel stations as people begin to feel a little panic. And then, of course, we will, bit by bit, we will see the rise in energy prices feeding through into the price of absolutely everything, because that's just the way this works. How do you see this playing out?
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Professor Helen Thompson
Yeah, I mean, I think that we in Europe have been relatively like, protected so far, both in terms of the prices. I mean, if you look, they've come down now, the difference. But there was a really big difference between the Indian price index and the Brent price for oil until the last few days. And in terms of when the last tankers that left the Gulf before the war started due to arrive, I think I saw from Ed Conway this morning that we're speaking on Tuesday that the last tanker with air fuel Aviation fuel is due on Thursday here and Britain is particularly. Actually all European countries, almost all European countries are particularly dependent on aviation fuel coming out of the Gulf, much more so than they are on crude coming out of the Gulf. And I suspect that's why we're already seeing the impact, impact on air prices. But it's not going to be that much longer after that, I think, without something changing very rapidly in which we're going to see the impact on petrol and particularly on diesel prices.
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Maren Sumset Webb
So we'll see that. We'll feel that first. But then, of course, there's also the impact on fertilizers, on. You know, people talk a lot about helium and about the other things that we're used to just getting through the Gulf. So we're now at the point where the idea that there is a global market for any of these things, or a global price even for any of these things is slightly discredited. The whole conversation about, for example, the global price of gas, that doesn't quite work anymore, does it?
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Professor Helen Thompson
No, you can see it in oil really clearly. And oil is interesting because usually there always are differences between the prices that prevail in Asia and Europe and the United States, but they're usually within a sort of $10 range maybe of each other. Like at one point last week, I think that there was about a 16, possibly $70 difference between the price for that essentially the Indians were paying, India was paying for oil and what the wti, the effective US price like was. That's a major difference. That's pretty much twice what the price was at the start of this for the us.
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Maren Sumset Webb
Let's talk a bit about what all this means for the uk. So, you know, we've been attempting to head towards a net zero. We've been very clear, or our government has been very clear, parts of our government have been very clear on what they want from the energy transition. But now that this has happened, it seems to be very clear that we've made ourselves remarkably vulnerable.
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Professor Helen Thompson
I think that it's clear that Britain has a pretty weak energy security strategy. Indeed, one might argue whether there is any real energy security strategy in relation to fossil fuels, which remain the largest part of our energy consumption.
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Maren Sumset Webb
That's interesting. I'll just interrupt you there because I did just look up before we started to double check the percentage of our energy that is actually oil, not just fossil fuels, but oil, and it's near 40% percent.
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Professor Helen Thompson
Yeah, we still. Yeah, yeah. And you know, it's still the largest single source of, of our energy.
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Maren Sumset Webb
Consumption, and we're well over 70% fossil fuels in general. And there is often, when you listen to people discuss energy, there's a tendency to confuse energy and electricity. Right. And we'll often be told that 60% of our energy or 40% of 70% of our energy on any particular day comes from renewables. But what people actually mean when they say that is not energy but electricity, as in fact, we remain, like all economies, fully based on fossil fuel use.
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Professor Helen Thompson
Electricity is a little bit more than 20% of the UK's overall energy consumption. And if you look at like fossil fuel energy consumption, only 13% of it actually goes to electricity. So you can have a strategy for electricity, you can have a strategy for electricity security, but it can't be the same, just as a matter of logic, as an energy security strategy. And if you say, which is really, I guess, the Ed Miliband like position, which is actually you can't have energy security for fossil fuel energy, to which actually that argument in itself, I have some, like, sympathy. There is something that actually is a roller coaster and has long been a roller coaster about fossil fuel energy consumption, certainly once oil came into the picture, but nonetheless is that if you are going to have a strategy to change that, then it has to be simultaneously a strategy for decarbonizing electricity and for electrification. It involves the electrification of those things that we're presently using oil and gas for. And if you look at the present government in Britain's energy policies, almost all of it is directed at electricity and very little of it is directed at electrification. So even in its own terms, that is a problem. And this phrase clean power is bandied around. I think the power is, I'm not saying a deliberate obfuscation, I don't think that, but it confuses. Because power in energy terms isn't a meaningful term. We should be talking about energy or we should be talking about electricity. They're different things.
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Maren Sumset Webb
Yeah. And the idea of trying to electrify more than we have already would be
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Professor Helen Thompson
hugely expensive, in principle at least, are easy wins. We're not even doing that. If you look at electric trains in this country, the electrification of the rail network, I think it's under 50% actually, of our rail network is actually electrified. This is something that's stored, like for a long time in this country, because actually it's not difficult to do. I mean, by that technologically difficult is an absolutely known thing to do, for obvious reasons. We've already got electric track, that's an obvious thing to do. But actually, as far as I can see, the government doesn't actually have a strategy for the complete electrification of the rail ways.
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Maren Sumset Webb
So I suppose what we in the UK have learned, for those of us who didn't know it already, is that while the fossil fuels market is extraordinarily unstable and will remain unstable and has always been unstable, you kind of have to live with that because nonetheless, fossil fuels create the foundation of our economy completely. So how do we in the UK try and stabilize our own supply of fossil fuels? And one of the things that this is this whole thing is brought up is this argument again about the North Sea. So you have one side of the political world thing. What this tells us is that we must go further and faster with our attempt to use renewables. And the other side of the argument, well, yeah, let's do that. But at the same time, why don't we encourage more explanation exploration and production in the North Sea and why don't we actually move ahead with some fracking the ascent that is now possible. Let's bump up our own production of fossil fuels because that will make us more secure. Where do you come down on that?
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Professor Helen Thompson
I'm generally of the view that we need to be very open minded about the North Sea and that we really need to get out of this binary that we've got into of it's like fossil fuels versus renewables. And Keir Starmer was using that like the other day and for the reasons that we've just been talking about it, it doesn't even make sense in its own terms because right now is you can't substitute renewables for most of the things that fossil fuels are doing for. It's just because of the way that we set things up. You can only think of that mindset about electricity and that only applies to gas, given that we don't use oil for electricity. I think that what we have to bear in mind though is the North Sea isn't going to be or more doing more in the North Sea, which I'm in favor of, isn't going to be a panacea because to get some of the benefits of that, we've got to revisit some of the policies that we put in place like decades ago in the way in which we treat the North Sea. I mean, one of the things that we do obviously is to export about 80% of oil that we produce in the North Sea. And we do that because we don't have refineries in this country that can actually deal that well with the kind of oil that now comes out, the kind of crude that now comes out of the North Sea. And I think this whole issue about what we do about refineries is actually a bigger picture than that too. It's one of the reasons why we're in this position of importing as much aviation fuel as we do like from the Persian Gulf. Because our refineries, we've only got four refineries left, they're not set up to do that. They're not set up to deal.
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Maren Sumset Webb
And why don't we have refineries anymore?
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Professor Helen Thompson
I think I'm right in saying is we haven't opened a new refinery since 1969, I want to say, and that we closed another one. They've been closing down like for several, like decades now. So Grangemouth in Scotland, like closed like
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Maren Sumset Webb
last year, which did produce aviation fuel, didn't it?
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Professor Helen Thompson
Yeah. One of those oddities of like when we had the boon of North Sea. So the North Sea, the major North Sea oil discovery was 19, like the year after we last opened a refinery that didn't go hand in hand with saying that we need a strong refining, domestic refining operation. The North Sea was from the start quite orientated to production for World Light. And then on the gas side is we've set up a way of pricing that effectively means that the gas that we do consume from the North Sea, we end up paying pretty much the same as was if we were consuming it from liquefied natural gas purchases in the global market. So again, if we want to get the macroeconomic benefit or the economic benefit from more domestic gas production, which would be a good thing, we've also got to look at the way in which we deal with gas, at least in relation to electricity. So there's a lot of things that are coming in terms of the decisions that were made in British energy policy for decades, not just like the last decade and a half or so that really coming home to roost is a complacency, I think that we had through the North Sea years, through the boom North Sea years. I mean by that, which was that markets would and global markets would be the solution to energy security and it's just not the case that they are.
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Maren Sumset Webb
But all these things, these are policy choices. Right. So while it may take time, pretty much all these things can be reversed. It would be possible for the UK to reintroduce a fairly hefty element of energy security over say a five year period.
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Professor Helen Thompson
I think that what we need is a rethink of a whole set of things that we do in energy policy that I think it starts to make sense. If you think in the 90s that the UK cross parties, it wasn't dependent on which political party was in office, made a bet essentially that there wasn't really serious geopolitical risk attached to energy and then that's why the markets were. Plus some regulation could do the work and that the state stayed out of it essentially even to the point where we got rid of having an energy secretary in the 1990s, we only got one back in, I think it was 2008. Energy was just consumed under the Department of Trade and Industry, I think that we embraced, in a way, much more than the Americans did, this notion that markets were the solution to all energy questions. And I'm not saying that markets aren't the solution to some energy questions, but the idea that the state can just be completely, largely hands off and that doesn't have to deal with geopolitical risk and supply chain risk, I think that's turned out to be an incredibly dangerous illusion and naive as well.
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Maren Sumset Webb
So if you could start tomorrow, let's say that you had Ed Miliband's job, we'd all quite like that. What would you do?
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Professor Helen Thompson
I mean, I think you have to review everything. And I'm not saying that because I think that you actually have to throw everything out. I think that in this respect the energy transition is necessary to improve long term energy security as well as the climate change issue. But you have to be able to think about the short term and the medium term as well as the long term. And I think that's where we are in some sense imprisoned. And this is where I think that the net zero question does come into play, because what net zero did not just from the 2019 legislation, but from the Climate Change act back in 2008 is correct. A pretty strict legal framework in which energy questions really have to be thought about legally through emissions, through carbon emissions. And then that makes it actually quite difficult to adjust, to actually review everything, because we've got a whole set of priors that are legally built into the way in which energy policy must be considered. I think that the easy win, if you like, would be to make a decision on Rosebank and Jackdaw, the fields in the North Sea where the Government or the Energy Secretary has been sitting on for quite some time now without making a decision. Make a quick decision about that to allow them to go ahead. That would be a start.
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Maren Sumset Webb
There've been a lot of losers and not so many winners from this war so far. But one of the big winners here
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Professor Helen Thompson
seems to be coal, certainly in Asia. I think that this is what's actually quite revealing about Europe's weakness. And it isn't just about the Britain, though Britain actually, I think is probably Exhibit A where coal is concerned, because we know we don't have any coal powered reactors left. We closed the last one down at Radcliffe and saw a few years ago what happens in Asia in certainly in China and in India and Japan and South Korea, actually, all the larger economies is when the price of liquefied natural gas is like, too much, they switch from electricity purposes to to more coal. And that is not an option for like European countries, certainly not an option like for ours. And again I think it goes back to Britain's like structural like weakness is there are things you can fall back on in the emergency that are reliable. Coal is one, nuclear is another and hydropower is another. And Britain has relatively little of those three things as we know. We haven't finished building a nuclear reactor since the middle of the 1990s when size will be open. At the moment, Hinkley Point C looks maybe like 2030. We don't have a coal power station and we don't have a country that's well suited at all to like hydro power. So that makes us like structurally vulnerable and we simply do not have the options of in the emergency burn coal that Asian countries and some European countries still have.
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Maren Sumset Webb
Yes, we just removed all the, for policy reasons removed the optionality from our system.
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Professor Helen Thompson
We're very locked in from a set of accumulated set of decisions that I'd say have been made in a way going back to the 70s, even certainly since the 90s.
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Maren Sumset Webb
Well, this is depressing. This is really depressing. What about fracking? That conversation has come up again in the UK and we saw the phenomenal success it's been in the US which of course is fairly insulated from their own war because they have this phenomenal energy security in the US which we obviously don't have. Would it make sense for us to pick up that conversation seriously?
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Professor Helen Thompson
I think the thing that's difficult about fracking in Europe is if you look in the earlier part of the 2010s and there was a lot of hope placed, particularly actually in Poland and to some extent in Ukraine. And it's actually an interesting part of the whole Russia, Ukraine story about fracking. And you see the US companies involved in that. You actually see, I think that the Obama administration was pretty keen on pushing like fracking in, in Europe. Poland looked the most propitious, but actually quite a lot of money was like spent there. And quite simply the rocks don't fracture in the same way. The geological prospects we have different, we
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Maren Sumset Webb
have different kinds of rocks.
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Professor Helen Thompson
Geological prospects of fracking in Europe are just not the same as they are in the United States. Now that isn't necessarily to say the whole thing is just a write off and not to be like pursued or thought about, but I don't think we should be under any illusions here is as I say, if you look in the Polish case, there was a lot invested for in the end, no re so Just because there are, like, shale deposits, it does not mean that fracking in a European country is a commercially viable proposition.
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Maren Sumset Webb
Helen, is there any chance that we can end our conversation on a note of optimism?
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Professor Helen Thompson
Where would you like to go, Merrin?
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Maren Sumset Webb
I. Literally anywhere at this point. Is there anything that we can say that is hopeful for the UK when it comes to energy security or for our future?
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Professor Helen Thompson
Yeah. One thing I do think is that the level of understanding about energy questions in our politics, I think, is rising, like, really considerably. And I've been talking about, like, energy on podcasts in one way or another since about 2016, like, 17, when I was doing talking politics. And to be honest, when I used to mention it, like, then I always thought, like, people would just think, what's she going on about? And then there was a big change for obvious reasons, like in, in 2022, like with Russia's invasion of Ukraine. And then I think it, like, faded away again. But now we've had, in some ways, in supply terms, the biggest energy, like, shock of peacetime that there has been. And I don't think it will fade away quite so much this time. I. I think that we're actually reached a point, in some sense, like, of no return, where the reckoning, if you like, is concerned. And that, I think, for the UK is a. Is a good thing because we've got to, like, undo, like, a mindset that essentially left us without an energy strategy or without an energy strategy in the world as it was, rather than the world as policymakers wanted it to be. And now the world titters and we have to be serious. And I think that's a good thing. I think you can see movement on the nuclear issue in terms of willing to face what it actually would mean to get more nuclear reactors, like, built. I think there has been movement from the Starmer government on that issue. So I think that those are good things.
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Maren Sumset Webb
Okay, so the conversation has become serious that we can foul this under Better late than never.
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Professor Helen Thompson
Yeah.
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Maren Sumset Webb
Thank you very much for joining us today.
- [33:22]
Professor Helen Thompson
It's been, it's been an absolute pleasure.
- [33:24]
Maren Sumset Webb
Yeah. I hope we haven't ruined everybody's Easter weekend. Thanks for listening to this week's Marin Talks Money. If you like our show, rate, review and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Also, keep sending your questions and your comments to marinmoneyloomburg.net. you can also follow me and John on Twitter or X. Helen, you're on Twitter, aren't you? What's your handle, Helen?
- [33:45]
Professor Helen Thompson
He T20.
- [33:47]
Maren Sumset Webb
Brilliant. Follow Helen, Any energy insight you want or need, you will find there. I'm Marionsw by the way and John is John Underscore Stepek this episode was hosted by me, Marisam Zet Webb. It was produced by Sama Saadi Moses andam Sound designed by Blake Maples and Aaron Casper.
- [34:08]
Commercial Narrator
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- [35:10]
Investment Advisor
leaders, word on the street is security incidents are dropping way down with Windows 11 PCs built in. Security for the win upgrade to Windows 11 Pro at windows means business.com Ryan
- [35:24]
Professor Helen Thompson
Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with a message for everyone paying big wireless way too much.
- [35:29]
Commercial Narrator
Please, for the love of everything good
- [35:31]
Professor Helen Thompson
in this world, stop with Mint. You can get premium wireless for just $15 a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying. No judgments. But that's weird. Okay, one judgment anyway. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required intro rate first three months only, then full price
- [35:51]
Commercial Narrator
plan options available, taxes and fees extra.
- [35:52]
Professor Helen Thompson
See full terms@mintmobile.com.