NextEra, Thunder Horse & Coal: The Week's Top Energy Stories
1. NextEra & Dominion Set to Create the World's Largest Utility
NextEra Energy and Dominion Energy are merging to create the world's largest electric utility, valued at US$420bn, amid surging AI data centre power demand
When two giants of an industry come together for a merger, the world takes notice. When that combined entity promises to be the largest a sector has ever seen, the world stops in its tracks.
Think Vodafone and Mannesmann, Exxon and Mobil, even the proposed merger between Warner Bros and Paramount that is under negotiation today. These kinds of deals have the capacity to entirely reshape an industry.
This is exactly what is happening now in American utilities.
NextEra Energy, already the world's largest utility by market cap, is set to acquire its US rival Dominion in a deal that experts say will create the world's largest electric utility.
The merged entity is expected to have an enterprise value of US$420bn, putting it among the world's most valuable companies.
The transaction looks set to be structured as an all-stock deal, which would see Dominion shareholders receive around 0.8 NextEra shares for every Dominion share, alongside a one-time cash payment of US$360m distributed equally across all outstanding Dominion shares.
2. Coal Investment Hits 14-Year High, IEA Warns
New research from the IEA has found that investment in coal has reached its highest level since 2012 with China and India leading the US$180bn charge
Investments in coal have reached a 14-year high, according to the International Energy Agencyās latest World Energy Investment report.
The study projects that investments in the fossil fuel are on course to top US$180bn by the end of 2026, the highest figure since 2012.
These findings speak to an uncomfortable truth present in the energy sector today, that despite all the recent progress on renewable energy, hydrocarbons still account for a huge proportion of power generation the world over.
This figure of US$180bn represents a 4% increase from 2025, while the main economies responsible for the spike are China and India.
The IEA says that more than 65% of all investments in coal come from China, with funding for steam coal production alone set to top US$100bn this year. For context, that is double what it was a decade ago.
The second biggest investor on the national level is India, where spending on coal has tripled over the last 10 years.
The country has been pushing hard to increase domestic production of late, with Coal India and a host of new companies winning auctions for commercial mines, adding tens of millions of tonnes of new capacity every year.
India is also the leader when it comes to investments in coal transport infrastructure (the trains used to move coal from mines to ports), with spending rising from US$5bn to US$7bn, and is seeking to expand its coal gasification capabilities to produce chemicals.
3. 100 Days of War: How the US-Iran Conflict Has Changed Energy
A hundred days into the US-Israel war with Iran, the Strait of Hormuz remains closed and Exxon, the IEA and PVM Oil warn of a long-term price crisis ahead
One hundred days ago, on 28 February, the US and Israel launched joint military operations against Iran.
The rest, as they say, is history. Destruction, death and unprecedented disruptions to the global energy market have followed, and the conflict still shows no sign of slowing.
Central to this story, particularly when it comes to energy, has been the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. This narrow waterway – about 21 miles wide – off the southern coast of Iran, has been effectively closed since the war began in the dying days of winter.
Ordinarily, around 20% of the world’s oil and gas shipments pass through the strait.
Since late February, though, logistics companies and insurance firms have been extremely hesitant to pass through it, meaning that a fifth of the global economy’s fuel has been largely stranded in the Gulf.
In the months since, governments and markets have scrambled to respond, with emergency stock releases, frantic diplomacy, naval escorts and wildly swinging oil prices all becoming part of day-to-day life.
But with no resolution in sight, many analysts worry that the worst is yet to come.
4. SLB's Role in the Expansion of bp's Thunder Horse Oil Field
SLB OneSubsea has won a bp subsea boosting contract for the Thunder Horse oil and gas field, the firm's third deepwater oil project in the Gulf of Mexico
The Thunder Horse oil field, located 150 miles southeast of New Orleans in the heart of the Gulf of Mexico, is one of the largest deepwater oil fields ever discovered.
It was first discovered in 1999 by bp and has been operated by the company ever since. It is thought that more than one billion barrels of oil lay beneath the waves at Thunder Horse – enough to last well into the 2030s.
That kind of scale demanded enormous ambition but, for a time, Thunder Horse seemed a cursed project.
Pumping was originally planned to commence in 2005, but the project's semi-submersible production platform was almost irreparably damaged by Hurricane Dennis in July of that year, with the strong winds almost capsizing the gigantic rig.
In light of the extensive pre-production hype surrounding the "world's largest production platform," it was a costly and embarrassing incident for bp.
Following a failure during pre-commissioning checks, components in the subsea system needed to be repaired and replaced, and the equipment remained in a cold state for a months and months.
The field was eventually brought on stream in June 2008, and has now been running for almost two decades. It was expanded to the north and south in 2016 and 2018, further boosting its capacity.
Now, more than 18 years into production, bp is turning to subsea boosting technology to help sustain output from what has become one of its most significant deepwater assets.
SLB's OneSubsea joint venture has been awarded a contract by bp to provide a subsea boosting system for the Thunder Horse project.
The agreement covers the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) of the system, including project management, engineering, manufacturing and testing.
5. Schneider Electric & Kraken's Strategy for Grid Flexibility
Schneider Electric and Kraken partner to tackle grid congestion with AI-driven demand flexibility, targeting faster connections for data centres & industry
Back in 2016, Octopus was an up-and-coming energy provider in the UK. A decade on, it is the the country's undisputed energy leader, thanks in no small part to the cutting-edge technology that underpins its services.
Kraken, Octopus' proprietary operating platform, was central to the company's meteoric rise. The technology played a role in all of Octopus' operations, from customer service, to grid balancing, to automatic billing.
Last year, Greg Jackson and co. decided to spin off Kraken, making it a fully independent business. In the 12 months since, Kraken's position and influence in the energy market has grown as large as the stature of its mythical cephalopod namesake.
One of the latest partnerships the firm has struck up is with Schneider Electric, another titan of the global energy sector.
The collaboration between the two organisations will focus on improving the flexibility of power grids – something both firms say is critical to the modern energy landscape, especially given the rise of AI and data centres.
The numbers behind AI illustrate the gravity of the situation. Data centre electricity demand alone reached around 415TWh in 2024 – roughly equivalent to the UK's entire annual power consumption – and is projected to double by 2030.
Clearly, that is a huge amount of energy. The problem is that the organisations responsible for managing grids often lack the oversight needed to respond to shifting demand.
This means that data centres generally rely on very expensive upgrades to infrastructure before they can start running at full capacity.
The joint venture between Schneider and Kraken will look to find a way around that bottleneck by using software and AI to extract more capacity from the grid as it already exists, rather than waiting for grids to be revamped.
