The Guardian: Why Middle East conflict is a bigger threat to UK energy security than Putin

World oil markets have responded with surprising resilience in the face of uncertainty, but are prices set to rocket? With much of the media focus over recent weeks on the political crisis in Ukraine and EU and US sanctions against Russia, Europe’s future energy security seems further adrift than ever.

But Europe’s biggest problem isn’t this winter’s gas supplies; it is our economy’s continued reliance on imported fossil fuels – oil in particular. Some of the most important dynamics affecting oil markets today are happening in the Middle East.

For those of us following energy markets closely, news of political turmoil in the Middle East are a familiar part of our work. But the past few years have been rather exceptional. It’s not just the increasingly diverse sources of regional and domestic conflict in the area and the rising number of Middle Eastern oil and gas producers that are unprecedented, but how the oil markets have responded to conflict.
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