Liam Denning, Columnist

Energy’s Year of Recovery? More Like Remission.

The sector has snapped back from Covid-19, but it’s still consolidating and anticipating inevitable decarbonization.

November 9, 2021 at 4:25 PM UTC

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

Not outright recovery.
Photographer: PAUL RATJE/AFP via Getty Images

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It’s been one year since the bombshell announcement of positive test results for Pfizer Inc.’s Covid-19 vaccine jolted stocks higher. Since that day, no sector has soared faster than energy.

This was something of a bungee-cord snapback. Covid-19’s lockdowns and general economic mayhem had ravaged oil demand, to the point that Nymex futures actually closed below zero for the first time ever. Until news of the vaccine broke, energy had been the worst performing sector in 2020, falling by more than half.