Liam Denning, Columnist

Russia’s War Draws Governments Into Energy Markets

Releasing millions of barrels of reserve oil and pushing energy companies to drill are only the beginning.

April 4, 2022 at 10:00 AM 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.

Intervening in energy markets.
Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg

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With its attack on Ukraine, Russia has made enemies of more than a few states. With regard to energy, though, Russia is far from being an enemy of the state. The war has accelerated a shift in energy away from markets and toward mandates.

President Joe Biden announced Thursday not one but three federal interventions in energy markets. The headline grabber was a 180 million-barrel release from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the biggest ever. But he also invoked the 1950 Defense Production Act to spur domestic development of critical minerals such as lithium that go into batteries for electric vehicles and the grid. In addition, he prodded Congress to make oil and gas companies holding fallow federal acreage pay a fee for it or drill.