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Omran Al-Kuwari on Rethinking Energy Security and What the World Got Wrong on Hormuz
The S2G Podcast • Ep. 65
Omran Al-Kuwari on Rethinking Energy Security and What the World Got Wrong on Hormuz
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Omran Al-Kuwari has been counting: September 16 marked 200 days since the Strait of Hormuz was closed, and there’s still no fallback plan.
As he puts it, a small regional airport might have more built-in redundancy than the Strait that feeds much of the world’s energy. Omran, whose career in gas dates back to 1999, joins S2G’s Sanjeev Krishnan and Frédéric Michel, the former chief strategy and communications advisor to Emmanuel Macron, to argue that Hormuz was never a regional problem. It’s global critical infrastructure, and the risk reaches well past oil and gas into fertilizer, food prices, and even the helium that hospitals need for MRI machines. Oil had its wake-up call in 1973 and built strategic stocks in response. LNG is having its wake-up call now.
Omran explains why the weak points sit in the gaps between institutions, why we’ve built an architecture that keeps producing crises, and why the fix comes down to redundancy, governance, and deciding who pays for it. The conversation closes with a reframe: Energy transitions don’t swap one fuel for another, they stack new systems on old ones, and those systems now have to be built for a more volatile, fragmented world.
Key Takeaways
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Omran argues that Hormuz should be treated as a critical global infrastructure asset because disruption does not stop at oil and gas. It can move through fertilizer, food, industrial production, and other parts of the global economy. That means the risks and the responsibility for addressing them extend well beyond the Gulf.
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Interdependence creates enormous economic value, but without backup capacity, it can also create fragility. Omran’s central challenge is therefore economic as much as technical: how do we price redundancy, determine who pays for it, and create incentives to build resilience before the next crisis makes its value obvious?
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One of the surprises of the crisis has been China’s ability to absorb the disruption. Omran points to a diversified mix of storage, renewables, nuclear, and coal that has provided flexibility and helped limit additional pressure on global energy prices. The lesson is less about any single energy source than the value of maintaining multiple options.
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European and Asian gas markets are already much more closely connected, while the United States remains separated by the cost and capacity of LNG infrastructure. As more U.S. gas is exported and data centers compete for domestic supply, those markets may become increasingly linked, with implications for power prices, industrial competitiveness, and AI development.
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Energy systems rarely move neatly from one source to another. New technologies are layered onto existing systems, making the overall architecture more complex. For Omran, that means the transition must account not only for new energy sources, but also for a world that is more fragmented and volatile, requiring new infrastructure, governance, and coordination around the entire system.
Tonya Bakritzes: We used to think about energy in separate boxes. Oil and gas were commodities, electricity was a local utility, and security was the government’s job.
That’s not how it works anymore, and the Hormuz crisis made that clear. When nearly a fifth of the world’s LNG went offline, the shock pushed up power prices in Europe and Asia, and from there, the cost of fertilizer, food, and just about everything else.
That’s the argument Dr. Omran Al-Kuwari has been making: Gulf energy is global infrastructure, and the biggest risks sit between systems.
