The 2026 U.S.-Iran War and the Global Energy Crisis

Chapter 2: Oil, Changing the Speed of War

2.1 From Coal to Oil

In October 1911, thirty-seven-year-old Winston Churchill entered the office of First Lord of the Admiralty. On his desk lay a report on German Imperial Navy's warship construction plans. Germany was launching new battleships every year, and Britain's dominance at sea was being eroded at a visible pace. The question Churchill faced was straightforward: how to build warships that were faster, stronger, and could travel farther than Germany's?

The answer was not coal.

The coal of Wales had sustained Britain's naval supremacy in the nineteenth century. Major ports worldwide had coal supply depots, and the British Navy was a giant steam fleet sailing across this web. Coal was a resource buried infinitely beneath British soil, so from a security perspective, there was no more reliable energy source. Britain was the world's largest coal producer, and coal was the physical foundation of the empire.

But beside Churchill was Admiral John Fisher. As First Sea Lord from 1904 onward, Fisher was known within the navy as the "Oil Maniac" for his relentless push toward oil power. Fisher had conducted an oil combustion test on the destroyer HMS Hannibal in 1903, and by 1904, he had turned HMS Spiteful into the first oil-only destroyer. Submarines and destroyers already used oil, but the idea of using oil in capital ships that decided the fate of nations sounded like "madness" within the Navy. This was because not a single drop of oil was produced on British soil.

In 1912, Fisher sent Churchill a letter: "What you want is a super-fast warship. All oil. Don't cling to armor plates. That is truly foolish! The only means of defense is one thing, and one thing alone: speed!"

Churchill posed a question to the Naval War College: what level of speed would be needed to overwhelm the maneuvers of the German High Seas Fleet? The answer came back: 25 knots. This was 4 knots faster than 21 knots, the limit of coal-powered battleships. Churchill later recalled: "Without oil, we could not have achieved the power needed for that speed."

So the gamble began. On June 15, 1912, the British Admiralty approved construction of the Queen Elizabeth-class, the next flagship battleships. These warships were designed as pure oil-only vessels, burning not a single speck of coal. Five ships were built, and the first, HMS Queen Elizabeth, was laid down on October 21, 1912. Displacement: 31,500 tons, eight 381-millimeter (15-inch) guns, designed speed: 25 knots. It was faster, stronger, and could travel farther than any warship afloat at that time.

Why oil defeated coal can be explained in the language of thermodynamics.

At the same weight, oil has twice the energy density of coal. This means you could travel twice as far with the same size fuel storage space. Speed also increased. The Queen Elizabeth-class, powered by twenty-four Yarrow oil-fired boilers and Parsons steam turbines, produced 56,000 horsepower and surpassed the previous Iron Duke-class's 21 knots by 4 knots.

Supply methods changed. Coal-powered warships had to dock in ports and spend days loading coal. In that process, hundreds of stokers wielded shovels to move coal, and the hull became covered in black dust everywhere. Oil was different. Connecting a pipe was all it took. Refueling at sea from tankers was possible while underway. By Admiral Fisher's calculation, the switch to oil cut the number of stokers in half, and this workforce could be reassigned to gun turrets and ammunition magazines. At the time, the British Navy's most serious concern was a shortage of trained sailors, so oil was also a solution to the manpower crisis.

Concealment ability differed too. Coal-powered warships belched columns of black smoke from their funnels. Enemy positions were exposed from tens of kilometers away. Oil burned cleanly with almost no smoke, and this was a decisive tactical advantage.

All these advantages came at a price. Britain was the world's largest coal holder, but it produced not a single drop of oil. The fuel that moved the imperial heartbeat was buried beneath another nation's soil. This was the fatal dilemma hidden in Churchill's gamble.

Churchill confronted this dilemma head-on. On July 31, 1912, he established the Royal Commission on Fuel and Engines. Admiral Fisher served as chairman. The commission members were filled with experts in oil, geology, and naval engineering. Over three years, the commission submitted three confidential reports, and the conclusion was clear: oil supplies are sufficient. However, large-scale storage facilities must be built during peacetime, and supply sources must be diversified.

The decisive measure came in 1914. The British government purchased a 51 percent stake in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company for 2 million pounds. This company, after discovering vast oil fields in Masjed Soleyman in southwestern Persia (present-day Iran) in 1908, had built the world's largest oil refinery of the time in Abadan. The transaction condition was that the company would supply 40 million barrels of oil to the Navy over twenty years. The British government essentially nationalized an oil company. This company later changed its name to the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, and then changed its name once more to BP.

A paradoxical structure emerged: to maintain dominance at sea, Britain had to advance into the deserts of the Middle East. The moment the British Navy's lifeline was tethered to Persian Gulf oil wells, the Middle East became a permanent powder keg of great power geopolitics. To understand why the Strait of Hormuz remains the chokehold on the world economy today, one must return to Churchill's decision in 1912. The moment oil became the fuel of war, the lands where oil flowed could only become battlefields.

The oil revolution did not stop at sea. On land, another massive tectonic shift was occurring through the internal combustion engine.

The steam engine had a fatal physical limitation. It required massive boilers, large quantities of water, and coal, making it impossible to mount on anything but trains or large ships. Military movement was bound to fixed railroad lines. In places without railroads, armies still had to rely on horses and human legs.

The internal combustion engine, which generated power by burning gasoline and diesel, was small and light. This engine rode onto carriages and became trucks, wrapped itself in armor and added caterpillar tracks to become tanks, and fitted itself with wings and flew into the sky as aircraft. The space of war expanded from the one-dimensional realm of railroads and trenches to the three-dimensional realm of plains and sky.

The First World War was the first to demonstrate the power of the internal combustion engine on the battlefield. In September 1914, when the German Army advanced to fifty kilometers outside Paris, the French Army made an emergency requisition of hundreds of Renault taxis in Paris and transported 6,000 reserve troops to the front lines at night. It was not the cavalry but the internal combustion engine mounted on civilian automobiles that turned the tide of the Battle of the Marne. In the later stages of the war, British tanks trampled trenches and barbed wire and broke through, while in the sky, propeller-driven fighter aircraft performed reconnaissance and bombing.

After the war, British Foreign Secretary Sir George Curzon said: "The Allies sailed to victory upon waves of oil."

Coal moved trains. Oil moved tanks, trucks, and aircraft. The age of cavalry had ended. How quickly and how far armies could move was now determined by the quantity of oil and the output of internal combustion engines. The speed of war had changed.

2.2 The Real Victory and Defeat in Two World Wars

The textbook narrative of the Second World War goes like this: the ideological clash between fascism and democracy, the tactical genius of great generals, the Normandy landings and the heroic battles of Stalingrad. But when you look through the lens of energy at the internal structure of the war, a completely different landscape unfolds.

In 1939, the world's oil map was extremely asymmetrical. The United States was an overwhelmingly dominant oil empire, producing more than 60 percent of the world's crude oil output. Oil wells in Texas, Oklahoma, and California spewed forth millions of barrels daily. The Soviet Union, centered on the Baku oil fields, was the world's second-largest oil producer. These two countries formed the core of the Allies.

The condition of the Axis powers on the other side was miserable. Germany produced no oil. Japan produced no oil. Both nations had to import oil, and without it, not a single tank or fighter could move. The Second World War began with this asymmetry and ended with it.

Let us look at Japan's story first.

Until July 1941, the Japanese Empire was importing more than 80 percent of the oil it needed from the United States. It was buying the blood that moved its own military from a potential adversary. Domestic synthetic fuel production amounted to only 3 million barrels annually, and more than 90 percent of the rest depended on imports.

From 1937 onward, Japan had been invading China and waging all-out war. In 1940, with the consent of the Vichy French government, Japan occupied French Indochina (present-day Vietnam). Initially, the United States restricted the export of scrap metal and aviation fuel. But when Japan advanced into southern Indochina in July 1941, President Roosevelt played his final card. On July 26, Japan's assets in the United States were frozen in full. Oil exports were banned entirely. Britain and the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia) joined in.

In one stroke, Japan lost 88 percent of its oil imports.

The Naval Ministry reported to Emperor Hirohito: the time they could last on stockpiled oil was approximately eighteen months. Half that if they went to war. Japan had to choose: either surrender or march toward where the oil was.

The oil lay to the south. The oil fields of the Dutch East Indies were producing 65 million barrels annually as of 1940. But to occupy the Dutch East Indies, they first had to neutralize Britain's Singapore base and America's Philippine base. If the U.S. Pacific Fleet sailed out from Hawaii, Japan's southern campaign would be vulnerable to a flanking attack.

On the morning of Sunday, December 7, 1941, the Japanese Navy launched an aerial attack on Pearl Harbor. The Pacific War had begun. The direct cause of the start of the war was the American oil embargo. Japan's huge resource plunder campaign as it surged southward in search of oil. That was the true essence of the Pacific War.

In the early stages, Japan swiftly seized the oil fields of Southeast Asia. But transporting oil from those fields to the Japanese mainland and front lines was an entirely different matter. Thousands of kilometers of sea routes became hunting grounds for American submarines. The U.S. Navy unleashed submarines across the Pacific and systematically sank Japanese tankers and transport vessels. As tankers sank in succession in the South China Sea and Philippine waters, an odd situation emerged: oil overflowed from the wells, but fuel was in short supply at the homeland and fleet.

By the end of the war, Japan's fuel shortage reached a dire state. As aviation fuel to fly aircraft ran dry, training flight hours for newly enlisted pilots were slashed to extremes. Sending less-experienced pilots to the battlefield was tantamount to a death sentence, and eventually, kamikaze suicide attacks, fueled only for a one-way journey, became institutionalized. In April 1945, when Yamato, the largest battleship in history, was deployed in the defense of Okinawa, what remained of the Japanese Navy's fuel allowed only a one-way voyage. It was a sortie with no oil to return. Yamato was hit by bombing from the U.S. Navy air force and sank in the East China Sea.

An empire without oil ended in this way.

Germany's trajectory was no different. Only the path was different.

Blitzkrieg, Adolf Hitler's military invention, was a tactic where armored divisions pierced the enemy's defense lines and executed flanking maneuvers hundreds of kilometers away. This tactic consumed enormous quantities of fuel. Since Germany produced no oil, it relied on two things. One was the Ploiești oil fields in Romania, the lifeline that supplied about 60 percent of German crude oil. The other was coal liquefaction technology. Called the Fischer-Tropsch process, this technology extracted synthetic fuel from coal. Large-scale synthetic fuel plants like Leuna operated throughout German territory.

But as the war expanded across Europe, fuel demand grew geometrically, and supply could not keep pace. When Hitler embarked on the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 (Operation Barbarossa), his ultimate objective was not Moscow. It was the Baku oil fields in the Caucasus region. Baku was the heartbeat of Soviet oil production. Hitler told his staff: "If we do not obtain the oil of Baku, we must lose this war."

The German Sixth Army became stuck at Stalingrad, the gateway to Baku. The Battle of Stalingrad, which lasted from August 1942 to February 1943, is recorded as the turning point of the Second World War. The Sixth Army was annihilated, and the Baku oil never fell into German hands. General Erwin Rommel on the African front likewise overwhelmed the British Army tactically, but as his supply line was cut and his tanks ran out of fuel, he retreated. What decided the battle in the desert was not the general's genius, but the fuel gauge.

The final stage of war teetered between tragedy and comedy. In December 1944, Hitler made one last desperate gamble on the western front. The Ardennes Offensive, also known as the Battle of the Bulge. German armored units tried to break through Belgium's forests and seize Allied supply bases. Capturing the Allies' fuel stores was one of the operation's key objectives. The plan was simple: lacking their own fuel, they would steal the enemy's. The offensive succeeded initially, but the Allies had destroyed their fuel depots beforehand or moved them to safety. Tiger and Panther tanks, their fuel exhausted, were abandoned along the forest paths of the Ardennes. The world's most powerful heavy tanks had become worthless scrap metal without fuel.

The picture on the Allied side was entirely different.

America was producing over 60 percent of the world's oil from Texas, Oklahoma, and California. America's capacity to wage war, built on this oil, was something the Axis powers could never match. While fighting a two-front war in both Europe and the Pacific, America also supplied vast quantities of matériel to Britain and the Soviet Union through the Lend-Lease Act. A substantial portion of that aid consisted of oil and petroleum products.

The 100-octane high-quality aviation fuel supplied by America filled the tanks of the British RAF's Spitfires and the U.S. Army Air Forces' P-51 Mustangs. Without this fuel, victory in the Battle of Britain and air superiority over German skies would have been impossible. To safely transport oil within the mainland while avoiding German U-boats in the Atlantic, America rapidly constructed a massive pipeline spanning from Texas to the eastern seaboard: 24 inches in diameter and 2,100 kilometers long, nicknamed the Big Inch. War demanded oil, and America answered with oil.

The true victor of World War II was not decided by generals' tactics. It was America's endless oil fields crushing Germany's synthetic fuel plants and Japan's depleted fuel reserves through sheer volume. A tank without oil was nothing but heavy scrap metal, and a fighter without fuel was a sitting target in the sky. The outcome of the war was determined not on the battlefield but in the oil fields.

2.3 The Decisive Effect of Bombing Petroleum Facilities

As World War II unfolded, military strategists reached a harsh realization about the arithmetic of war.

Destroy one hundred enemy tanks on the battlefield, and the enemy manufactures one hundred more in its factories. But destroy a single enemy refinery, and one thousand of the enemy's tanks cannot move. The fact that targeting fuel is far more effective in deciding the outcome of war than targeting weapons became the core logic of strategic bombing.

On the European front, the Allies focused on two primary targets.

First, the Ploiesti oilfields in Romania. This was the heart of Germany's crude oil supply, providing roughly 60 percent of Germany's crude and producing about 40 percent of the German military's fuel. Nine refineries were scattered around the city like coral reefs, and their distillation towers, cracking units, boiler rooms, and storage tanks had to be destroyed with precision to shut down operations.

On August 1, 1943, the U.S. Army Air Forces launched 178 B-24 Liberator bombers from Benghazi, Libya. Code-named Operation Tidal Wave. After flying 1,900 kilometers, they would drop their bombs at extremely low altitude, between 60 and 240 meters,an audaciously unconventional operation for the time. But clouds and navigation errors scattered the formation, and German air defense commander Colonel Alfred Gerstenberg, having previously decrypted American codes, had positioned 88-millimeter antiaircraft guns, barrage balloons, and fighter aircraft in readiness.

The result was devastating. Fifty-four bombers were shot down or failed to return, and 532 crew members were killed, captured, or missing,the highest proportional loss rate of any U.S. Army Air Forces operation in Europe. That day became known as Bloody Sunday. Forty-two percent of the refinery's cracking units and 40 percent of its refining capacity were destroyed, but Germany mobilized forced laborers to repair the facilities within weeks and brought idle equipment online, restoring production to its original levels.

Operation Tidal Wave was tactically close to a failure. But the lesson it left behind was clear: petroleum facilities must be attacked with precision, repeatedly, and relentlessly. In the spring of 1944, the Allies put that lesson into practice.

Second, synthetic fuel plants on German soil. This was the real knockout blow.

On May 12, 1944, bombers of the U.S. Eighth Air Force struck the synthetic oil plant at Leuna in central Germany. Leuna was Germany's largest facility for producing synthetic fuel from coal using the Fischer-Tropsch process and Bergius hydrogenation.

Germany's Armaments Minister Albert Speer said he would never forget that day. "On May 12, 1944, the outcome of the technological war was decided." He reported to Hitler: "The enemy has struck our weakest point. If they persist in this course, we will soon lose any significant fuel production capacity."

The Allies did persist.

The numbers speak for themselves. The synthetic fuel plants' monthly production was 316,000 tons before the attacks. By June 1944 it had fallen to 107,000 tons. By September it had collapsed to 17,000 tons. Aviation fuel production plummeted from 175,000 tons in April to 30,000 tons in July and just 5,000 tons in September. On June 30, 1944, Speer wrote to Hitler: "By June 22, our aviation fuel losses had reached 90 percent."

These numbers paralyzed the entire German military. The Luftwaffe could no longer put fighters in the sky. Germany had developed the Me-262, the world's first jet fighter, only to leave it grounded in hangars for lack of fuel. With no aviation fuel to train new pilots, training hours were cut to the bone. Final engine test runs were reduced from two hours to thirty minutes. In May 1944 alone, the Luftwaffe lost 489 trained pilots, but training schools produced only 396 replacements. Losses outpaced replacements. The Luftwaffe was disarmed not by fighters but by the absence of fuel.

On the ground, the panzer divisions came to a halt. After the summer of 1944, German armor operations became increasingly constrained by fuel shortages. During the Ardennes Offensive in December 1944, Germany's fuel reserves were already insufficient to sustain the operation. Capturing Allied fuel depots was part of the operational plan, but it failed. In early 1945, to contain the Soviet forces at the Baranow bridgehead on the Vistula River, Germany massed 1,200 tanks. But these tanks, starved of fuel, could not move and were pushed back by the Soviet offensive.

Speer's March 1945 report was the final diagnosis: "The German economy will face inevitable collapse within four to eight weeks."

On the Pacific front, severing Japan's oil supply routes followed the same principle.

The U.S. Navy's submarine fleet made Japanese tankers its primary target. One by one, tankers were sunk along the shipping routes from Southeast Asia to Japan's homeland, in the South China Sea, the Taiwan Strait, and the Philippine waters. Japan was pumping oil from the southern oilfields, but it could not transport that oil to the homeland.

Late in the war, Japan's aviation fuel stocks ran dry. Pilot training was reduced to bare minimums, and this became the institutional backdrop of the kamikaze attacks. The strategy of carrying only one-way fuel and crashing into enemy ships was born from the tragic reality that return was impossible without fuel.

And this lesson repeats itself precisely in the twenty-first century.

In the Ukraine-Russia war, instead of directly confronting Russian tanks and artillery on the front lines, Ukraine struck deep into Russian territory's energy infrastructure with long-range kamikaze drones. The Ust-Luga and Primorsk terminals, the critical Baltic Sea oil export ports near Saint Petersburg, the Yaroslavl refinery, one of Russia's top five, along with the Ryazan refinery near Moscow and the Tuapse refinery in the south, were engulfed in flames one after another. Russia's oil export capacity was severely crippled, and Russia, one of the world's largest oil exporters, found itself facing shortages of gasoline and diesel for domestic consumption.

In the 2026 Iran war, the core targets were not military installations but energy infrastructure. Iran struck Kuwait's Mina Al-Ahmadi refinery, Saudi Arabia's Yanbu refinery, the UAE's Fujairah port, and Qatar's Ras Laffan LNG facility. The United States targeted Kharg Island, which handles 90 percent of Iran's crude oil exports. This was not a war against armies but a war to sever the economic arteries. The logic of the 1944 Leuna bombing operated unchanged eighty years later.

Between Albert Speer's warning to Hitler on May 12, 1944, and the reality Asian governments faced after the March 2026 blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, eighty years had passed. Yet the sentence structure is strikingly similar: "The enemy has cut off our energy. If this continues, we cannot endure much longer."

The phrase "the decisive effect of bombing petroleum facilities" is actually understating the case. More precisely, it should be said this way: cutting off fuel is the most efficient method of waging war to simultaneously paralyze all of the enemy's military systems, defenses, logistics, and economy. A war targeting fuel rather than weapons began in World War II, continued through Ukraine's drone campaign, and reached completion at the Strait of Hormuz in 2026.

The story of 2026, which begins with Part Two of this book, unfolds on the foundation of this ancient grammar.

Attorney Kim Kyung-jin, AI Policy Specialist

Specialist in AI Law and Policy · Former Member of the National Assembly · Author of Multiple Works

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