Wow! Pragmatism! Driven by physics, economics and, yes, even politics. It’s clear that the reset that took off in 2025 will carry into 2026, and energy markets are breathing a collective sigh of relief. This turnabout is positive for infrastructure development, long-overdue policy fixes, and energy security. President Trump’s priorities may be a bit less supportive of higher oil prices and rapid crude oil production growth. But that’s a small price to pay for more realistic policies that bolster oil, natural gas and NGLs.
In observance of today’s holiday, we’ve given our analysts a break and are revisiting the New Year’s Day blog that features our energy prognostications for 2026. If you didn’t read it then, this is your opportunity to see what you missed! Happy MLK Day!
So what does this renewed tilt toward fossil fuels mean for energy markets? With so much changing, there’s just no way to predict what will happen in 2026, right? Nah. All we need to do is stick out our collective RBN necks one more time, peer into our crystal ball, and see what the new year has in store for us.
It’s now 14 years that we’ve been in the prognostications business, and it seems like the world keeps changing faster and getting more unpredictable. But that doesn’t deter us from going for it again. And we have also continued our tradition of looking back on how we did on last year’s predictions. Yes, we check our work! You can see how we did in our 2025 Prognostications Scorecard that was posted on January 1. Be sure to check if we predicted Maduro’s capture or President Trump’s takeover of Venezuela’s oil (Darn’ed, we didn’t). And there were a couple of other misses, but we got the important ones right!
2026 – Year of the Horse
Way back in 2013, when we first dipped our toes into the murky business of energy prognostications,we were happy to take insight wherever we could find it. That led us to the Chinese zodiac, which turned out to be a very useful guide for thinking about energy markets. Really. Last year was year of the snake. ’Nuf said. There was palpable greed in 2019’s Year of the Pig, and COVID 2020 was definitely Year of the Rat. This year the Chinese calendar tells us it is the Year of the Horse — strong, proud and fast. That sounds great. But anybody remember what happened at the end of 2014, the last time it was Year of the Horse? Yep, the first crude oil price crash of the Shale Era. Over the Thanksgiving weekend in 2014, WTI dropped by $7.54/bbl to $66.15/bbl, marking a 38% decline in only five months. In 2014, the horse turned out to be a bucking bronco and the market got thrown hard.
