Greg Priddy, a senior fellow for the Middle East at the Center for the National Interest, is an expert on political risk and global energy markets. He will also be a speaker at the .
During an executive briefing, Priddy will share an outlook for petroleum supply, addressing key issues related to political instability, conflicts, and sanctions in major oil-producing regions that can disrupt supply chains and lead to uncertainty in the oil market.
Priddy鈥檚 work in energy started with him serving as a contractor for the U.S. Energy Information Administration at the U.S. Department of Energy from 1999 to 2006. His work centered on analysis of oil market disruption scenarios, including some of the U.S. government鈥檚 scenario planning after 9/11 and in the run-up to the Iraq War in 2003.
From 2006 to 2018, Priddy was director, global oil, at Eurasia Group. His work focused on forward-looking analysis of how political risk, sanctions and public policy variables impact energy markets and the global industry, with a heavy emphasis on the Persian Gulf region.
His writing has been published in The New York Times, The National Interest, Barron鈥檚 and the Nikkei Asian Review. He has appeared on the NewsHour on PBS, CNBC, CNN, NPR, Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabi TV.
We sat down with Priddy to learn more about his background and areas of expertise.
Q. What first interested you about the global fuels market?
A. Money! I ended up gravitating toward the energy sector in the late 1990s when I found myself with a graduate degree in international relations and a State Department and intelligence community, which, due to the end of the Cold War, weren’t doing much hiring. I decided to learn the oil market at EIA and parlay that into a better-paying private sector career in political risk consulting, using both skill bases. By the time the government started hiring again after 9/11, I didn’t want to go back in that direction.
Q. You’ve traveled to the Middle East several times. What did you learn about the fuels industry from spending time there that you wouldn’t have learned any other way?
A. I have had a lot of contact with people in the national oil companies over the years, and it is great to be able to hear what they think of the market and of demand trends in other centers of growth like China and India, etc. There was sometimes a disconnect with what I was hearing in Houston. Sometimes the Gulfis were right, but sometimes they misperceived things pretty badly, as in the period when shale was taking off in the early 2010s, and they didn’t see the market crash of late 2014 coming.
Q. What do you think is the most misunderstood aspect of global energy?
A. Probably the perception by the mass public in the U.S. that oil companies and distributors somehow collude on prices. It has been studied to death and there is no truth to it, but the myth persists. A lot of people don’t understand the impersonal forces of supply and demand.
Q. What are your go-to sources for information on oil supply and demand and fuel prices?
A. EIA () is good and free. The International Energy Agency () is a good source of data, but their forecasts are a bit too pessimistic about long-term demand because they are way too optimistic about the timeline for a transition away from fossil fuels.
Q. While you were in the Middle East did you visit a truck stop?
A. I did have lunch once at a truck stop near Dokan Lake in northern Iraq in 2014. I asked my Kurdish driver to stop there, and I was the only foreigner there. I have a photo that shows the convenience store/restaurant. The fueling area was on the other side of the lot. There were no showers.
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