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Middle East: The Capital of Concentrated Wealth

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Middle East: The Capital of Concentrated Wealth and Oil

Middle East: The Capital of Concentrated Wealth

For much of history, the Middle East has been the capital of concentrated wealth. Whether it is oil, gold, or empires, the cradle of civilization has always been a place of opulence.

It all started early, with the Persian empire under Cyrus the Great. In the armory and treasury at Persepolis was a hefty 120,000 talents of bullion. That made the stash a sizable 115 million oz in total. The Umayyad Caliphate continued the trend by building the biggest empire at the time, which spanned from Spain and Morocco all the way to modern day Pakistan. That’s 5.1 million sq. miles.

Today, the Middle East still has concentrated wealth. The WSJ found that Middle East billionaire wealth grew 12.4% in 2013. Perhaps even more impressive: for every ten barrels of oil in world reserves, Middle Eastern countries in OPEC have eight. A country such as Kuwait, which is half the size of Maryland, has the 6th highest reserves in the world and is producing almost 3 million barrels a day.

Original infographic from: Master of Finance

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How Much Does the U.S. Depend on Russian Uranium?

Currently, Russia is the largest foreign supplier of nuclear power fuel to the U.S.

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Voronoi graphic visualizing U.S. reliance on Russian uranium

How Much Does the U.S. Depend on Russian Uranium?

This was originally posted on Elements. Sign up to the free mailing list to get beautiful visualizations on natural resource megatrends in your email.

The U.S. House of Representatives recently passed a ban on imports of Russian uranium. The bill must pass the Senate before becoming law.

In this graphic, we visualize how much the U.S. relies on Russian uranium, based on data from the United States Energy Information Administration (EIA).

U.S. Suppliers of Enriched Uranium

After Russia invaded Ukraine, the U.S. imposed sanctions on Russian-produced oil and gas—yet Russian-enriched uranium is still being imported.

Currently, Russia is the largest foreign supplier of nuclear power fuel to the United States. In 2022, Russia supplied almost a quarter of the enriched uranium used to fuel America’s fleet of more than 90 commercial reactors.

Country of enrichment serviceSWU%
🇺🇸 United States3,87627.34%
🇷🇺 Russia3,40924.04%
🇩🇪 Germany1,76312.40%
🇬🇧 United Kingdom1,59311.23%
🇳🇱 Netherlands1,3039.20%
Other2,23215.79%
Total14,176100%

SWU stands for “Separative Work Unit” in the uranium industry. It is a measure of the amount of work required to separate isotopes of uranium during the enrichment process. Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration

Most of the remaining uranium is imported from European countries, while another portion is produced by a British-Dutch-German consortium operating in the United States called Urenco.

Similarly, nearly a dozen countries around the world depend on Russia for more than half of their enriched uranium—and many of them are NATO-allied members and allies of Ukraine.

In 2023 alone, the U.S. nuclear industry paid over $800 million to Russia’s state-owned nuclear energy corporation, Rosatom, and its fuel subsidiaries.

It is important to note that 19% of electricity in the U.S. is powered by nuclear plants.

The dependency on Russian fuels dates back to the 1990s when the United States turned away from its own enrichment capabilities in favor of using down-blended stocks of Soviet-era weapons-grade uranium.

As part of the new uranium-ban bill, the Biden administration plans to allocate $2.2 billion for the expansion of uranium enrichment facilities in the United States.

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