The U.S.-Israeli war on Iran entered a new phase Wednesday after Israel bombed Iran’s South Pars gas field, the largest known natural gas reserve in the world. The attack set off huge fires at a refinery and petrochemical facilities that process the majority of Iran’s domestic supply of natural gas. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps retaliated by attacking energy infrastructure across the Persian Gulf region. Within hours, Iranian missiles caused extensive damage to Qatar’s Ras Laffan facility, which handles nearly 20% of global exports of liquified natural gas. Separate attacks from Iran damaged two refineries in Kuwait, two oil fields in the United Arab Emirates and a Saudi Aramco refinery at the port of Yanbu — a critical oil terminal in the Red Sea far from Iran, on Saudi Arabia’s western coast.

The escalating attacks set off panic in global markets and sent the price of oil skyrocketing as high as $118 a barrel. Several governments in Asia are now rationing fuel, slashing public services and shortening workweeks to conserve energy. Here in the U.S., gasoline prices are now at their highest level since 2023 and are set to climb further. On Wednesday, Vice President JD Vance addressed soaring fuel prices after a meeting in Michigan with the American Petroleum Institute.

Vice President JD Vance: “It’s not going to last forever. We’re going to take care of business. We’re going to come back home. And when that happens, you’re going to see energy prices come back down to reality. But in the meantime, we got a problem. We know that we have a problem. We’re doing everything that we can to address it.”