The instinct is understandable. Oil and gas prices spike, shipping routes become war zones, and the obvious conclusion is: accelerate electrification. Get off hydrocarbons. Build more wind, solar, batteries, nuclear. Reduce exposure to geopolitical chokepoints.
It is the right long-term direction. But there is a dangerous assumption buried inside that logic - the assumption that the green transition is independent of the very supply chains it is meant to replace.
It is not. And the Strait of Hormuz makes that uncomfortably clear.
The sulphur problem no one is talking about
Roughly 90% of global sulphur supply is a byproduct of fossil fuel processing. Sulphur can be mined directly from volcanic and sedimentary deposits - but that route is significantly more expensive, more carbon-intensive, and nowhere near sufficient at the scale required. For now, the green economy runs largely on what is, in effect, a cheap waste product of the industry it is trying to replace.
That sulphur feeds sulphuric acid - the world's highest-volume industrial chemical — which in turn is the engine of high-pressure acid leaching (HPAL), the dominant process for extracting nickel and cobalt from laterite deposits. The same nickel and cobalt that go into every lithium-ion battery powering your EV, your grid storage, your data centre UPS.
The Gulf accounts for around 45% of global sulphur exports. Indonesia — the world's dominant nickel producer - imports sulphur for HPAL. When maritime traffic through the Strait dropped by approximately 97% in early March 2026, Indonesian producers began warning that stockpiles could last weeks, not months.
The chain is not a cliff edge - it is a slow tightening: higher prices, constrained supply, production cuts at individual facilities as inventories run down. Sulphuric acid recycling within metallurgical processes is technically complex and costly, so there is little slack to absorb a shock of this kind. The destination is not an overnight collapse of battery supply, but a sustained squeeze on the materials that make the energy transition physically possible.
The semiconductor layer
Qatar supplies roughly one-fifth of global LNG trade through the same strait. In 2025, Qatar and Australia each provided around one-third of Taiwan's LNG imports - meaning Taiwan's grid is structurally exposed to Hormuz disruption in a way that few peer economies are. Gas accounts for approximately 42–47% of Taiwan's electricity generation.
TSMC - which manufactures over 90% of the world's most advanced logic semiconductors - already accounts for roughly 8–10% of Taiwan's power consumption, a share that is rising as leading-edge fabrication scales. The chips powering the energy transition are made in a place whose electricity supply depends, in material part, on gas that transits a 33-kilometre chokepoint.
And then there is helium - an overlooked dependency. Qatar is the world's second-largest helium producer, accounting for around 32% of global output. Semiconductor fabrication relies on helium for controlled atmospheres and cryogenic systems. The same disruption that squeezes LNG flows threatens the speciality gases that chip fabs cannot easily substitute.
What this actually means for strategy
The green transition is not yet a hedge against Hormuz disruption. It is, currently, exposed to it - because the critical minerals, industrial chemicals, and high-tech components required to build the new energy infrastructure remain concentrated around that single chokepoint.
Three things follow from this:
First, strategic stockpiling of sulphur, cobalt, nickel, and helium (and more) deserves the same policy attention as strategic petroleum reserves. It does not always currently receive it.
Second, metallurgical diversity matters. HPAL is efficient under stable conditions but brittle under supply stress. Investment in alternative processing routes is not merely environmental policy - it is resilience policy.
Third, semiconductor concentration and energy transition policy need to be addressed jointly. They share the same geographic vulnerability.
The Strait of Hormuz is not an oil story. It is a coupled-systems story. The green transition will not decouple us from it until we design it explicitly to do so.