Day 1- State of the Industry: Houston & the WorldTuesday, 16 March 2027

Every route the industry once treated as fixed is now conditional. Since the strikes of February 2026, Hormuz has swung between closure, blockade, truce and renewed attack. At the height of the crisis some 20,000 seafarers and 2,000 ships were trapped inside the Gulf, and war-risk premiums multiplied several times over in a single week. Red Sea traffic is returning, but slowly, and Panama spent the summer cutting drafts. The shortest route has given way to the survivable one, and risk has become a routing, chartering and capital-allocation input rather than an insurance line.

What is different in Houston is the witness list. The Gulf Coast did not watch this crisis on a screen; it absorbed it in freight, premiums and cancelled cargoes a few miles from this room. This panel takes the security and resilience lens (threat horizon, sanctions exposure, crew and asset protection, insurance response, contingency planning) and asks the people living through it what they have changed, and what they would change again. The commercial fallout is picked up on Day 2.

In little more than a decade the United States went from importing hydrocarbons to being the world’s largest exporter of LNG and LPG, and a structural exporter of crude, refined products and petrochemicals. With Middle East supply disrupted for much of 2026, American barrels and molecules became the market’s shock absorber; LNG exports alone rose 23% year on year in the first half.

This session takes the market-level view before the programme breaks the trade into its parts on Day 2. Where is new capacity coming online, and where has it stalled? What does a more interventionist Washington mean for committed volumes and the ships that carry them, from the Supreme Court’s tariff ruling to the September 2026 proposal for a 90-day ban on diesel exports? And the question worth asking out loud: is the US a growth market for tonnage for another decade, or are infrastructure, permitting and politics about to cap what the ships can lift?

Nuclear propulsion and floating nuclear power have gained more regulatory ground in the past twelve months than in the previous sixty years. The NRC has set out how its existing licensing frameworks (10 CFR Parts 50, 52 and 53) can apply to maritime deployments; the NRC–Coast Guard memorandum of understanding divides responsibility between reactor licensing and vessel oversight; MARAD is consulting industry on shipboard reactors; and the IAEA’s ATLAS initiative, launched in Washington in August, has begun building an international framework alongside the IMO’s modernization of its Code of Safety for Nuclear Merchant Ships.

Developers are now preparing designs, ports are assessing readiness and shipowners are pricing the option. This panel brings the regulator, the industry and the international standard-setters together to answer the question every commercial player is asking: what does the path from design to deployment actually look like—and how long will it take?