China’s steel exports will soon hit an eight-year high, before sweeping tariffs sink in and drag down the industry in 2025, industry watchers said.

As the biggest exporter of steel, China accounts for about 55% of the world’s steel production. The country’s steel exports have been surging this year and are expected to smash through the 100 million metric ton mark, matching levels last seen in 2016.

Strategists at Macquarie Capital predicted that China’s steel exports will reach 109 million tons this year, before declining to 96 million tons in 2025. Trade tariffs could further curb China’s steel exports, “albeit this may require a while to play out,” analysts from the the investment bank told CNBC.

Their predictions were echoed by analysts interviewed by Citigroup. China’s steel shipment is “skewed to the downside” from next year and onwards due anti-dumping measures, Ren Zhuqian, an analyst from steel consultancy Mysteel, said in a Citigroup note this month.

Foreign markets have been particularly crucial amid a domestic supply glut, as China’s economy grapples with a prolonged property crisis and slowdown in manufacturing activities.

In September, China’s steel exports jumped 26% from a year ago to 10.2 million tons, surpassing the 10-million ton a month benchmark that was last hit in June 2016. In the first nine months of the year, exports rose 21.2% year on year to 80.7 million tons, according to the customs data last week.

After hitting a record high of 112 million tons in 2015, the country’s steel exports had been on a multi-year slide before it started improving in 2020.

Steel export growth has accelerated ever since, propelled by a lack of domestic demand, even as overall export growth in China slowed sharply in September on the back of a series of disappointing data that pointed to a weak economy.

Thailand expanded anti-dumping duties to 31% on hot-rolled coil, high-strength steel used for critical infrastructure construction, from China in August. Mexico imposed a nearly 80% tariff on some Chinese steel imports late last year.

This month, Brazilian government imposed 25% tariffs on all steel products from the country. And Canada’s 25% surtax on Chinese steel products, which it announced in August, came into effect on Tuesday.

These kinds of protectionism measures tend to have short-lived impacts, said Tomas Gutierrez, head of data at consultancy Kallanish Commodities, as steel exporters resort to measures such as “circumvention,” shaking off the China-label by making transits through a third-party country.

But Vietnam’s ongoing anti-dumping probe into hot-rolled coil could derail China’s export momentum as it “impacts a much higher volume of Chinese steel,” Gutierrez said.

Vietnam is a major importer of Chinese steel, consuming about 10% of the country’s steel exports in 2023, according to a Mysteel report. Other top destination markets include Thailand, India and Brazil.

Last month, Indian government ordered tariffs of between 12% and 30% on some steel products imported from China and Vietnam, escalating an anti-dumping duty it imposed on Chinese steels last year.

“We see a Whac-A-Mole scenario,” EIU’s Chim said. The tariffs lead Chinese steel producers to redirect to alternative markets, “until that market, too, imposes new trade restrictions.”

U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration called for tripling tariffs on Chinese steel in April, and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said he could raise tariffs by 60% on Chinese goods if re-elected next month.

But the impact of these threats from Washington would be rather limited, as less than 1 percent of Chinese steel exports, worth $85 billion, were shipped to the U.S. in 2023.

For the first time in six years, the World Steel Association this month forecast that China’s domestic steel demand this year would account for less than half of global demand, citing “the ongoing downturn” in the country’s real estate sector.

China’s property-related steel demand may not see a substantial improvement until 2025 or 2026, EIU’s Chim said, as Beijing seeks to curb new housing supplies while clearing existing housing inventories.

New construction starts, the most steel intensive part of the property construction process, will continue to be very weak, Chim said.

Meanwhile, he added, state-led infrastructure investment, which has increasingly pivoted away from roads and railways to energy infrastructure, is unlikely to fill the gap left by home builders.

More domestic steelmakers had scaled back production given poor profitability on steel sales. Almost three-quarters of Chinese steel companies reported losses in the first six months this year, with many at risks of bankruptcy.

China’s production of medium-thick hot-rolled coil — a proxy of flat steel products — fell 5.4% from the prior month in September, and 6.4% on year, according to S&P Global, which cited official customs data.

On escalating trade tensions, a spokesperson for China’s customs administration said a majority of Chinese steel products were to meet domestic demand, before receding that the hard-rolled coils “would have broad appeal in overseas market,” due to continuous innovation and product upgrades in the industry.

Authorities had set up an investigative team to crack down on these “illegal” steel exports, Luo Tiejun, vice president of the state-backed Iron and Steel Industry Association, said in a meeting last week.

“If China really followed through [with the investigation], Chinese exports would be much less competitive and export volumes could come down,” Gutierrez said. But the government may not have the “confidence” for that yet.

With a historic presidential election just around the corner, Chevron CEO Mike Wirth told CNBC’s Jim Cramer what kind of government action is important for his company.

“What really matters is consistent and coherent energy policy,” he said. “Affordable and reliable energy is essential to keeping inflation at a level that economies can handle — and that’s why we need investments, and we need stable policy to encourage that investment.”

Wirth stressed that energy is a vital part of the global economy, saying that if supplies are constrained by political actions, it can trigger inflationary reactions across the board. The price of energy, he continued, is “embedded in everything,” and he said other countries are looking to the U.S. for long term commitments about energy and investment in the global supply.

According to Wirth, Chevron is apolitical and tries to work with both parties. He said there are legislators from both sides of aisle — usually from energy producing states — that understand his company’s needs. He said Chevron wants to see people elected to office that believe in free markets, competition and “the economic vitality of this country.”

He also stressed that electricity demand in the U.S. will continue to grow, saying there will be a need for all kinds of power, including wind, solar and natural gas. He added that even though electric vehicles are becoming more popular, combustion engines remain important and produced en masse. And Chevron’s oil has purposes beyond gasoline, he continued. For example, he said, oil helps create petrochemicals which are used for a variety of manufacturing purposes, including to create materials for EVs.

“There’s room for all of it. We’re going to need all of it,” he said, “I want to see every solution that is economic and feasible come to bear.”

NextEra Energy is seeing strong interest from data center customers in restarting the Duane Arnold nuclear plant in Iowa, CEO John Ketchum said Wednesday.

“We are very busy looking at Duane Arnold,” Ketchum told investors during the company’s third-quarter earnings call. “We’re very interested in recommissioning the plant.”

NextEra is conducting engineering assessments on the plant and is working with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and local stakeholders on evaluating a possible restart, the CEO said.

“Obviously, it goes without saying, there’s very strong interest from customers, really data center customers in particular around that site,” Ketchum said.

The CEO said in July that NextEra was weighing whether to restart Duane Arnold. He cautioned at the time, however, that the company would only do so if the project was “essentially risk free.”

The Duane Arnold Energy Center northwest of Cedar Rapids, Iowa ceased operations in 2020 after more than 40 years of service. The nuclear industry in the U.S. faced a wave of reactor shutdowns over the past decade as they struggled to compete against cheap natural gas.

But power companies are pressing ahead with restarting recently shuttered nuclear plants as electricity demand surges from data centers, manufacturing and the electrification of the economy.

Ketchum’s comments on Duane Arnold come a month after Constellation Energy unveiled plans to restart the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania in 2028 through an agreement with Microsoft.

Tech giants such as Microsoft are grappling with massive power needs as they scale up artificial intelligence. Nuclear is attracting growing interest from tech companies because reactors provide large quantities of reliable, carbon-free power. Alphabet’s Google and Amazon recently announced investments in next-generation small nuclear reactors.

Holtec International, a privately held nuclear technology company, blazed the trail for restarting reactors with the Palisades plant in Michigan. Holtec expects that plant to come back online toward the end of 2025. It would be the first nuclear plant in U.S. history to restart after shutting down.

Nuclear power may be making a comeback in the U.S. after years of setbacks — and big tech is the driving force.

As tech giants like Microsoft, Amazon and Google compete to take the lead in the AI revolution, the data centers needed to power the burgeoning technology consume an ever-increasing amount of energy.

In the last two months, those three companies have penned deals to generate more nuclear power — perhaps most notably, Microsoft struck a 20-year agreement with Constellation Energy to restart a reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, the site of the most serious nuclear meltdown in U.S. history in 1979. The reopening is planned for 2028.

Speaking to CNBC at the annual International Monetary Fund meetings in Washington, long-time energy market veteran Dan Yergin described the turnaround as nothing short of extraordinary.

“It’s amazing, the change. The nuclear industry was in the doldrums,” Yergin told CNBC’s Karen Tso on Tuesday, describing the reopening of the Three Mile Island power plant as “symbolic.”

“Big Tech is saying, ‘We need reliable 24 hour electricity. We can’t get it just from wind and solar’,” he said.

Yergin, who has written several books on energy including “The Prize” and “The New Map,” pointed to the booming funding going into the sector. He cited $7 billion in venture capital going into nuclear fusion alone — which does not include financing for nuclear fission, a different energy-generating process.

“This is a really big change, and it reflects in this country, in the United States, a sense that — we’ve had for, really, a generation of flat demand [for] electricity,” Yergin said. “Now it’s going to grow, and there’s real anxiety about, how do you grow it? And nuclear [energy] is back in form, and people are talking about small nuclear reactors. And, of course, you have big tech actually seeking to contract for the output of the electricity from existing nuclear power plants. It’s an amazing change.”

Electricity demand is surging after staying largely flat for some 15 years, fueled by new data centers, factories, electric vehicles, and hotter and longer summers. A recent Energy Department memo cited in numerous press reports projected that U.S. power grids could see as much as 25 gigawatts of new data center demand by 2030.

Recently, the U.S. Department of Energy announced it had closed a $1.5 billion loan for the revival of the Holtec Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan in late 2025, which would make it the first American nuclear plant to be restarted. Google in mid-October said it would purchase power from Kairos Power, a developer of small modular reactors, to help “deliver on the progress of AI.”

Global electricity consumption from data centers, artificial intelligence and the cryptocurrency sector is expected to double from an estimated 460 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2022 to more than 1,000 TWh in 2026, according to a research report from the International Energy Agency.

— CNBC’s Ryan Browne contributed to this report.