Big Oil Is Betting Billions On Nuclear Fusion

After decades confined largely to laboratories, nuclear fusion is beginning to attract the kind of money and industrial planning normally reserved for technologies expected to make it onto the grid. Global private investment in fusion hit a record $4.48 billion in 2025, up 69% from a year earlier, while some of the world's largest energy companies are moving beyond simply backing fusion startups.

Italian energy giant Eni S.p.A. (NYSE:E) now plans to deploy a commercial fusion power plant in Europe by the early 2040s or sooner, building on its investment in Commonwealth Fusion Systems and a more than $1 billion agreement to buy electricity from the startup's first commercial U.S. plant. Eni is also looking beyond power generation, using decades of experience processing hydrocarbons and hydrogen to build a business around the fuel systems future fusion plants will need to operate.

" Competition is growing in the fusion industry after the technology and expectations had changed significantly in the past 5-6 years ," Francesca Ferrazza Eni's head of magnetic fusion initiatives, told the Financial Times in an interview. " It was always considered research. Now we are considering it as an industry. "

Commonwealth Fusion Systems raised another $1 billion in July, bringing its total funding to $4 billion as it targets the early 2030s for its first commercial power plant. The planned 400-MW ARC facility in Virginia became the first fusion project to apply for interconnection with PJM earlier this year, while Google has agreed to buy 200 MW of its output. Eni has committed more than $1 billion to buying electricity from the plant.

Eni also wants to build a business supplying the fuel systems necessary to keep commercial fusion reactors running. The company plans to use its experience processing hydrocarbons and hydrogen to recover, purify and recycle deuterium and tritium, the two hydrogen isotopes used as fuel by many fusion reactor designs. To that end, Eni has formed a JV with the UK Atomic Energy Authority to develop and sell those services globally, giving the Italian company a potential source of fusion revenue beyond owning plants or selling electricity.

Tritium is much harder to extract than deuterium. Deuterium is stable and abundant enough to be extracted from seawater, where roughly one in every 6,700 hydrogen atoms is deuterium. Tritium is radioactive , has a half-life of just 12.3 years and exists naturally only in tiny quantities. A 1-GW deuterium-tritium fusion plant could consume roughly 55 kilograms of tritium per year, far beyond what could be supplied from naturally occurring sources.