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s the global economic order shifts, nations are prioritizing reliability, insulation and strategic leverage over pure economic efficiency. The central story of global energy today is not only the rise of renewables or the stubborn resilience of fossil fuels: a deeper transformation is underway in the structure of the world economy itself. The era in which supply chains stretched effortlessly across borders and efficiency was treated as the supreme organizing principle is giving way to something more guarded, more political, and more strategic. The new priority is resilience—the capacity to withstand shocks and maintain continuity in a world of cascading disruptions.

The past five years have made the shift unavoidable. A pandemic that froze supply chains, wars that weaponized energy transit routes, and extreme weather events that strained grids and storage—all revealed how vulnerable even advanced economies have become. The International Energy Agency (IEA) is explicit: investments in unabated fossil-fuel supply in 2023 were set to rise by more than 6 percent, reaching about US$950 billion worldwide. Upstream oil and gas alone were projected at over US$500 billion in 2023. Meanwhile, global energy demand rose again in 2024, driven by extreme weather and industrial growth, with non-fossil sources growing but fossil fuels still undergirding the system. These disruptions did not just interrupt supply; they reshaped strategy. 

 

 

The U.S.-China rivalry tets the tempo

Whether acknowledged openly or not, the global energy system is increasingly shaped by the evolving balance between the United States and China. China already accounts for over 50 percent of global battery-manufacturing capacity and dominates rare-earth processing (estimates as high as 90 percent).

Meanwhile, the United States has reorganized the incentives set out in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (IRA) and related industrial policy to channel hundreds of billions of dollars into clean-energy manufacturing, semiconductors, pharmaceuticals and other strategic industries. What matters now is the money—the commitments for manufacturing in the U.S. and for alliances with Middle East and Asian partners—rather than just the headline IRA number. For many countries, the question is no longer price or technology—it is alignment. In 2024 more than 30 countries rewrote national energy-security strategies to reduce exposure to either U.S. or Chinese supply chains.
 

Neutrality is becoming harder to sustain

As Raphael Lotilla, the Secretary of Energy in the Philippines puts it , “energy security today isn’t just about what we can afford. It’s about who we can rely on when the world becomes unpredictable.” 

 

 

 

Europe: principles meet pressure

No region feels this tension more acutely than Europe. Before the war in Ukraine, Russia supplied about 40 percent of Europe’s gas. By late 2023 that figure had fallen below 10 percent—but at the cost of price surges, industrial strain and internal political fragmentation. Meanwhile, wind and solar generated a record share of the EU’s electricity in 2024, yet the equipment required to sustain that progress remains heavily tied to Chinese supply chains. Europe is discovering that resilience requires not just diversification—but political clarity about which dependencies it can live with. 

 

 

Producers in transition: preparing for multiple futures

Oil- and gas-producing states are not waiting passively for transition. They are hedging. Sovereign wealth funds in the Gulf now exceed US$4 trillion in combined assets. At the same time, in 2023 global LNG contract signings were about 50 percent higher than five years earlier, signaling that long-term fossil infrastructure is being repositioned rather than abandoned. As Abdulaziz bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s Energy Minister recently noted “the challenge is not peak oil. The challenge is navigating a world where certainty itself is scarce.” 

 

 

The new geography of supply chains 

The most revealing shifts are happening not in commodity flows but in industrial geography. Battery factories are being relocated closer to end-markets. Critical-minerals corridors are being renegotiated across Africa, Asia and the Americas. Infrastructure is being judged not only by cost but by its political reliability.

One European renewable-equipment manufacturer recently shifted from a low-cost Asian supplier to a higher-cost Australian one for rare-earth materials. The rationale: paying a premium for predictability. 

 

 

The scale of the shift

The strategic realignment underway is staggering in scope. The IEA warns that to maintain current oil-and-gas output, the world may need to invest about US$540 billion per year. Meanwhile, initiatives to strengthen energy-security and supply-chain resilience are rapidly expanding. Renewables additions are also reaching new records—yet fossil fuels still play the dominant role. The implication: The world is not exiting hydrocarbons—it is reorganizing them behind defensive walls.

 

 

A reordering of power

What is emerging is not merely an energy transition. It is also energy addition and a reordering of power. Economics has slipped into strategy; supply-chains are behaving like alliances. And energy, once treated as a commodity, is resuming its historic role as a lever of geopolitical influence. The advantage will belong to those who can think across three dimensions at once: technology, markets and power. Those who continue to assume that price-signals alone will determine outcomes will discover, too late, that efficiency is not the opposite of fragility—it can just as easily be its cause. The global energy map is being redrawn. The question is no longer whether this will happen, but who will shape the contours of the new resilient order.