The 2026 Atlantic Council Global Energy Forum, distilled

I think it's a historic time where what we're calling the demand era, demand for energy as we've never seen it before in our histories, speed of technology as we've never seen it before in our lifetimes, and political risk maybe as great as it's ever been in my lifetime, colliding. This could turn out extremely well, it could turn out badly, it could turn out somewhere in between. We all have agency in shaping this.

Seven billion other people want what we have, and God bless them. They should, and they will achieve that. But the only road from here to there is massively more energy. We need to take energy for what it is. It is life.

It's absolutely not sustainable. What is happening right now is the markets have been buffered with SPR releases, with some demand destruction. But I don't even want to use the word destruction. It is not actually destruction of demand, it is a pause in demand, because just like in COVID, when you had an almost collapse in worldwide demand, none of that was really destroyed. As soon as everything opened up, demand went back immediately to pre-COVID levels and then continued to rise.

We know a couple of fundamental truths: with growing population, energy demand is going up. It's very rare that over the long term energy demand is not increasing. The other macro trend is a view towards needing more different types of energy, because not one molecule can provide everything that's needed, and so you need the diversification of those sources of energy.

There are over four billion people on the face of the planet that live on $10 a day or less per capita. There are no Tesla charging stations in the highlands of Peru. There are so many pockets of poverty in the world that need a hydrocarbon system today to help them get the mobility they need.

New York City consumes about 50 terawatt-hours of electricity per year. So what we actually need in the next five years is two New York Cities' worth of electricity every year for the next five years, and this is only data centers.

People don't appreciate it. Every basic search on your AI tool is ten times more energy than a Google search. You make a video for a minute, it's an hour's worth of energy supply for a Western household. You train one of these models and it's what a hundred houses would use in a year. Then you multiply that by billions of people - it's a staggering amount of energy that's needed.

We have racks that will require one megawatt per rack. That is 100 times more than what we did three years ago. One megawatt a rack means you're going into these one-gigawatt data centers, and to put that in perspective, one nuclear power plant normally runs like 1.2 gigawatts. AI data centers have much bigger variations in load, which puts more stress on the grid.

The new demand on the grid will not be the heat or the transport or the airlines, it's the compute. The size of a Japan's consumption is being loaded on the grid every year. So what I call today's barrels is tomorrow's electrons.

The race of AI, primarily between ourselves and China, really isn't a race just to come up with the best software. It is really the race of energy, because energy is required to power all these data centers.

Data centers are the fifth largest growth segment in the demand sector for power. Every hour that goes by on a one gigawatt data center, they're making a million dollars an hour.

We are all codependent and co-reliant. There's no such thing as energy independence. As much as you will hear even here in the United States that the US is a net exporter of oil, that does not mean the United States is isolated from the rest of the world or the international market. You still physically import the oil you consume and export quite a bit of shale production just because refineries aren't equipped to handle it.

This is the lowest the SPR has ever been. I don't know anyone who believes we can go below 300. I know plenty of people who think we can't get near 300, because physically you will damage the caverns where the oil is stored.

Energy security is no longer a question of just supply and infrastructure alone. It depends on how countries, markets, and energy systems connect together. Producers need stable demand, consumers need reliable supply, and transit nations need predictable flows.

The war in the Gulf area and Hormuz gave us that chance and opportunity to be the export hub for Iraqi fuel oil. The plan is to rebuild that line from scratch, all the way from Kirkuk to Banias, around 1,200 kilometers, a major transportation line for Iraqi crude oil through Syria to Tartus and Banias for export.

As we've discussed in the last day and a half, we're in the midst of the largest oil market and gas market disruption in history. Upwards of 1.2 billion barrels of oil supply have been lost, and of course this is an integrated supply shock.

I am European. I'm proud of being European, but I'm not particularly happy with the European energy policies, because we forgot the concept of security of supply and we built dependence on Russia. And at the end of the road in 2022, the American gas, the American fracking that we were blaming for every environmental problem, saved Europe in that crisis. We are paying in Europe four times your gas price and twice your power price.

The Western Hemisphere, from Alaska down to Venezuela, is now the center of the universe for energy. The world is looking to America as the dominant force in energy. We are the top producer of oil and gas. We are the top exporter of oil and gas.

Four years ago we spent more than one hundred billion on Russian gas. Now we spend less than twelve billion.

Where we operate in Iraq, we've invested over four billion dollars. We're the biggest gas producer now, getting close to a billion cubic feet per day, and we increased our production 50% last year with US Development Finance Corporation support. It's a great partnership through thick and thin, because we've had 11 attacks on us even before the war, rockets and drones, but we continued investing because we prioritize the local needs.

For 20 years, going back to my time working for Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, it has been an objective of the United States to wrest Europe away from Russian energy supplies. Next year, in 2027, that goal of a bipartisan US policy approach will be achieved.

At the time of the Arab oil embargo in the 1970s, the Arab states producing oil produced about 36% of total global production. And here today, the Western Hemisphere is sitting at 32% and growing every year. When you look at the new geography of energy production, the Western Hemisphere is one of the key theaters.

Underneath our feet in Canada, we have the fourth largest reserves of oil. We're the fifth largest producer of natural gas. We've got 1.4 quadrillion cubic feet of natural gas that's economically recoverable at $2 per MCF. And that's to say nothing of our power in nuclear, our strength in solar, in wind, hydro. That is actually our original energy superpower.

It's 1,000 miles closer to Australia than California is. That's what gives us an advantage with our Asian allies. Seven to eight days from Alaska to Tokyo, uncontested waters, shadowed by the Seventh Fleet in the south and the Third Fleet in the north. It's basically an American lake, the North Pacific. No canal to go through, no strait to go through, no issue to go through.

The message is very clear and can be explained in very few words. We want to be a rock-solid partner to the US and the Western world in providing what we have in abundance, which is lithium and copper.

Other countries are trying to achieve what we don't lack. In North America, the table is set. We have everything there, and we are bumbling. When you have the political stability, the AI revolution, everything is set. I'm frustrated and optimistic at the same time.

Venezuela: 300 billion barrels. That's six times more proven reserves than the United States, and they're producing one-tenth the production. There's tremendous opportunity in the Western Hemisphere. We can control our own destiny.

Our president set a goal last May through an executive order of achieving three new criticalities by July 4th of this year. Many people believed that was impossible. I've publicly said I was skeptical. We've got one down and a really good shot at achieving at least three by July 4th.

They're going to do 28 rulemakings this year. Typically a rulemaking in the past would take a few years, probably three, maybe even four years. We're going to do 28 rulemakings in the span of this year. This is affecting about ten thousand pages of regulation.

For the first time in decades, the conditions for a global nuclear revival have converged. We have political will, we have commercial appetite, we have the right policy frameworks and a shared geopolitical imperative to end the dependence on Russian supply chains.

About a year ago, the administration, the energy dominance council in the White House released some executive orders on nuclear technology that I believe have now accelerated the deployment of small modular reactors by five years. It's been that much of a game changer.

In Korea, we began the construction of the first nuclear power plant in 1971, when Starbucks opened the first cafe at Seattle in that year. Without any serious interruption we build nuclear power plant again and again and again, so we have a very strong and sound supply chain of almost one thousand companies.

Today we are the fifth largest lithium producer globally and as of April twenty twenty six, the country has a total installed capacity of two hundred and ten thousand tons per year of lithium carbonate equivalent. In twenty twenty five Argentina reached a production level of one hundred and sixteen thousand tons of LCE.

We cannot move fast enough, but we can move faster, and we are. Many of the rare earths are not actually that rare. It's just that they are used in very small amounts in very high value applications, and there's very limited processing capability.

We're the largest lithium-ion battery manufacturing company globally outside of China. We have eight plants in North America, seven in the U.S. and one in Canada. Each of these plants are about $5 billion in investment. So we've made with our partners about $40 billion of investment over the last five years.

How can the United States actually attract refining in the United States? What are the mechanisms? Who's going to pay for it? It's a loss leader. I mean, we all know that you don't make money off of really small margins. So how do you do it?

There's no gas station for copper, there's no gas station for aluminium. The average American citizen does not get that we don't have enough metal to go around.

Right now the average of permitting is about 29 years; even if we cut it in half it takes still about 12 to 15 years, which is the reason why we have lost all of those opportunities to mine and process overseas.

What stands in the way today for us to continue this path towards energy security? I would argue it's not the geology, it's not the technology. It is actually policy makers right now, policy makers who have to have a vision for what the energy future looks like.

It's permitting and lawfare reform. It's absolutely permitting and lawfare reform. If we can get the permitting reform, the lawfare reform down, this will be the place to invest for the next 50, 100 years. There's no doubt about it.

The handles that the opposition hung on to originally to stop the project has been the 401 water quality certificate. Once those handles get hung on to, the hyenas come in and nip a project apart in a way that it takes all the economic value out of it.

The Venn diagram is aligning now around let's get this done, let's increase predictability, speed of permitting, and let's get off to the races. And I think that pressure's starting to build and this is the year to do it.

There's the potential to open up tens if not 100 gigawatts of unused capacity currently by taking better advantage of demand flexibility. We're piloting this DC flex opportunity with partners like Emerald AI, saying okay, we've built for peak capacity but most of the time we're not using anywhere near that. How can data centers soak up the unused electrons when they're available and then curtail their demand when everybody's running their air conditioning units?

In a typical data center over a 15-year contract, that's a billion dollars that can go back to the customers. That's that downward pressure that Alex was talking about, because you now have that larger population against the fixed costs, and the more data centers that come in, the large loads are covering a larger portion of those costs.

You should not expect to be able to push any of the costs for electricity and infrastructure upgrades on retail customers. I would argue if you want to get your data center built, go someplace and explain to people how you're going to reduce their electricity costs and they might have a much more open attitude towards where that is sited.

Suriname, Guyana and Trinidad can and should work out with other Caribbean countries how to resolve this critical time window, delivering cheap oil and gas to the non-oil-producing SIDS countries and pre-financing technologies for these countries to become energy sufficient. This will not be based on charity but on strong collaborations and partnerships.

If you believe solely in the invisible hand, there's no reason for public capital to exist at all, except the strategic projects we need aren't getting done otherwise. And sometimes it's a larger slug of capital, and that's what helps to incentivize the private market to come in.

The US Department of Energy is now the largest energy lender in the United States. We have about $250 billion worth of lending authority through what was the loan programs office, now the office of energy dominance financing, and we are looking to provide low-cost capital. We have cheaper debt than anyone else can offer.

The most important thing that I hope the people in this room leave with is stop politicizing energy. I was at DFC. Biden administration came in, gas projects were cancelled. Trump administration came in, solar projects were cancelled. It creates a total lack of predictability for the market.

The assets that we're building today will operate for 60 years. We still think that we're in the very early stages of the rollout of global gas infrastructure. It's a massive, expensive logistics chain that requires a lot of capital and a lot of people to work on, but we're tremendously optimistic. For the last 15, 20 years gas demand has grown globally between five and six percent, and we actually see that accelerating.

We can't have it just switching every time there's a new administration in place. You can't make long-term investments that way. So that would be my biggest wish.

When I was in the Biden administration, I don't think I ever used the word climate or decarbonization. My phrase was always, help America do big things again.

The answer is over time to create markets based on differentiated product intensity of carbon — to rethink carbon accounting to make it look more like financial accounting.

You've got to be able to compare a ton of steel from company A to a ton of steel from company B and know what that looks like. We've got to get to a common approach similar to how we think about financial statements.

The way to address that is to say, wait a second, China, my foreign emissions fee, you're going to pay a fee roughly equal to the avoided cost of controlling emissions. And that fee, you're either going to buy a lot more natural gas, which improves our economy, but increases your cost of production, or you're going to turn on your scrubbers, which is going to increase your cost of production, but either way we're going to level the playing field.

We call methane the emergency brake on climate because methane has 20 times the warming potential of CO2 over a 20-year time period. Really it's the solution that we have in the next 10 years to really slow global warming.

Suriname is one of the only three countries in the world that is carbon negative, due to almost 93% coverage of pristine rainforest and an equal percentage of mangrove coverage along the coast. In two years' time, Suriname will be one of the three countries in the Caribbean to produce significant amounts of oil.

In conclusion, we are not asking the world to look at what Syria has endured in recent years, but rather at what it can become in the years to come. Syria today is not just a story of recovery but a story of resurgence. It is not a battleground but a land of opportunity. It is not a burden on the future, but a partner in shaping it.

Egypt does not have the resources in terms of gas that exist in Qatar or of oil that exists in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. However, Egypt possesses a unique location between the Middle East, Africa and Europe, and it connects the eastern Mediterranean and all of the gas molecules in the eastern Mediterranean. We have an ability to enable other partners to monetize their molecules and to make those molecules available where they can bring value.

While traditional energy security focused on the stable procurement of fuel resources, electricity security in this new era hinges on the resilience of the power grid, the capacity of large-scale energy storage systems, cybersecurity, and the stability of critical mineral supply chains.

The bottleneck that we face is not that we do not have enough sunshine or that we do not have enough wind or that we do not have enough waves on the ocean. Rather, the true obstacle is rooted in the architecture of global finance.