The One Popular Energy Term We Should Retire at CERAWeek

For decades, energy independence has been an overwhelmingly popular bipartisan policy goal. Every U.S. president since Nixon has made it a cornerstone of their agenda.?

Here’s the problem: pursuing “energy independence” in an increasingly interconnected world may only serve to exacerbate the dual modern challenges of energy security and decarbonization.?

Energy integration, not independence, is the most direct path to accelerating the energy transition while increasing energy security both at home and around the world. There are two major reasons why energy and policy leaders must come together around this new approach.?

Diverse supply chains are essential for the expansion of new energy technology.

Critical minerals – including lithium, cobalt, graphite, and nickel – and other essential minerals like copper, are essential to make everything from EVs to solar panels and transmission lines.

But the supply of these elements is controlled by only a handful of countries, leaving all others vulnerable to geopolitics and heightened volatility.?

The Biden Administration recently issued an executive order calling for more domestic development, but even in the best-case scenario, the increase in U.S. supply will not meet the scale and pace of demand. The International Energy Agency projects that the world will need a 600 percent increase in the use of critical minerals to achieve net zero by 2050.?

The nuclear energy supply chain faces similar challenges, with Russia’s dominance in the sector raising significant concerns around access to key resources. A similar effort is underway to develop domestic resources, but it will take time to make meaningful progress.?

While bringing energy supply chains closer to home is an important policy goal, it is not sufficient to meet our ambition. We must focus on building sustainable global supply chains for clean energy technology, which will require commercial diplomacy with a complex and evolving set of nations.?

Climate change is a global challenge that no country can solve alone.

Over the last two decades, the U.S. and Canada each reduced their carbon emissions by more than 20 percent. During that same time period, India and China both increased their emissions by more than 100 percent.

Any realistic effort to rapidly mitigate the impact of climate change must account for global aggregate emissions, even if regional, rather than country-specific targets.?

For many parts of the world, access to North America’s natural gas – via liquefied natural gas (LNG) – is the fastest and most economically feasible solution to reducing reliance on coal, heating oils, diesel, and other high-emissions energy sources. In Mexico, the expansion of natural gas for generating electricity has allowed the country to dramatically reduce its use of coal and fuel-oil. Same continent, different economies, but all share a common resource to advance the goal, and it is together that we are proving to the world that sustainability and security go hand-in-hand.

Unfortunately, energy policies are still too focused on country-specific targets, which means blocking projects that would expand LNG export capacity and help reduce global emissions. Science does not recognize national borders. We must agree to tackle emissions from a regional perspective first, or we are setting ourselves up for failure.?

At a time when energy integration is so critical to accelerating the transition to cleaner energy sources, a conference attracting energy and policy leaders from around the world has a special significance. While the United Nations COP27 set the ambitions and demonstrated the why, CERAWeek attendees offer the how.

I’m excited to join several of my TC Energy colleagues at CERAWeek over the next few days. This is an opportunity for productive conversations and new connections that will bring the world closer together to build a stronger energy future. I hope to see many of you there.