Impacts of energy insecurity

Where energy insecurity leads

Start with the gap between what a country needs and what it can depend on. Tap any pressure to see what it feeds into.

Why the search ends up somewhere fragile

Four stages, and each one is the reason the next one happens.

1. 1The dependable supply falls shortA country needs more energy than it can count on getting. That shortfall is the pressure behind everything that follows: with no gap, there is no reason to change where the energy comes from.
2. 2The easy places are already takenThe sources that are cheapest and simplest to work tend to be the ones already in use — that is why they were used first. A country needing more cannot simply lean on them harder, so the extra has to come from somewhere new.
3. 3The search moves into difficult groundSo exploration turns to what was passed over: deeper water, remote and frozen regions, rock that holds its energy tightly. Places left until last tend to be the fragile ones — environmentally sensitive, slow to recover, hard to put right after an accident.
4. 4The costs arrive, in money and in damageWorking somewhere difficult is expensive: heavier engineering, longer transport, more risk to manage. And because the place is fragile, reaching the energy leaves damage behind. Both are real costs of the original shortfall — but only one of them ever shows up as a price.

Commit before you read on

Two of the five impacts catch most people by surprise. Commit to an answer before you read on.

Energy in a country becomes both more expensive and less reliable. What happens to the food it grows and the goods its factories make?

What you need to know

• Demand for energy is rising globally, while the supply a country can depend on may be insecure — and where demand runs ahead of supply, there is the potential for conflict.
• Insecurity pushes exploration into difficult and environmentally sensitive areas, because the easier sources are already in use.
• That harder search brings economic costs, because difficult places are expensive to work, and environmental costs, because the places reached are fragile.
• Food production is squeezed, because growing, storing and moving food depends on energy at almost every stage.
• Industrial output falls, because factories turn energy into goods and cannot do it with energy they cannot depend on.

The big picture

Energy insecurity is the gap between the energy a country needs and the energy it can actually depend on. That gap pushes exploration into difficult and environmentally sensitive areas, raises economic and environmental costs, squeezes food production and industrial output, and — where demand runs ahead of supply — carries the potential for conflict.

⚠ Watch out

Writing that an energy-insecure country has 'run out of energy'. It usually has not. Insecurity is about a supply that cannot be depended on — the wrong amount, at the wrong moment, at a price that will not hold still.

Memory hook

One gap, four pushes and a warning. The gap pushes the DRILL into fragile ground, the PRICE up in both money and damage, and the PLOUGH and the PRODUCTION LINE down — and where the gap is widest, it can push countries apart.

Check yourself

Cover the page. Name the five impacts, then take any two and say how the gap between demand and dependable supply produces each. 'Because there is less energy' is not yet an answer.