This article was orginally published in French in EVOLEN APRIL 2025 Magazine available here
Since 2020, the world has begun its Energy Transition, but beyond decarbonization and the development of renewables, another faster transition is taking place. This other Energy Transition is the transition from a world where energy is globalized to a world where energy is politicized.
From Global to Political energy
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and until 2022, the development of energy flows has always been aimed at optimizing the availability and cost of energy. To this was added the energy transition to decarbonize our economies, but without affecting the globalization of trade around energy, and therefore the geography of investment.
But since then, two major events have changed the situation and are redrawing the map of future projects around strategic and political alliances
The first of these events is obviously the war in Ukraine, where Europe learned the hard way that energy could become a weapon of economic warfare. Trump’s arrival in power at also seems to be a step in this direction, because American LNG will be used as a bargaining chip to balance the trade balance with all countries.
The second event, of which we can only see the beginnings, is the digital technology race with the arrival of artificial intelligence on the agenda of the major powers and its corollaries in terms of energy and access to critical mining resources (copper, nickel, rare earths, etc.).
The concomitance of these two events places energy at the heart of the strategy of the great powers in the midst of which economic Europe : the European Union + political Europe, including the United Kingdom, Norway and, to a certain extent, Ukraine, are trying to find their way.
This nascent period of energy politicization is bringing new constraints of sovereignty and security to both producer and consumer countries, well away from the usual rules of the energy market. This new global environment is creating a shock at the level of investment, not so much for the production or consumption of energy, but above all for the distribution of energy.
This global reorganization of energy flows is giving rise to a large number of energy transport and distribution projects, which we know better under as the ‘Midstream’ category. This trend towards Midstream projects (Pipelines, Tankers, Terminals and Energy Storage) can already be seen in the figures.
According to our Project Smart Explorer database, the volume of investment in Midstream will more than double between 2022 and 2025, reaching more than
75 billion dollars in 2025.
LNG put the Supply chain under pressure
This reorganization of the distribution of energy is felt mainly through natural gas and in particular Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG), which comes to compensate for the end of Russian gas deliveries by Pipeline to Europe. To give a figure, it is the equivalent of 120 million tonnes of LNG that Russia has transported to Europe in 2021 via pipeline, and which now needs to be supplied from other regions, mainly in the form of LNG. What’s more, Europe has to manage this transfer of supply sources against a backdrop of increasing demand for gas, both to replace coal at and to offset variations in renewable energy production.
In this situation, even if Northern Europe can increase its production, around 110 million tonnes of LNG will have to be transported to Europe via new infrastructure. In the United States, of course, the entire value chain is being brought into line to produce gas, mainly in the Permian basin, and transport it to the East Coast. This is where the liquefaction trains are concentrated, designed to export LNG by tanker to Europe and Asia.
The new US administration’s Long-Term LNG Supply Agreements with Europe, but also with India and other Asian countries, are generating a new wave of
projects in the USA. If we add to this President Trump’s desire to boost the US economy and develop AI thanks to abundant, cheap energy, there will be more than 80 new gas-fired power stations in the USA that will need to be supplied.
The figures from Project Smart Explorer for LNG projects at USA already show that investment will simply double and exceed 40 billion dollars per year.
On the other hand, infrastructure is also an issue, because Russia intends to export its gas, in particular , to Asian countries such as India and China. Since
does not have the necessary infrastructure, Russia has rushed in recent years to build up a fleet of tankers and, in 2024, exported more than 33 million tonnes of LNG, mainly to Europe.
In this little game of competition for control of tankers, it is the Asian shipyards that are coming out on top, producing tankers rapidly, with orders rising from an average of 35 per year at since the covid to more than 70 for 2024 and 2025. The rest of the value chain has not been left behind, with longer lead times for all the Long Lead Items linked to LNG: compressor, pipeline, medium-voltage motor and transformers.
With this in mind, most forecasts predict that demand for natural gas will grow by more than 50% between now and 2040. Increasing pressure on international gas production and distribution systems
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