Equally impressive is the evolution of renewable and alternative energy technologies. The renewable energy market is expected to reach as high as $800 billion market by 2015 and to generate 17% of the world’s electricity by 2030. In parts of the world, the cost of solar energy is reaching grid parity. Nuclear, despite the Fukushima disaster, is growing at a pace not seen in decades, especially in Asia—21 reactors provide 31% of South Korea’s electricity, while 26 reactors are under construction in China.

And energy storage is perhaps the biggest game-changer: Apple, to take one example, is said to be working on a hydrogen-based laptop battery that could last for months. Once the energy storage puzzle is cracked, renewables and alternatives should have even greater currency.

Or take exploration: Our ability to process and analyze massive amounts of three-dimensional data about the ocean floor has allowed the energy industry to discover vast new fossil fuel deposits. Technological innovations in drilling then allow producers to access these deposits, many of them located in remote, once-forbidding places—beneath the Arctic icecap, for instance, or at extraordinary depths.

Great Game 2.0
The economic, environmental, and geopolitical consequences of this technological transformation are breathtaking. Perhaps no change is more important than the introduction into the energy game of dozens of new players. The energy of geopolitics will not likely ever be the same.

Today, alongside traditional powers like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Brazil is becoming an energy superpower and Canada is reinforcing its position as one, as is Russia. Also joining the ranks of growing energy producers are countries like Philippines, Argentina, Angola and Suriname (all thanks to deepwater drilling), and Poland (shale gas). In Israel, massive recent gas discoveries are upending the energy and political calculus—a fact that would most likely have stunned former Prime Minister Golda Meir. “Let me tell you something that we Israelis have against Moses,” she famously joked in 1956. “He took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil.” The Department of Energy estimates that there are 32 countries worldwide with meaningful reserves of shale gas.

The global energy map has been redrawn and expanded by technology—which is the. real driving force in “Great Game 2.0.”

The geopolitical consequences are nowhere greater, perhaps, than in the United States. For decades, the U.S. has been the world’s oil glutton, consuming about a quarter of global energy supplies, despite having just five percent of the population. Until recently, the U.S. had grown increasingly reliant on energy imports, a dependency that shaped its economy and its foreign policy. Since 2008, however, U.S. domestic oil output has climbed 12 percent, largely on the back of the Bakken and other shale discoveries, as well as on the rapid expansion of deepwater drilling. With its production projected to climb for years to come, the U.S. should soon lose its ranking as the world’s top oil importer—a dubious honor that is expected to go to the European Union by 2015 and China by 2020. (China already has overtaken the U.S. as the biggest importer of oil from the Middle East.)

If, five years ago, you had asked—“Which country in which region of the world can be totally energy self-sufficient?”— no one would have guessed the United States. Yet now, the revelation of North America’s massive shale gas and oil reserves, combined with the technological innovations that unlock their potential, are helping bring into focus the tantalizing prospect of energy independence for the United States. Just a few years ago, the fossil-fuel-rich corridor that ran from Saudi Arabia, through the Caspian, over Siberia, and into Canada— the Saudi-Caspian SiberiaCanada (SCSC) corridor—was seen as the world’s energy backbone. Six years ago, the corridor stopped in Canada. But now, that energy rainbow extends to the U.S. where, potentially, Americans will be able to tap into the pot of gold at the end of that rainbow. But the fairytale will only come true if the U.S. seizes the opportunity through appropriate policy, investments in infrastructure, and intelligent energy management. >>>

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