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Topic: Artificial Intelligence (AI), Critical Infrastructure, Critical Minerals, Nuclear Energy, Oil and Gas, Solar Energy, and Wind Energy Blog Brand: Energy World Region: Americas, and Asia Tags: China, Energy Security, Great Power Competition, North America, and United States The Next Generation of US Energy Security Leaders December 8, 2025 By: David Gattie, and Joshua Massey
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America needs a new generation of energy leaders who grasp the technical realities of energy systems and today’s geopolitics to navigate aging infrastructure, great-power rivalry, and rising AI demand.
Our nation’s concept of energy security was defined in the American mind by the oil crises of the ’70s… where our country found its economy literally held hostage by hostile foreign powers over decisions that our leaders made in international affairs. To ensure that nothing like that ever happens again—that should be our goal in building energy security (Brigadier General Stephen A. Cheney, USMC, (Ret.))
It’s axiomatic that energy is a critical factor in the fate of nations. Domestically, it underpins industrial capacity, military strength, economic power, and standards of living. Globally, the quest for energy drives diplomacy, shapes existing alliances, informs new partnerships, and recontours the geopolitical landscape. By extension, US energy security is a national security imperative with global implications.
Energy security concerns spanned the 20th century. In the early 1900s, Naval Petroleum Reserves were established to support the Navy’s shift from coal to oil, with Petroleum Administration for Defense Districts (PADDs) established in 1942 to support World War II (WWII). Post-WWII, the US industrial economy was a fossil fuel economy, and during America’s industrial build-up and great power competition with the Soviet Union, fossil fuels accounted for 93 percent of total energy consumption—71 percent of which was oil and natural gas.
The primary objective of 20th-century energy security was to ensure uninterrupted, reliable, and affordable energy supplies—particularly oil and natural gas, which were increasingly non-domestic. Both Congress and the Executive Branch took action to achieve this goal. In 1959, concerns over the growing dependence of the United States on foreign oil led to the establishment of import quotas under the authority of the National Security Clause of the Trade Agreements Act. In 1969, President Richard Nixon formed the Cabinet Task Force on Oil Imports to evaluate the effectiveness of the import quotas. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries’ (OPEC) oil embargo of 1973 made clear the risk of an over-reliance on foreign energy supplies and prompted the creation of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR). In 1978, Congress went further by passing the Power Plant and Industrial Fuels Use Act, which prohibited the use of natural gas or petroleum for new power plants, requiring instead that new plants use an alternate fuel such as coal, an abundant US energy resource.
Throughout this period, the United States made great strides in nuclear science and technology and began to diversify its energy portfolio. In the early 1950s, President Dwight D. Eisenhower announced his Atoms for Peace initiative to harness nuclear power for civilian purposes, followed by efforts to establish international control over atomic energy under US leadership. From 1960-2000, the United States dominated domestic nuclear reactor deployments and exports abroad. Solar Photovoltaic (PV) and wind, however, were just beginning to penetrate electricity markets and accounted for only 0.05 percent of total US power generation
By the end of the 20th century, the fall of the Soviet Union had significantly altered the geopolitical landscape. There were also bright spots on the energy security front. The United States remained secure in coal and dominant in civilian nuclear power. Other energy problems stubbornly persisted. Most notably, the country remained dependent on foreign supplies of oil and natural gas, which required keen diplomatic skills, particularly with respect to energy-producing countries in the Middle East.
The 21st Century Energy Security Landscape
The 21st century presents different geopolitical conditions as well as a different set of energy resources and energy technology constraints. First, while adequate and affordable supplies of fossil fuels defined energy security in the 20th century, those same resources are conflicting with a more climate-centric position on energy security. Due to innovations in hydraulic fracturing, the United States is no longer dependent on foreign supplies of oil and natural gas, but instead is a global leader in the production of both. What would have been embraced as a competitive advantage in the 20th century has developed into a policy battle as energy security is being reframed by some under the influence of global climate change. This is a conflict within the US energy debate today, with calls to transition away from fossil fuels to a greater, if not complete, dependency on renewable energy. This has resulted in a downward trend in coal-fired power generation capacity and a shift toward natural gas plants. Recent administrations have brought this into sharp relief with President Barack Obama calling for a transition to a low-carbon economy, President Joe Biden positioning climate change at the center of US foreign policy and national security, and President Donald Trump prioritizing US energy dominance and promoting increased development of oil and natural gas.
Second, the United States no longer occupies the commanding heights of civilian nuclear power as it once did in the 20th century. While nuclear power is getting renewed attention for its baseload and zero-carbon characteristics, the US civilian nuclear sector went dormant in new nuclear construction for about thirty-five years. This ended with the construction of two new reactors in Georgia.Currently, new construction has begun only on one reactor in Wyoming—TerraPower’s Natrium reactor. The United States is no longer self-sufficient in fueling its reactors, as imports account for about two-thirds of the enriched uranium needed to meet domestic demand, 35 percent of which is supplied by Russia, as Russia has about 44 percent of the world’s uranium enrichment capacity. Moreover, the United States has fallen behind China and Russia in civilian nuclear deployment.
Third, US energy infrastructure is aging. In the US electric power sector, 37 percent of total US thermal capacity (i.e., coal, natural gas, nuclear, and oil), 76 percent of the US coal fleet, and 65 percent of the US nuclear fleet is over 40 years old. This poses a threat to resource diversity within the power sector. By comparison, 96 percent of China’s nuclear fleet and almost all of its coal fleet have been built since 2000. During this same period, 51 percent of new US electric power capacity has been natural gas, 21.6 percent wind, and 17.7 percent solar. Natural gas is dominating new US thermal capacity for power generation, which is straining the global supply chain for natural gas turbines.
US oil refining faces similar circumstances. No new major refineries have been built in the United States since the 1970s. Refining capacity has increased primarily through upgrades and new construction at aging facilities that have been in operation for decades, while looming closures threaten future output. Meanwhile, the majority of global investment in new refinery capacity over the past two decades has been in China, India, and the Middle East. From a strategic competition perspective, increased capacity via upgrades to aging refineries does not stand up to increased capacity via construction of new, advanced infrastructure.
Fourth, the United States is deficient in critical minerals, metals, and rare earths, both in supply and refining capacity. Although the United States led innovation in renewable energy technologies, it has fallen behind in developing the supply chains necessary to bring these technologies to the global market relative to China. Critical minerals, metals, and rare earths are vital to battery storage technologies, electric vehicles, and renewable energy technologies such as solar PV and wind turbines, all of which are gaining global market share with China as the dominant player. This conflicts with the push to transition away from fossil fuels to a greater dependency on renewables—on both technical and geopolitical grounds.
Complicating these issues is the rapid emergence of artificial intelligence—an energy-demanding transformational technology that could determine the “power and prosperity of nations in the decades to come” with “profound implications for the United States, its position in the world order, and U.S. national security and economic strength.” Artificial intelligence is a defining technology competition between the United States and China, with much at stake as to who establishes global leadership. Long-term, reliable electricity generation is foundational to this competition.
New Conditions Call for New Skills and Competencies
A domestic push for an energy transition away from fossil fuels, a fledgling effort to rejuvenate the civilian nuclear power sector, an aging energy infrastructure, a recontoured geopolitical landscape, and the global emergence of artificial intelligence as an instrument of national power: these are novel, in some cases conflicting, conditions that represent uncharted territory for the United States as a great power. They also signal the need for US energy security to be realigned with 21st-century realities. US energy security is no longer an oil and natural gas supply and affordability issue constrained by geopolitical relationships in the Middle East. Nor is it within the context of great power competition with the Soviet Union, which by the end of the Cold War was atrophying and sclerotic. Rather, US energy security is embedded within new geopolitical realities that are challenging US industrial power. Most acutely, strategic competition with China, a pacing authoritarian threat leveraging all energy resources and all energy technologies within an industrial strategy of military-civil fusion.
This environment underscores the fact that energy security demands a combination of technical prowess and a clear-eyed view of geopolitics. US energy security in the 21st century will require individuals to be adept at understanding how other countries think about energy within the context of international affairs. They must also possess technical competency as energy resources have different physical properties, while energy technologies that extract work from these resources have different operating characteristics and capabilities. Meaning, energy resources are not inherently substitutable, and energy technologies are not inherently interchangeable within the industrial base. A fundamental point being, each energy resource and each energy technology provides a unique value proposition with respect to US competitive advantage—value propositions that are technical in nature, with strategic national security importance. These security value propositions should be the priority consideration when deliberating the fate of any energy resource or technology within the US industrial base. A case in point is the US electric power sector, which is foundational to the US industrial base, and all the more critical as data centers and artificial intelligence put upward pressure on demand for new power plant capacity—especially baseload power.
Given the domestic push to transition away from fossil fuels in favor of renewables and batteries, the challenges with the finance and construction of new nuclear reactors, and an aging thermal fleet, individuals involved in US energy security will benefit from a deeper, more technical understanding of power generation technologies as well as the overall electric power sector. This is highlighted only as a particularly relevant case. Energy security leaders will also need a working knowledge of the broader US energy system. This includes basic technical competency in sectors such as mining, oil and natural gas exploration, drilling, refining, and pipeline capacity, and how these integrated energy sectors constitute energy security.
While the concept of energy security was defined in the American mind by the oil crises of the ‘70s, current geopolitical conditions call for this to be redefined in order to align with 21st-century realities. The United States is in a strategic competition with China. And energy security, which broadly includes energy resources, energy infrastructure, and energy technologies, will be a major, if not deciding, factor in determining which country establishes and maintains a competitive industrial advantage relative to the other. To that end, 21st-century energy security leadership will require a broader base of skills and competencies than did its 20th-century predecessor.
Note from Authors:
We acknowledge that these are daunting tasks for energy security practitioners and will require a great deal of practical experience in the field. For academia, it calls for collaboration between at least two disparate fields—international affairs and engineering. International affairs provides the context for geopolitical realities and a sense of urgency around the national security implications of energy security, and engineering provides context for the technological realities and limitations of energy resources and energy technologies. At the University of Georgia (UGA), we spent several years attempting to do this within the engineering program by trying to infuse international affairs content into engineering coursework. This approach was unsuccessful and eventually reversed, where the technical foundations of energy resources and energy technologies are infused into the international affairs discipline. This was formally developed as UGA’s Energy Security Studies Program (ESSP)—an interdisciplinary collaboration between UGA’s College of Engineering and School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA). The program is administered through UGA’s Benson-Bertsch Center for International Trade and Security and offered within SPIA’s Master of International Policy degree, where Gattie, from engineering, and Massey, from international affairs, serve as founding faculty. The overarching objective of ESSP is to elevate US national security as the priority for US energy security policy within the context of great power competition.
About the Authors: David Gattie and Joshua Massey
David Gattie is an associate professor of engineering at the University of Georgia’s (UGA) College of Engineering and a senior fellow at UGA’s Center for International Trade and Security. He leads UGA’s Energy Security Studies Program, where he is a founding faculty member. He has also provided testimony on energy, climate, and nuclear power policy before the US House Energy and Commerce Committee.
Joshua Massey is a senior academic professional at the University of Georgia’s (UGA) School of Public and International Affairs, director of UGA’s Master of International Policy program, and a senior research associate at the Benson-Bertsch Center for International Trade and Security. He is a founding faculty member of UGA’s Energy Security Studies Program.
Image: Gorodenkoff/shutterstock
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Источник: nationalinterest.org