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Household Energy Affordability Executive summary
Household energy affordability continues to be a key priority for governments as energy bills remain elevated Household energy bills globally have come down from the peaks seen during the global energy crisis in 2022, but on average they were still around 4% higher in real terms in 2024 than they were in 2019. Household energy bills soared in many parts of the world as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which introduced a period of extreme volatility and a sharp run-up in prices. At the peak of the…
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Energy and AI AI for energy optimisation and innovation
AI can help optimise complex energy systems The energy system is complex and evolving. It is becoming increasingly electrified, digitalised, connected and decentralised, with mounting cost pressures. These drivers have encouraged energy companies to deploy applications that utilise artificial intelligence to optimise systems, improve production, reduce costs, raise efficiency, improve uptime, cut emissions and enhance safety. Many of the desired goals of AI’s application in the energy sector – such as cost reductions, enhanced reliability and improved resilience – are challenging to quantify at a broader sectoral level, beyond the confines of individual case studies. It is also challenging to predict…
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Scaling Up Transition Finance What is transition finance?
Developments and current status Many energy investments defy a simple binary classification between “clean” and “dirty”: there are also the “in-between” investments that can deliver material emissions reductions but that do not bring emissions to zero. These investments have historically been difficult to categorise due to differences in energy pathways and timeframes across regions and have been the subject of debate, including over whether and how they should be supported.Transition finance refers to financial activities that can contribute to emissions reductions, particularly in hard-to-abate sectors as well as in emerging market and developing economies (EMDE) where…
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Global Methane Tracker 2025 Key findings
Energy-related methane emissions have still not reached a definitive peak The fossil fuel sector is responsible for nearly one-third of methane emissions from human activity today. Record production of oil, gas and coal, combined with limited mitigation efforts, has kept emissions above 120 million tonnes (Mt) annually. Abandoned wells and mines – included in this year’s Global Methane Tracker for the first time – contributed around 8 Mt to these emissions in 2024. Bioenergy production and consumption results in a further 20 Mt of methane, largely from the incomplete combustion of traditional biomass used in cooking and heating in developing economies…
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Global Methane Tracker 2026 Regional insights
Central and South America The fossil fuel sector in Central and South America emitted just under 8 million tonnes (Mt) of methane in 2025, around half of which was from oil and gas facilities in Venezuela. Oil and gas facilities are the main sources of methane emissions in Venezuela, Argentina and Brazil, whereas in Colombia emissions are split roughly evenly between coal mining and oil and gas activities. In Venezuela, the upstream methane emissions intensity of oil and gas operations is nearly six times the global average, and flaring intensity is around 12 times higher. The intensities of operations in Argentina…
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World Energy Investment 2025 Africa
…rising from around USD 17 billion in 2019 to almost USD 40 billion in 2024. Public and development finance (DFI) funding for energy projects in Africa has fallen by approximately one-third in the last ten years, reaching USD 20 billion in 2024, largely due to a reduction of more than 85% in spending by Chinese DFIs. While representing a small share of overall spending, the public sector and DFIs are particularly important for projects in nascent markets, using new technologies or in commercially unviable areas where it can be challenging for private sector investment relying on concessional funds to…
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Financing CCUS at Scale Executive summary
The current wave of investment in carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) is larger and more geographically diverse than ever before. Momentum in private capital flowing into projects is reflected in the more than 30 final investment decisions (FIDs) that have been reached in the past 2 years alone, particularly in Europe and North America, and in key sectors including transport and storage, industry, and power. Investment has grown more than 15-fold since 2020, reaching over USD 5 billion in 2025. The pipeline of projects currently under construction suggests that after years of incremental capacity additions, operational capture capacity is set…
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Pledges to Progress 2025 Pledges to Progress Company Assessment
The assessment shown below sets out actions reported by 116 oil and gas companies to achieve the goals set out in the Oil and Gas Decarbonisation Charter, agreed at COP28. It is a baseline assessment, in that the evaluations for each metric are based on public company reporting published in 2024, which often rely on data and progress from 2023, i.e. before the OGDC was launched.This is not an assessment of environmental performance. It tracks 25 specific aspects of target-setting, implementation strategies and disclosure, based on a framework put together by the International Energy Agency (IEA), the…
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Sheltering From Oil Shocks Targeted consumer support to enhance energy affordability
Many governments around the world are reacting quickly to protect consumers from increasing fuel prices. In the days following the conflict in the Middle East, the IEA has tracked announcements from around 40 countries that are deploying or considering deploying emergency measures to shelter consumers from price increases. Immediate government responses have been to implement price caps, fuel subsidies and shifts in taxation, along with price stabilisation mechanisms that can quickly set limits on consumer price increases. Previous crises, including the Covid-19 pandemic and the 2022 energy crisis, demonstrated that impacts often fall disproportionately on the poorer segments of…
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Energy and AI AI and energy security
The nexus between energy and AI has implications for energy security. There are at least two broad dimensions to this relationship. The first arises from the impact of AI on energy security. AI can be – and indeed already is being – applied to address specific challenges relating to energy security concerns. At the same time, greater digitalisation and connectivity in the energy sector – which enable the use of AI – can create new energy security challenges. The second dimension arises from the need to mitigate energy sector-related supply chain risks, which have implications for the scaling up of data centres to meet…