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Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2025 Executive summary
Demand for key energy minerals continued to grow strongly in 2024. Lithium demand rose by nearly 30%, significantly exceeding the 10% annual growth rate seen in the 2010s. Demand for nickel, cobalt, graphite and rare earths increased by 6‑8% in 2024. This growth was largely driven by energy applications such as electric vehicles, battery storage, renewables and grid networks. In the case of copper, the rapid expansion of grid investments in China has been the single largest contributor to demand growth over the past two years. For battery metals such as lithium, nickel, cobalt and graphite, the energy sector accounted…
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Global EV Outlook 2025 Trends in electric car markets
Electric car sales Global electric car sales exceeded 17 million in 2024 More than 20% of new cars sold worldwide were electricElectric car sales topped 17 million worldwide in 2024, rising by more than 25%. Just the additional 3.5 million cars sold in 2024 compared to 2023 outnumber total electric car sales in the whole of 2020. China maintained its lead among major markets, with electric car sales exceeding 11 million – more than were sold worldwide just 2 years earlier. Global sales were slightly tempered by stagnating growth in Europe, as subsidies were phased out or reduced in several major markets, and…
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World Energy Investment 2025 United States
Energy investment policies in the United States reflect its prioritisation of energy security Energy investment in the United States reflects its prioritisation of energy security, with a subsequent strategic push to establish a presence in emerging value chains and to supply international markets. Since becoming a net energy exporter in 2019, a remarkable turnaround from its high previous reliance on imports, the country has continued to expand its global energy role. In 2024 it was the world’s largest producer of oil and gas (20% of global output), as well as a major investor (25% of total investment). This growth…
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Global Energy Review 2026 Electricity demand
Electricity demand grew more than twice as fast as overall energy demand Global electricity demand grew year-on-year by around 3% in 2025, easing from 4.4% in 2024, when intense heat waves boosted electricity consumption. Nevertheless, the 2025 growth rate remained above the 2.8% annual average observed between 2014 and 2024 and was also well over twice the rate of overall global energy demand growth in 2025 (1.3%). Demand growth was well above long-term average rates in advanced economies, but slowed in Asian economies In 2025, emerging market and developing economies accounted for 80% of…
- Key findings
- Global trends
- Oil
- Natural gas
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+ 9 pages
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China’s Official Energy Finance in Emerging and Developing Economies Trends in China’s Outbound Energy Finance
This section examines the major shifts in China’s outbound energy finance over the past decade, with a particular focus on developments since 2022. Drawing on publicly available project information and systematically compiled datasets, the analysis highlights structural changes in the scale, composition and institutional drivers of official financing, with aggregate figures presented up to 2024. Together, these trends reveal how China’s role as an energy financier is evolving – from a gradual decline of traditional policy-bank lending to the rise of more commercial-oriented official providers – and what this means for investment patterns across EMDE. Overall financing trends…
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What Next for the Global Car Industry The global car industry in context
Highlights Global car markets are undergoing potentially transformative changes. Car sales reached a high point in 2017 and have bounced back from a pandemic-related drop due to sales of electric and hybrid cars; sales of conventional cars have continued to fall. Growth has shifted to emerging economies including China since the turn of the century, with around half of all sales now in these regions. Global car production has grown unevenly since the pandemic. China’s car output reached a record 27 million in 2024, 30% higher than in 2019, while India’s output grew 30% to almost 5…
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Global Energy Review 2025 Natural gas
Natural gas demand returned to structural growth in 2024 Following the supply shock of 2022 and 2023, natural gas markets moved towards a gradual rebalancing and returned to structural growth in 2024. Global gas demand reached a new all-time high, with over three-quarters of growth coming from emerging market and developing economies. Preliminary data indicate that gas demand increased by 2.7%, or 115 billion cubic metres (bcm) (equivalent to around 4 EJ) in 2024. This was above the around 2% annual average growth rate from 2010 to 2019 and well above the rate of around 1% between…
- Key findings
- Global trends
- Oil
- Natural gas
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+ 3 pages
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Financing Clean Energy in Africa Clean energy investment landscape: setting the scene
Summary The IEA’s Africa Energy Outlook 2022 laid out a new scenario – the Sustainable Africa Scenario (SAS) – which sees the continent achieve by 2030, in full and on time, all of its energy and climate-related goals, including universal energy access and its NDCs.Realising the SAS requires mobilising over USD 200 billion annually by 2030, but energy investment has been declining in Africa and in 2022 was under USD 90 billion. Clean energy spending was a fraction of this at around USD 25 billion – only 2% of the global total despite the recent rise in global clean energy investment. This is far from what…
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Energy and AI AI and climate change
The emergence of AI has both raised concerns that AI-fuelled data centre growth might fuel climate change and also raised expectations that AI applications in the energy sector could help reduce emissions by unlocking new optimisations and efficiencies. As over 100 countries – and the European Union – have targets to reach net zero emissions between 2030 and 2070, it is pertinent to explore what AI’s impact on emissions could potentially be. Global fuel combustion CO2 emissions are estimated to reach 35 000 million tonnes (Mt) in 2024. Data centres account for around 180 Mt of indirect CO2 emissions today from the consumption…
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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…
