The IEA’s World Energy Investment 2026 report, published in late May, lands with an unusually blunt message. Its Executive Director, Fatih Birol, called the present moment the most serious energy-security crisis the world has faced, drawing comparisons to the oil shocks of the 1970s. The trigger is the 2026 conflict in the Middle East and the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a fifth of global oil and large volumes of LNG normally flow. Even after a ceasefire, shipping has remained well below pre-war levels.
From “cheapest” to “most secure”
For two decades, energy policy was organised around a single question: how to buy energy as cheaply as possible. The IEA’s verdict is that this era is ending. Reliability of supply is moving to the centre of investment decisions. The new priority, as the report frames it, is diversification — sourcing energy from more countries and more carriers, and leaning harder on domestically available resources.
The numbers behind the shift
Global energy investment is set to reach about USD 3.4 trillion in 2026, up roughly 5% on the year. Around USD 2.2 trillion flows to grids, storage, low-emissions fuels, nuclear, renewables, efficiency and electrification; about USD 1.2 trillion to oil, gas and coal. Tellingly, despite high prices, oil investment is expected to fall for a third consecutive year — a sign that capital is reluctant to bet on a volatile barrel.
Diversification is the through-line
Diversification appears in two forms. The first is geographic: new pipelines and alternative shipping routes. The United Arab Emirates, for example, aims to complete a pipeline that bypasses the Strait of Hormuz as early as 2027. The second, and more strategic, is a turn toward energy that can be produced at home. This is precisely where the report’s logic meets Power-to-X — and where the geography of opportunity is strikingly wide. The Global Power-to-X Potential Atlas by Fraunhofer IEE and University of Kassel identifies almost all coastal regions and many desert areas as viable sites for producing synthetic fuels, which turns supply from a handful of chokepoints into a genuinely global, and partly even domestic, base.
Why Power-to-X is, at its core, a diversification technology
Power-to-X converts renewable energy with recycled CO₂ into synthetic fuels, gases and chemicals that can be produced, stored and used wherever renewable electricity is available — not only where oil and gas happen to lie underground. For an import-dependent economy such as Switzerland, that is the decisive point: defossilisation and energy security become the same project. Replacing fossil molecules with green molecules made from renewable energy and recycled CO₂ means every litre produced at home or from diversified partners is a litre that no longer has to transit a chokepoint like Hormuz.
The IEA is realistic about scale. Low-emissions fuels remain a small slice of total investment and still depend heavily on policy support; a wave of hydrogen project delays over the past year is a reminder that enthusiasm alone does not build plants. But the security lens changes the calculation. Once supply reliability — and not levelised cost alone — enters the equation, the value of fuels that can be made at home and stored for months rises sharply.
SPIN Perspective
The IEA has, in effect, handed Power-to-X a second argument. For years the case for synthetic fuels rested on climate grounds — and it still holds: replacing fossil molecules with renewable energy and recycled CO₂ is defossilisation in its purest form. What 2026 adds is a security argument that resonates with finance ministers, not only climate ministers. Diversification of energy supply is no longer a slogan; it is the IEA’s central recommendation. Power-to-X is one of the few technologies that delivers diversification and defossilisation at once — turning Swiss and European renewable electricity into storable, tradable energy carriers that reduce exposure to distant chokepoints. SPIN’s view is straightforward: Switzerland should treat domestic and partnered Power-to-X capacity not as a climate nicety, but as energy-security infrastructure.