Industry Advisory Council Meeting: Scaling Energy Investment, Innovation, and Resilience

A Critical Minerals Enabled Energy Future

The global energy system is entering a decisive phase defined by persistent volatility, shifting capital flows, and widening divergences in regional energy transitions. Industry leaders face mounting pressure to deliver reliable, affordable, and cleaner energy while adapting to tight supply chains, rising financing costs, geopolitics, and evolving consumer expectations and regulation.

Billions must benefit from unfettered access to affordable, clean, and reliable energy. Empowering persistently underserved populations and supercharging rising consumer and artificial intelligence energy demand with critical minerals enabled modern day electrification, hydrocarbon, and sustainable fuel solutions, is the civilizational challenge that governments enable and industry lead.

Against this backdrop of progressive technology breakthroughs and policy evolutions, the International Energy Forum's Industry Advisory Council (IAC), meeting in person on 3 February 2026 at the International Energy Forum headquarter in the Diplomatic Quarter of Riyadh will provide a vital arena for open exchange, helping bridge perspectives and strengthen producer–consumer cooperation to manage historic energy system and market transformations.

In 2025, IAC deliberations in Paris underscored the need to recalibrate energy transitions to reinforce security and competitiveness by scaling investment, while accelerating innovation across the technology spectrum to boost resilience. At the same time, supply chain constraints in renewables, nuclear, LNG, and critical minerals highlighted structural gaps that risk slowing investments in both legacy and emerging energy systems. These dynamics demand practical strategies to better align short-term deliverability with unrelenting energy demand growth trends and more diverse long-term visions.

As the energy sector pivots toward new growth markets, from clean hydrogen and next-generation nuclear, to low-carbon fuels, CCUS, and more resilient and advanced power grids, global companies call out for more policy and regulatory clarity. This includes cohesive and interoperable standards, predictable policy frameworks informed by robust data, and public private partnerships to accelerate both financing, permitting and other measures that derisk energy investment. Enhancing predictability to strengthening resilience in an era of fragmentation is therefore central to maintaining the stable, competitive, and integrated global markets upon which producers and consumers depend to meet the age-old challenge of delivering affordable, clean and reliable energy today and in future.

Meeting on the eve of the 16th IEA-IEF-OPEC Symposium on Energy Outlooks, the 2026 IAC brings together leaders from across the value chain to explore opportunities for investment, innovation, and collaboration. Insights generated at this meeting will feed into the IEF17 Ministerial to be held on 26 April in Riyadh, helping shape a forward-looking agenda that reinforces energy security, affordability, and the global competitiveness of the energy industry.

Structured in three thematic sessions to address the challenges and opportunities that transformative energy market and policy dynamics create currently and imply for the future, the IEF Advisory Council will help foster more cohesively shared visions with actionable strategies to strengthen energy security and clean technology priorities of all IEF stakeholders.

Summary of Proceedings

Welcome and opening

Eng. Jassim Alshirawi, Secretary General, IEF
The purpose of the IEF IAC Meeting is to capture real-economy perspectives on investment trends, cost pressures, infrastructures gaps, and clean technology deployment and identify shared priorities for producers and consumers in sustaining energy security, affordability and sustainability. Industry views will be integrated into the IEF17 Ministerial give direction and strengthen public private partnerships in the global energy sector.

Session 1: Competing for Capital: Rebuilding Confidence in Global Energy Investment, Clean Competitiveness, and Resilience

This opening session sets the stage by evaluating how companies are adapting business and investment strategies to market confidence amidst cost inflation, geopolitical volatility, regulatory fragmentation, and diverging energy policy and technology pathways.

Focus

• Upstream and midstream investment gaps
• Fiscal stability, regulatory clarity and cohesion in fragmented markets
• LNG expansion, petrochemicals, hydrogen
• Cross-border project development across regions

Key Questions for Roundtable Discussions

1. How are global companies rebalancing portfolios across hydrocarbons, renewables, hydrogen, CCUS, and clean molecules to meet demand growth and maintain competitiveness?
2. What policy and regulatory signals are most critical to restoring investor confidence and bridging the gap between energy access and clean tech ambitions, financing, and bankability?
3. How can governments and industry collaborate on permitting infrastructure expansion, and stable fiscal frameworks to overcome delivery constraints?
4. Where are the most promising cross-border opportunities for new energy investment, supply chain partnerships, and trade flows?

Session 2: Full-Spectrum Innovation: Delivering Clean Energy Growth in Diverse Market Settings

This session will explore how clean technologies from nuclear to renewables, efficiency to digitalization, hydrocarbons to hydrogen, and bioenergy to sustainable low-carbon and synthetic fuels, can be deployed at scale without compromising affordability, reliability, and sustainability in different settings.

Focus

• Nuclear, renewables, storage, reliable energy system integration
• AI and digitalization to manage risks and enhance reliability
• Hydrogen value chains and sustainable fuels accelerators
• Public private technology partnerships in emerging economies

Key Questions for Roundtable Discussions

1. What innovations across generation, grids, storage, and system integration will have the greatest impact on delivering clean, firm, and flexible energy on scale?
2. How can emerging economies leapfrog bottlenecks in finance, grid capacity, local manufacturing, and permitting?
3. What role can hydrogen, ammonia, and sustainable fuels play in industrial decarbonization and clean competitiveness?
4. How can digital and AI-enabled optimization support faster deployment, improved reliability, and lower costs?

Session 3: Critical Minerals: The New Foundations for a Clean Resilient and Competitive Global Energy System

This session will assess how producers and consumers can bridge upstream constraints, processing bottlenecks, and geopolitical risks to build resilient and diversified critical minerals supply chains and critical minerals enabled energy networks and industries. Laying the foundations for a clean, resilient, and affordable global energy system, discussion outcomes should focus on supply chain diversification, certification, responsible mining, and producer–consumer alignment.

Focus

• New upstream opportunities, investment, and financing models
• Risk and opportunities in refining, processing, trade and investment
• Investable, inclusive and interoperable standards and traceable metrics
• The IEF role in transparency and cooperation

Key Questions for Roundtable Discussions

1. What new investment models and partnerships can accelerate responsible mining and processing capacity expansion?
2. How can producers and consumers develop and align standards for traceability, environmental safeguards, and certification?
3. What strategies can mitigate geopolitical vulnerability, including concentration risks in refining, battery materials, and rare earths?
4. Where can the IEF play a system-wide convening role to strengthen data transparency, market predictability, and technical cooperation?

Powering The Way Forward: The IEF-IAC Partnership Engine

Eng. Jassim Alshirawi, Secretary General, IEF
Summary of key findings providing clear industry guidance for the IEF17 Ministerial.