World energy has no single controller, and no final destination. It can only be navigated.
After thirty years inside the world's energy system — from Eskom to Shell to Secretary-General of the International Gas Union to World Energy Laureate at the World Energy Council — Andy Calitz has written the guide he wished he'd had. Navigating World Energy is a traveller's map of the global energy transition as it actually is in 2026: how it unfolds country by country, across every major energy region, amid war, climate, geopolitics and the sudden hunger of artificial intelligence.
Energy has become the argument beneath every other argument — over prosperity, security, climate, and now AI. Yet no one steers the system, and everyone does: billions of people and thousands of institutions, each navigating their own vessel across the same crowded sea. This book takes you aboard.
It is built from real places, one at a time. You make landfall at the fifty sites where the future of energy is being decided: the mega-dam rising above India, the Chinese factories that manufacture the sun, the Strait of Hormuz, the cobalt of the Congo, a battery on the California coast, a reactor going up on a Wyoming coal town. At each, a short "For the Navigator" reading tells you why the place belongs on your chart and what it should change in how you set a course.
Along the way you meet the navigators themselves — the producers, movers, financiers, makers and influencers who share one system and cannot agree on it — and you learn to read the forces now blowing across it: the return of energy as a weapon, the race to decarbonise, the scramble for critical minerals, and the electricity demand that AI has unleashed.
What you will take away
- A clear, system-wide picture of how world energy really works
- The geography of power: the chokepoints, the resources, and the states that hold them
- The hardest choices facing governments, investors and industry, weighed honestly
- A way of thinking — navigation — that stays useful as the conditions keep changing
With a foreword by Dr Angela Wilkinson, Secretary General and CEO of the World Energy Council, the book takes positions and states them plainly, but sets out to be realist and even-handed rather than to campaign. It is written for anyone who works in, invests in, regulates, or simply depends on energy — the minister and the engineer, the investor and the student, and the citizen who wants to understand the system that powers their life.
Because world energy has no final destination. It can only be navigated — continuously, and by many hands at once.
Praise for Navigating World Energy
"At last, a global account that takes energy security as seriously as climate, and reads the world from Asia as clearly as from the West." — Nobuo Tanaka, Executive Director Emeritus, International Energy Agency
"A clear-eyed and deeply informed guide to the world's most consequential system." — Sir Mick Davis, Chairman, Vision Blue Resources
"Energy is the lifeblood of the world economy… a comprehensive insight into the historic development of this ever-evolving system, but also the challenges the world faces in navigating a future that meets all our needs." — Andy Brown, President of the Energy Institute
"A reminder of why this industry is worth a career. Calitz writes about energy the way those of us inside it experience it — as the work that keeps the world running." — Fatema Alnuaimi, CEO, ADNOC Gas plc
