Honeywell CEO: America can lead the energy era defined by AI and hyper-demand — if policy moves fast enough
Global power demand is on track to double by mid-century. America has every advantage except urgency to get ahead of this.
Honeywell CEO: America can lead the energy era defined by AI and hyper-demand — if policy moves fast enough
Overview
New technologies, geopolitical shifts, and swings between scarcity and abundance force energy industry leaders, investors, policymakers, and consumers to regularly reassess how we power our world.
Today’s unprecedented energy demand is also compounded by an aging workforce and new supply pressures. This is no mere spike that we can wait out. The world will add more than a billion people by mid-century, and as economies grow and electrify, global power demand is on track to roughly double. Power-hungry technologies like AI will only push it higher.
This is not a wave to ride. It calls for the deliberate use of strategies and technologies that improve existing infrastructure, integrate alternative feedstocks, and add new capacity, strengthening supply, affordability, and security.
Collaborating with the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy, our team at Honeywell identified three priorities to maintain U.S. energy leadership. First, build more capacity and build it faster. Second, build a smarter, more secure system of energy delivery. Third, widen our energy mix.
Build More, Faster
Today, the United States is the world’s largest exporter of LNG, and the volumes keep climbing, a credit to the technologies that unlock new supply and the policies that bring it to market. Our greatest challenge now is not supply, or even demand. It is human. We need more LNG infrastructure, and we are short on the people to build it. Welders, pipefitters, plant operators are in dwindling supply. The raw talent exists, but we must develop it through apprenticeships and employer-led training and apply technologies like AI to help close the gap.
Worldwide, AI-enabled operations could save up to $80 billion a year in LNG production by 2050, according to MIT, while easing labor pressure by augmenting a younger, less-experienced workforce. It means job security, not job scarcity.
Demand is also rising fast at home. A single data center campus can draw as much power as a small city, and consumers are increasingly resisting developers who expect them to foot the bill. On-site, behind-the-meter generation lets operators scale without waiting on the grid or hitting consumers in the wallet, and rapid-deployment options like fuel cells can keep pace with development otherwise constrained by gas-turbine backlogs and long nuclear lead times.
Policymakers can help on several fronts: maintain regulatory certainty for LNG development, deliver permitting reform with enforceable timelines, set clear and consistent rules so large users can build on-site power and connect to the grid quickly and fairly, and commit federal dollars to skilled-trades training and the technologies that close the gap.
Smarter, More Secure Delivery
Building new capacity is only part of the answer. We also have to get more out of the system we already have.
Consider early 2024, as Winter Storm Heather approached Texas. Many feared a repeat of Winter Storm Uri in 2021, when the state’s infrastructure buckled, the lights went out for millions, and 240 people died. Heather tested the work Texas had done to fix those weaknesses — and the state passed. The storm was less severe, but a key to that success was Texas’s investment in battery storage, which freed up three gigawatts of gas capacity and delivered $750 million in savings.
That technology improves every year. Our problem is that America could be a battery storage production leader and is not. Changing that is both smart industrial policy and smart national security policy.
Details
AI matters here just as much. Applied across our energy system, it can take billions out of production costs — an estimated $4 billion a year within five years and up to $14 billion by 2050 in the United States alone — without putting a single new piece of steel in the ground.
Efficiency is only half of resilience. The other half is protection. As we electrify and connect more of the economy, we widen the attack surface for those who would do us harm. Attacks on the industrial systems that run our energy infrastructure are climbing fast, and securing those systems is no longer separate from securing the energy supply.
Policymakers can help by standardizing storage rules across grid operators, extending incentives for domestic battery manufacturing, and pairing the rollout of AI with enforceable cybersecurity standards.
Widen the Energy Mix
Resilience also means not leaning on any single source, or any single region. America’s lead in LNG is one story about one resource, but there are others worth telling.
Heavy transport, aviation, marine, and long-haul freight need energy-dense fuels, and this year’s jet fuel spike showed why alternatives matter. Sustainable aviation fuel is expensive to produce today, but the cost becomes competitive at scale. And we can grow that fuel ourselves. No country matches the United States in agricultural feedstock, which makes alternative fuel as much a middle-American job-creation story as it is an energy one.
We also have to look at what is in our own backyard. Venezuela is moving to expand its oil output, and the United States is its natural destination. Along the Gulf Coast there are refineries built specifically to process the sort of heavy crude Venezuela produces, and the shipping lanes between us are open.
The rest of the world is reaching the same conclusion. Africa’s demand for refined fuel will pass six million barrels a day by mid-century, with too little capacity to meet it. Every refinery, terminal, and fuel plant built abroad is a market for American technology — if we enable it, by extending clean fuel production credits, opening marine fuel under the Renewable Fuel Standard, and backing American energy technology overseas with U.S. export finance.
None of this is theory. The demand is certain, and the technology to meet it is ready today. The open question is whether our policy moves at the speed of the moment.
Build more capacity and build it faster. Run it smarter and more securely. Widen the energy mix. Do that, and we do more than keep the lights on. We create jobs in the trades, in agriculture, and in manufacturing. We strengthen our national security, and we give capital the certainty it needs to move. This country has always led by meeting the moment. This is our chance to do it again — for ourselves and for the world.
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