Liam Denning, Columnist

Covid-19 Blows a $400 Billion Hole in Global Energy

Investment in oil and gas supply is in retreat, creating an opportunity to do things differently in the recovery.

May 27, 2020 at 2:00 PM UTC

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

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Covid-19 has blown a $400 billion hole in global energy. How we fix it will determine our success or failure versus that other implacable force of nature: climate change.

The International Energy Agency’s latest investment review, released Wednesday, could easily be subtitled: Don’t let a good crisis go to waste. That figure of $400 billion or so is the difference between where the IEA’s projection for energy investment in 2020 began the year — 2% growth — and where it now thinks it will land: a 20% decline. To put that figure in perspective, it’s not far short of all the money that went into the oil and gas production business last year. Which is apt, since that’s been hit hardest: