Honeywell CEO: America can lead the energy era defined by AI and hyper-demand — if policy moves fast enough

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