Lead one of four states through the global energy transition, from 2026 to 2050. Three rivals play alongside you on the same map. They build, trade, sanction and remember, and every choice trades prosperity, security, leverage and the climate against each other.
Fossil fuels are stocks: finite deposits concentrated in a few places, burned once, and shipped through chokepoints. Renewables are flows: sun and wind reach almost everyone, cannot be embargoed, and are harvested by equipment. The geopolitics shift from who owns the fuel to who makes the equipment and the minerals inside it.
Relational, structural, market, financial and discursive. Each action you take uses one of them, and each behaves differently as the energy system changes. Some grow, some decay, and some are spent the moment they are used.
A state can hold some of the world's largest oil reserves and still suffer daily blackouts. Associated gas is flared instead of fed to power plants, the grid loses much of what it carries, cheap tariffs mean bills go unpaid, and imports from a sanctioned neighbour fill the gap. Iraq is the clearest case.
The scenario number fixes the world events and how your rivals behave. Give a class the same number and everyone faces the same crises and the same rivals, so the results can be compared.
Modelled on Iraq
Pumps over four million barrels a day yet cannot keep the lights on in summer. Flares much of its own associated gas and imports fuel and power from a sanctioned neighbour.
Modelled on A blend of Saudi Arabia and Russia
Sits on decades of cheap oil and gas and the spare capacity that moves world prices. Every year of the transition makes those reserves worth a little less.
Modelled on A blend of the United States and China
Owns the chip patents, the reserve currency and the payment rails. Builds the clean-tech supply chain at scale, but imports most of the minerals it runs on.
Modelled on Chile, the DR Congo and Indonesia
Mines the lithium, copper, cobalt and nickel that every battery and turbine needs. Most of the value is still captured by refiners abroad.
Energy Imperium is a teaching simulation, not a forecast. Its numbers are stylised and loosely calibrated so that the trade-offs have the right shape: oil prices fall as the world electrifies and rise when producers hold back, warming follows cumulative emissions, gas plants without fuel produce nothing, and coercion erodes the dependence it relies on. Rival states plan from their own interests, temperament and memory of what others have done to them.
Calibration points: the remaining 1.5°C carbon budget of about 130 GtCO₂ from the start of 2025 (Forster et al., Indicators of Global Climate Change 2024); warming of about 0.45°C per 1000 GtCO₂ (IPCC AR6); Iraq's oil output, power shortfall and gas flaring (World Bank Global Gas Flaring Tracker, IEA). The five modalities of power follow the literature on the geopolitics of the energy transformation. Map data: Natural Earth.