International Energy Agency (IEA)

International Energy Agency (IEA)

The IEA was born with the 1973-1974 oil crisis, when industrialised countries found they were not adequately equipped to deal with the oil embargo imposed by major producers that pushed prices to historically high levels. 

• This first oil shock led to the creation of the IEA in November 1974 with a broad mandate on energy security and energy policy co-operation. 
• The framework was anchored in the IEA treaty called the “Agreement on an International Energy Program,” with newly created autonomous Agency hosted at the OECD in Paris.
• The IEA was established as the main international forum for energy co-operation on a variety of issues such as security of supply, long-term policy, information transparency, energy efficiency, sustainability, research and development, technology collaboration, and international energy relations.  IEA Ministerial Meeting that takes place every two years

Mission

• The IEA works with governments and industry to shape a secure and sustainable energy future for all

Member Nations

The IEA’s founding members were Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Norway (under a special Agreement), Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom, and the United States.

• They were followed by Greece (1976), New Zealand (1977), Australia (1979), Portugal (1981), Finland (1992), France (1992), Hungary (1997), Czech Republic (2001), Republic of Korea (2002), Slovak Republic (2007), Poland (2008), Estonia (2014), and Mexico (2018).
• The IEA is made up of 30 member countries. 

Criteria for membership

A candidate country to the IEA must be a member country of the OECD. In addition, it must demonstrate several requirements. These are:

• Crude oil and/or product reserves equivalent to 90 days of the previous year’s net imports, to which the government has immediate access (even if it does not own them directly) and could be used to address disruptions to global oil supply;
• A demand restraint programme to reduce national oil consumption by up to 10%;
• Legislation and organisation to operate the Co-ordinated Emergency Response Measures (CERM) on a national basis;
• Legislation and measures to ensure that all oil companies under its jurisdiction report information upon request;
• Measures in place to ensure the capability of contributing its share of an IEA collective action. An IEA collective action would be initiated in response to a significant global oil supply disruption and would involve IEA Member Countries making additional volumes of crude and/or product available to the global market (either through increasing supply or reducing demand), with each country’s share based on national consumption as part of the IEA total oil consumption.

IEA’s collective emergency response system

The IEA’s collective emergency response system mechanism ensures a stabilizing influence on markets and the global economy.

• It was activated three times since the Agency’s creation.
• The first was in January 1991, during the First Gulf War.
• The second was in 2005, after the hurricanes Katrina and Rita damaged oil infrastructure in the Gulf of Mexico.
• The third was in 2011, during the Libyan crisis. 

IEA’s Report

World Energy Outlook (WEO)

The WEO is the energy world’s most authoritative source of analysis and projections.

The first WEO was published in 1977 and the flagship publication of the IEA has appeared every year since 1998.