Critical minerals lie on top of the flags of the United States and China. America’s energy security is stronger than it has been in decades, but growing dependence on critical minerals is creating new strategic vulnerabilities. (Shutterstock/William Potter)

How to Measure US Energy Security

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America’s energy security is stronger than it has been in decades, but growing dependence on critical minerals is creating new strategic vulnerabilities.

Conflict in the Middle East is once again testing America’s energy security and provides a cautionary tale about the “energy transition.”

The good news is that, as the National Center for Energy Analytics’ new US Energy Security Index (ESI) shows, the country is in a much better position to cope with oil and natural gas supply disruptions than it has been for decades.

The bad news is that emerging risks, primarily associated with energy-related minerals, could, on their current path, pose significant future energy security challenges.

A Tool to Measure America’s Energy Security 

The Energy Security Index was developed to help answer the question, “Is America’s energy security getting better or worse?” Using 18 indicators that measure the reliability and diversity of oil, natural gas, uranium, and mineral supplies and other systemic risks, ESI sets out to quantify the state of US energy security since 1970. It tracks and measures, for better or for worse, the impacts of key geopolitical events, such as the energy crises of the 1970s and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Index scoring is based on a composite of individual indicators, and the ESI assigns a risk score of 100 to the maximum indicator value over a 50-year reference period. Higher scores equate to higher risks. In practice, the ESI scores tend to range between a low of 30 (very low risk) and a high of 65 (very high risk), though some of the individual indicators can exhibit........

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