Reflections from CERAWeek 2026
inline-matteo-tafuri-200x300.jpg
Houston in March has an energy of its own, but this past spring, it carried something more. CERAWeek 2026 brought together over 10,000 participants from 89 countries, 84 ministers, and more than 1,600 C-suite executives. I was there as a NextGen Pass holder through S&P Global, representing Dartmouth as a Master of Energy Transition student. Walking into that conference center, I felt both the weight and the privilege of being in the room.
Growing up in Rome, Greek and Latin come with the territory. So when I walked into the conference and found myself moving between its named spaces, the vocabulary was already there. Agora (ἀγορά): the open space where commerce, politics, and ideas were never fully separate. Amphitheater (ἀμφιθέατρον): a space built for consequential things to happen in full view, with real stakes, before an audience that mattered. Nexus: the Latin word for a binding, a point where separate threads are tied together. CERAWeek, I realized quickly, is all three at once: the place where capital, policy, technology, and geopolitics are pulled into the same room, in full view, until you can finally see how they connect.
The official theme was "Convergence and Competition: Energy, Technology and Geopolitics." But what stayed with me most came from somewhere else entirely. It was the feeling that the energy sector is no longer just transitioning. It is expanding. The race for AI infrastructure and the reshoring of industrial manufacturing are creating demand at a scale that no single technology can answer alone. The conversations I heard kept returning to the same point: the world needs more energy, from every available source, deployed faster than political cycles typically allow.
The energy and policy leaders I listened to weren't walking away from climate goals. They were insisting that meeting them requires realism about timelines, infrastructure, and the limits of ideology in either direction. Stable, durable policy, insulated from the volatility of election cycles, is a prerequisite. Coming from a European context, where ambitious climate targets have often run ahead of the infrastructure built to meet them, that argument landed with particular force.
inline-taffuri-yergin-1200x800.jpg
Among the moments I'll carry with me: a brief conversation with Daniel Yergin, Vice Chairman of S&P Global and founder of CERAWeek, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning book "The Prize" shaped the modern history of oil. Leaving Houston with a signed copy felt like a small but meaningful closing of a loop.
I also had the privilege of watching Dartmouth faculty, staff, and fellow students bring their research and expertise directly to CERAWeek's stage. That visibility, of our community's work in global conversations about energy's future, was a source of pride throughout the week.
What I took away goes beyond a single argument or a changed position. It is a sharpened sense of the complexity of the problem, and a clearer understanding of why the people working on it, engineers, policymakers, investors, researchers, need to be in conversation with each other, not past each other. The Greeks had a word for that too: symposium, a structured exchange of views among people with different knowledge, in pursuit of something none of them could reach alone. CERAWeek, at its best, is exactly that. I'm grateful to the Irving Institute and to S&P Global's NextGen program for making sure Dartmouth had a seat at that table.
—Matteo Tafuri, Master of Energy Transition, GR'26
