John M. Roberts

John M. Roberts is an energy security specialist with Methinks, focusing on the inter-relationship between energy, economic development, and politics. He is a member of the Advisory Board for the UN Economic Commission for Europe’s (UNECE) Project on Sustainable Energy, and a member of the UNECE Group of Experts on Gas. He is a Senior Fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Centre in Washington, DC.

Roberts has a particular expertise in the development of energy in Central Asia and the Caucasus and in the pipelines designed to connect the Caspian to China, Russia, India, and Europe. He is one of Europe’s leading energy security specialists and has testified to UK parliamentary committees on Caspian, Russian, Mideast, Turkish, and Kurdish energy security issues.

He is also an adviser to Trans Caspian Resources, a US group seeking to develop a 78-km Trans-Caspian Connector pipeline.

He served as a managing editor at Platts for twelve years and previously with Financial Times Energy, focusing on the development of energy and on the impact of energy on development.

His latest papers include: How the Caspian Can Help Solve Europe’s Gas Woes: A Close Look at the Trans-Caspian Connector Project, Baku Dialogues, Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy, June 2022; The Twin Energy Crises – Climate Change and Russia, Ditchley Climate and Energy Summit, March 2022; and Hydrocarbon Resources in the Eastern Mediterranean: An Energy Perspective, Südosteuropa Mitteilungen, Munchen, Germany, February 2021.

His view on the current energy crisis is this: We face a paradox: we have never needed fossil fuels so much; we have never needed to get out of fossil fuels so much.