Why BRICS Struggles to Align Energy Security with Global Transition Goals

A Chokepoint Exposes a Structural Gap

The Strait of Hormuz handles roughly 25 percent of global oil trade. In 2026, a West Asia conflict turned that corridor into a live stress test — and BRICS, a bloc accounting for nearly half the world's population and around 40 percent of global GDP, could not mount a coordinated response. That failure, documented in a recent Observer Research Foundation analysis by Parul Bakshi, is not merely a diplomatic embarrassment. It is a diagnostic signal about the gap between declared energy ambitions and operational energy security capacity inside the world's most consequential emerging-market coalition.

The bloc now comprises 11 members — Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia (the latter still without formal acceptance of its 2023 Johannesburg invitation). Together, they account for approximately 40 percent of global crude production, a comparable share of global liquids demand, and nearly 50 percent of global energy consumption. That centrality should, in theory, give the grouping enormous leverage over supply disruptions. In practice, the Hormuz episode revealed the opposite: structural heterogeneity produced paralysis, not resilience.

The Fossil-Transition Paradox

The numbers frame the contradiction with uncomfortable clarity. According to Global Energy Monitor, even as BRICS members commissioned record renewable capacity in recent years, 2025 delivered the largest net annual increase in fossil fuel capacity across the grouping — 115 gigawatts, roughly 11 percent above the previous peak. Eight of ten BRICS members added new fossil capacity that year. The BRICS Energy Cooperation Roadmap 2025–2030, adopted in 2025 with ambitions around decarbonisation and green hydrogen, offered limited relief against an immediate supply shock.

This is not hypocrisy. It is the predictable output of a system containing both the world's largest hydrocarbon exporters and its most energy-vulnerable developing economies. The ORF report argues — and the logic holds — that this heterogeneity is routinely treated as an obstacle when it is in fact an underutilised asset. A bloc that spans major fossil-fuel producers, coal-dependent industrialisers, advanced clean-energy manufacturers, and financially constrained energy-importing nations is uniquely positioned to manage the fossil-to-transition continuum rather than pretend it does not exist.

What a Managed Drawdown Actually Requires

The core proposition is sequencing. Coal and gas are treated not as anomalies to be eliminated overnight but as transition realities requiring a phased, politically calibrated drawdown. That framing is uncomfortable for climate absolutists and fossil incumbents alike, which is precisely why it has traction. The question the report poses is whether BRICS — precisely because it contains both poles of the energy system — can hold that continuum together in a way that is geopolitically durable and developmentally just.

The Hormuz episode suggests the answer is currently no. The Roadmap's ambitions around green hydrogen and long-term decarbonisation are structurally irrelevant to a supply shock that unfolds over weeks, not decades. What the bloc lacks is not vision but operational architecture: shared strategic reserves, coordinated maritime security protocols, and real-time supply contingency mechanisms. Without those, the next chokepoint disruption will produce the same paralysis — and the same global price transmission.

For the broader energy transition, the signal is clear. BRICS cooperation on energy is not a peripheral diplomatic project. It is a load-bearing element of global energy stability. The bloc's inability to coordinate under pressure does not diminish its centrality; it amplifies the cost of inaction.