The Man From Ankara at the Centre of the World’s Energy Emergency

He starts every morning with Rize tea — the strong, dark brew from Turkey’s Black Sea coast that he says he cannot live without. He rearranges his diary around Galatasaray match fixtures and watches games at three in the morning from hotel rooms in Washington, Tokyo and Riyadh. And this week, at the most acute moment in global energy markets since the 1970s, Fatih Birol is the person the world’s governments are calling.

Born in Ankara in 1958 to a military doctor and a housewife, Birol describes a childhood marked less by ambition than by family cohesion. His father, who came from humble beginnings, worked multiple jobs to support the household. “We were known as the happy family,” he once told an interviewer. NPR Nothing in that upbringing obviously pointed toward the office he now holds — executive director of the International Energy Agency, the Paris-based body that coordinates emergency energy responses across thirty-one of the world’s largest economies, and whose forecasts and scenarios move markets worth trillions of dollars.

The journey from Ankara to that office is, in its own way, a distinctly Turkish story — one of technical education pursued with rigour, of opportunity seized across borders, of the kind of patient institutional climbing that rewards persistence over pedigree. Birol earned his undergraduate degree in power engineering from Istanbul Technical University before a scholarship from the Austrian government redirected him toward energy economics. He received his MSc and PhD from the Technical University of Vienna, then took an oil analyst position at OPEC in Vienna — good pay, permanent contract, a settled life in one of Europe’s most comfortable cities. Wikipedia

It was not enough. “I wanted to work on global issues, especially those affecting developing countries,” he has said. So he made a decision that still defines his narrative: he left a lifetime contract for a thirteen-month position at the IEA. “I chose the thirteen-month contract. And this year marks my thirty-first at the IEA.” NPR

That decision — to trade security for scope, comfort for consequence — is the hinge on which his entire career turns. He joined the IEA in 1995 as a junior analyst. That same year, an election for executive director was underway. Birol recalled what he thought at the time: why not me, one day? Over the following two decades he rose through the ranks to Chief Economist, where he oversaw the IEA’s flagship World Energy Outlook — the most authoritative annual assessment of global energy markets — before becoming, in 2015, the agency’s first internal candidate to be elected executive director by unanimous vote. NPR

The data man

Those who work with Birol describe a person who is simultaneously a skilled political operator and a genuine intellectual, which is a rarer combination than it sounds. The IEA’s authority, he has repeatedly insisted, rests not on ideology or institutional prestige but on numbers. “We always, always look at the data,” he has said. “Not emotions. Not politics, not ideology — data.” NPR

That insistence on empiricism has been both the IEA’s greatest strength under his leadership and, at moments, its most uncomfortable quality. When the data pointed toward conclusions that powerful governments found inconvenient — that the world was not transitioning away from fossil fuels fast enough, that energy security and climate goals were in genuine tension rather than easy alignment, that the economics of clean energy were shifting faster than policy was keeping up — Birol said so, clearly, in the kind of language that policymakers could not easily dismiss precisely because it was grounded in numbers rather than advocacy.

Under his leadership, the IEA has expanded its energy security mandate beyond oil to include electricity, natural gas, renewables and critical minerals, and has broadened its membership to bring major emerging economies into what had previously been an essentially Western club. The share of global energy demand represented by IEA members has risen from forty per cent to over eighty per cent since he took charge. CNBC That transformation — turning a Cold War-era institution designed primarily to manage oil crises among rich Western nations into something genuinely global — is arguably Birol’s most consequential achievement, and the one that makes him particularly well-suited to the crisis he is now managing.

The crisis he was born to manage

The Hormuz closure of 2026 is, in some respects, exactly the scenario the IEA was created to handle. The agency was established in 1974 in direct response to the Arab oil embargo of the previous year — the last time the world faced a supply disruption of comparable severity. Its founding logic was straightforward: member states would hold strategic petroleum reserves equivalent to ninety days of net imports, and in a crisis, those reserves could be released in coordinated fashion to prevent a supply shock from becoming an economic catastrophe.

What nobody in 1974 anticipated was that the person coordinating that response half a century later would be a Turkish economist who grew up in Ankara and chose a thirteen-month contract over a permanent job in Vienna. The IEA’s founders were, almost to a person, Western Europeans and North Americans. The institution they created has, under Birol, become something genuinely different — and in the current crisis, that difference matters.

Turkey’s position in the Hormuz crisis is complex and contested, as we report elsewhere in this edition. But Birol’s position is distinct from Turkey’s. He runs an international institution whose member states include the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan and Australia — countries that are, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, aligned with the American and Israeli operation against Iran. He is, in that role, an instrument of a Western institutional response rather than of Turkish foreign policy.

And yet. The credibility he brings to that role — the fact that he is not American, not European, not instinctively dismissive of the concerns of the Global South about energy access and economic justice — is part of what makes him effective. When Birol says that the world is facing its worst energy supply risk since the 1970s, governments from Delhi to Nairobi as well as from London to Washington take the assessment seriously in a way they might not if the same words came from an American or a Frenchman.

What the crisis reveals

This week, Birol convened an emergency meeting with G7 finance ministers — an unprecedented step that signals the depth of institutional concern about where energy markets are heading. The 1.2 billion barrels of strategic reserves held across IEA member states represent a genuine resource, but one with limits. Every day the strait remains closed depletes the buffer. The reserve releases buy time; they do not solve the underlying problem.

Birol has been careful in his public statements this week, as he always is, to let the data speak rather than to dramatise. But the data is doing plenty of dramatic work on its own. Brent at $120. Jet fuel at $190 per barrel equivalent in Europe. Bond yields rising as markets begin to price in sustained inflationary pressure.

He holds the French Legion of Honour and Japan’s Order of the Rising Sun among a long list of state decorations from governments that rarely agree on much else. CNBC He was named to Time magazine’s list of the world’s hundred most influential people, and the Financial Times named him Energy Personality of the Year. Wikipedia He is also an honorary life member of Galatasaray Football Club Al Jazeera — a detail that, in Turkish cultural terms, says rather more about belonging than any formal honour.

The man who left a lifetime contract for thirteen months in 1995 is now, thirty-one years later, the person the world turns to when the lights might go out. For the Turkish and British-Turkish communities who know that journey — who understand what it means to build a career across cultures, to choose ambition over comfort, to make a home in institutions that were not designed with you in mind and then to shape those institutions from within — there is something particular in that story worth recognising this week, when it matters most.

He will be watching Galatasaray when he can. He will be drinking his Rize tea every morning. And he will be looking, as he always does, at the data.