Energy Calories:
The DOMINANCE Act,
the Demand Era and Latin America

The DOMINANCE Act: What It Actually Does

The bill that passed the House on June 8, 2026 with bipartisan support is formally titled the Developing Overseas Mineral Investments and New Allied Networks for Critical Energies Act — the DOMINANCE Act. Its full name is the point. This is not a domestic drilling bill. It is a foreign policy and supply chain security instrument, focused specifically on critical minerals and overseas energy partnerships.

Its core provisions establish frameworks for the US to coordinate investment in partner countries' energy and mineral systems: authorising minerals security partnerships, creating dedicated country compact teams to negotiate bilateral energy agreements, and building diplomatic capacity specifically around critical mineral supply chains. A companion measure working through the Senate — the Energy Security Pacts Act — would extend similar tools to coordinate foreign investment more broadly.

The bipartisan support is real and significant. Republican co-sponsor Rep. Young Kim cited China's critical mineral export restrictions and Iran's control of the Strait of Hormuz as the immediate triggers. Democratic co-sponsor Rep. Ami Bera pointed to the pandemic supply chain disruption as the deeper wake-up call. Both parties, from different starting points, have arrived at the same conclusion: the US is dangerously exposed on energy inputs, and the solution requires active engagement with allied and partner nations — not just domestic production.

The Senate companion bill — the Energy Security Pacts Act, introduced by Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) and Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-NE) — reinforces the same logic. As Coons said at the Atlantic Council Forum: when it comes to reducing US reliance on competitors for energy and critical minerals, "we cannot move fast enough, but we can move faster." The bipartisan coalition behind both bills reflects a genuine convergence on energy security that transcends the normal political fault lines.

The Demand Era: What the Atlantic Council Forum Said

The timing of the Atlantic Council's 10th Global Energy Forum — June 9–10, the day after the DOMINANCE Act passed — gave the legislative moment a strategic frame. The Forum's central argument, articulated by Atlantic Council CEO Frederick Kempe in his opening remarks, was the arrival of what he called the "demand era": a period defined by energy demand at a scale and acceleration the world has not previously experienced, driven by the collision of AI-driven electricity consumption, industrial re-shoring, population growth and the electrification of transport.

The Forum was held against an acute backdrop — the ongoing closure of the Strait of Hormuz following the Iran war had concentrated minds considerably on what energy vulnerability actually looks like in practice. The Hormuz crisis made the abstract arguments about supply chain resilience suddenly very concrete for every government and company in the room.

The Forum's conclusion — that the world needs more production in the Western Hemisphere, more strategic reserves, and more bypass routes — is essentially the strategic case for Latin American upstream investment stated plainly by the US policy establishment.

Energy as Calories: The Frame That Changes the Conversation

Listening to the Atlantic Council Forum, a more useful analogy emerges than "barrels" or "BTUs." Think of energy as calories.

Every economy runs on an energy diet. Industrial processes, data centres, transport, agriculture, heating — all of it requires a continuous caloric intake of energy. When that intake is cheap and secure, the economy is healthy and can grow. When it is expensive, constrained, or subject to geopolitical disruption, the economy goes on an involuntary diet — output falls, costs rise, and the knock-on effects are felt everywhere from factory floors to household bills.

The demand era, as the Atlantic Council frames it, is a period of rapidly increasing caloric requirements. AI data centres alone are projected to consume electricity at rates that are fundamentally reordering power grids across the US and Europe. Re-shoring of industrial capacity — semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, defence manufacturing — adds further demand. The electrification of transport is still in early stages. The energy system needs to grow substantially just to keep the caloric intake per unit of economic activity constant — let alone to enable further growth.

Against this backdrop, the US energy dominance agenda is best understood not as ideology but as nutrition policy. The goal is to secure adequate, affordable, domestically influenced energy calories for an increasingly energy-intensive economic future — and to prevent adversaries from being able to put the US economy on a forced diet by controlling supply routes or critical mineral inputs. The DOMINANCE Act is the international dimension of that nutrition strategy: build the supply chains for the inputs you need, with partners you trust, before the crisis arrives.

Venezuela: The 303-Billion-Barrel Piece of the Puzzle

The US military operation to remove Maduro in January 2026 is easier to read through the calorie lens than through purely political ones. Venezuela holds 303 billion barrels of proven reserves — the world's largest — and was producing less than 860,000 barrels per day at the time of the intervention. From a pure caloric standpoint, that is an extraordinary inefficiency in the Western Hemisphere's energy diet, and one that happened to be feeding adversaries: China, Russia and Iran had all established oil-for-loan and joint venture arrangements with PDVSA under Maduro.

The intervention repositioned Venezuelan oil under US-aligned control — or at least under US-defined "authorised channels." The strategic logic is clear: redirecting those barrels away from China and Russia, adding long-dated supply potential to Western Hemisphere output, and removing a geopolitical fulcrum that adversaries had been using to maintain influence in the region.

The commercial reality is more complicated. Restoring Venezuelan production to 2 million barrels per day would require approximately $110 billion in capital investment. The majors who Trump hopes will re-engage were expropriated in Venezuela before — some twice — and no senior executive will commit capital without contract frameworks that do not yet exist. The governance situation remains fluid. The production upside is real but long-dated: think 2029–2032 at the earliest for meaningful incremental barrels, and only under optimistic assumptions about political stability and operator appetite.

What is not long-dated is the geopolitical signal. The US has demonstrated willingness to use hard power to advance energy security objectives in the Western Hemisphere. That changes the risk calculus for every party — allies and competitors alike — operating in the region.

What This Means for Latin American Upstream

The combination of the DOMINANCE Act, the demand era framing, and the Venezuela intervention creates a specific environment for upstream operators across Latin America — and it is not uniformly negative for the region's non-Venezuelan producers.

For Brazil and Argentina, the strategic picture improves. Chinese capital that was positioned in Venezuelan joint ventures is being displaced. It needs a home. Brazil's transparent regulatory framework and Argentina's RIGI investment incentives make both countries natural destinations. The Forum's explicit conclusion — more production in the Western Hemisphere — is a direct endorsement of both countries' upstream ambitions.

For Guyana, US geopolitical alignment is now structural capital, not just commercial advantage. ExxonMobil's Stabroek Block was already attractive; the US national security framing of Western Hemisphere energy dominance reinforces why Washington will support its development.

For technical advisors and independent operators, the demand era creates a particular kind of opportunity. The assets that will matter most are not necessarily the largest or the newest — they are the ones that can be evaluated rigorously, developed quickly, and connected to infrastructure efficiently. That describes a significant portion of the mature and semi-mature producing portfolio across Colombia, Ecuador, Trinidad, and Venezuela's own discovered-but-undeveloped acreage. The bottleneck, as ever, is not capital intention — it is technical credibility. Capital is available for Western Hemisphere assets with clear subsurface cases. The work that unlocks those assets is exactly what Alpha Technical Centre does.