One third of global oil production today comes from the Middle East, and all of the world's spare production capacity is located in the region. This underpins the lasting strategic importance of the region to global energy markets. Indeed, non-OPEC oil production has stagnated since 2004 and may begin to decline by the middle of this decade, making the world even more dependent on OPEC supply.

However, as Herman Franssen points out in this volume, growing demand in the region itself, alongside uncertainty regarding future upstream investments, have raised doubts about OPEC's ability and willingness to significantly increase oil production and export capacity. As far as global energy markets are concerned, this only aggravates the general air of uncertainty that has developed in recent years.

At the beginning of 2011, for example, nuclear power's future role in global electricity markets was brought into doubt following the crisis at Fukushima. As Hans Blix highlights in his keynote address, there are numerous lessons to be learnt from the incident – for instance, about the location of emergency electricity generators and the value of passive systems that offer cooling of reactors without the need for emergency pumps that depend on electricity. Tsunamis are not a common risk across the globe, but at a time when the world is conscious that global warming may bring rising sea levels and extreme and turbulent weather, all such eventualities must be accounted for.