Conflict in the Mideast has renewed calls for countries and companies to invest in energy security and resilience projects. But what those investments look like — and who is making them — depend largely on geography, corporate positioning and available resources. "Resilience" means something much different to energy producers in the Mideast, for example, than it does to countries in places like emerging Asia that have been hit hard and early by supply shortages stemming from the near-closure of the Strait of Hormuz. But the question remains: In a capital-constrained energy sector, who will foot the bill for energy security? More than 100 days into the current crisis, energy markets have shown surprising resilience to the global supply shock. That's due in large part to investments made after past crises. The East-West Pipeline in Saudi Arabia was built during the Iran-Iraq War in the early 1980s to allow crude to bypass Hormuz and was later expanded: An asset that may have once seemed redundant has now emerged as one of the most indispensable pieces of energy infrastructure in the Middle East. Today, the need globally for new pipelines, storage, ports and regasification infrastructure is widely agreed. But competition for capital is also stronger than ever, with untold billions of dollars needed to meet future energy demand growth. Heightened uncertainty around what future markets and demand centers will look like means the drive to make these substantial investments may not last beyond the current crisis, and in the near term, spending habits look unlikely to change. According to the IEA's World Energy Investment 2026 report, global upstream oil and gas investment is expected to remain essentially flat this year compared with 2025 at around $546 billion, despite recent commodity price spikes. The stuttering response reflects years of capital discipline, depleted exploration inventories and infrastructure constraints.