Oil is the New Oil

Information age is Energy Age.

I have heard it. I have said it. Pretty sure you have heard it, said it and nodded to it ad nauseum if you have worked in corporate over last quarter of a century.

“Data is the new oil”

Over the past two decades, this particular narrative has saturated boardrooms, venture capital pitches, and technology conferences. It has even seeped into our drawing room conversations as schools in a frenzy to prepare kids for the information boom have become data-first. It’s become the defining metaphor of the information age, suggesting that in a world of digital transformation, raw data has replaced petroleum as the most valuable resource driving economic value.

It’s a compelling idea.

Clean.

Abstract.

Optimistic.

Intellectual.

But it obscures a more awkward truth that no amount of cloud infrastructure or machine learning can change: under the hood, information age is still the energy age, and industrial age and mining age and agriculture age and tribal age – none of those went away. We have just built a stack of cards – as fragile as it’s weakest link.

Cognitive Ease

The metaphor works on a surface level. It even propagates itself well. Both oil and data are raw resources. Both require extraction, refinement, and distribution. Both create value when leveraged correctly.

But here’s what the metaphor conveniently ignores: oil is physical, limited and painfully extracted. It builds from 0 to 1 – additive for value. Data, by contrast, is ethereal. It is collected at scale and then curated. It builds from 100 to 1 – subtractive for value.

Oil powers the civilization’s actual invisible machinery. It fuels the vehicles that move goods, the planes that move people, the heating systems that keep us alive through winters. Unknowing to us as we are increasingly busy looking at the data streaming into our hand held devices made possible by the very invisible machinery.

That electricity? Generated by oil, coal, natural gas, or the rare few renewables we’ve managed to scale. Data tells you which power plant to build, but only energy builds it.

The tech industry loves this story because it flatters them. It suggests that the new economy runs on what they produce—algorithms, insights, information. But embodying that data is the real world – beneath that server farm, that AI model, every algorithm humming away at three in the morning is a dependency on actual energy.

Designed for Scarcity or Abundance

Consider what happens when oil runs out – and it will run out one day – versus what happens when you lose your data – which at the rate we are producing may never run out. Both are serious problems. But one leaves you stranded. The other leaves you informed about being stranded.

A global oil shortage reshapes civilization in months. Logistics would collapse. Agriculture would collapse. Medicine delivery would collapse. The entire supply chain that feeds, clothes, and houses eight billion people runs on oil-based transportation, fertilizer synthesis, and energy.

A catastrophic data loss—say, all cloud infrastructure simultaneously wiped—would be equally economically devastating. But you would still have food in the ground, clothes on your back, and the ability to move on foot. The difference is not semantic. One is infrastructure. The other is information about infrastructure.

This is not an argument against the importance of data. It’s an argument against the seduction of believing metaphors substitute for reality.

The Energy Cost of Everything

There’s another dimension to this. Every unit of economic activity, whether it’s running a data center or manufacturing a phone or powering a hospital, has an energy cost. And that energy cost is still fundamentally tied to oil, coal, and natural gas.

We talk about renewable energy as though it’s replacing fossil fuels. In some places, it is. But globally, fossil fuel consumption is still rising. Solar and wind have added incremental capacity, not replaced the base load. And even renewable infrastructure—mining lithium for batteries, manufacturing solar panels, transporting them—still runs on fossil fuel energy in most of the world.

So when you run a machine learning model, when you stream a video, when you manage a digital supply chain, you are ultimately running on energy that came from hydrocarbons. The metaphor obscures this. It allows us to believe we’ve transcended the material economy when in fact we’ve only added layers of digital abstraction on top of it.

A More Honest Accounting

This isn’t a polemic against technology or data. Both matter. Data science improves medical outcomes, optimizes supply chains, and helps us understand complex systems. The problem is not data. The problem is the narrative that data is fundamental in the way oil is fundamental.

A more honest accounting would go like this: Oil is still the base resource. Energy is still the limiting factor. Data is valuable because it helps us use energy more efficiently, extract it more effectively, and eventually transition away from fossil fuels. But until that transition is complete—and it’s not—we are still an oil-dependent civilization wrapped in a layer of digital infrastructure.

That transition matters. It’s necessary. And data will play a role in it. But pretending we’ve already transcended the material economy by adopting a flattering metaphor isn’t a transition. It’s just another form of denial.

What Remains True

Sometimes the most important insights are the ones that make us uncomfortable. We built an entire economy around the assumption of cheap energy. That era is ending. Not imminently, not all at once, but the trajectory is clear.

The real question we should be asking isn’t whether data is the new oil. It’s how we manage civilization when oil remains irreplaceable but finite or tied up in geopolitical conflicts like today. That’s where data becomes truly valuable. Not as a replacement for energy, but as a tool for understanding and managing a world in which energy remains the scarce resource.

Oil is the new oil. The sooner we stop pretending otherwise, the sooner we can actually do something about it.