Energy Security & Sustainable Development

Iran owns large hydrocarbon resources and plays a significant role in the global energy market as a supplier. Since long-term planning and foresight studies, such as the comprehensive scientific map were developed, science and technology development became a key aspect in the country's development programs. After 1970's energy crisis and west world's oil shock policy makers, especially from demand-side countries, followed a new approach to set national energy strategies. Energy security emerged as a systematic respond to the global crisis which aimed to improve energy systems resilience level. The high correlation between economic aspects, like GDP, and energy consumption, especially for energy export countries, considered energy security as a long-term respond to support sustainable development. In this paper we aimed to investigate energy security as a key concept and discuss how it tied to the sustainable development. As it has been showed, energy security is a complicated concept and needed to be localized for nations in order to address local challenges. Then it is crucial for Iran to study energy security from a new angle to adopt more sustain energy policies. It is expect that in a near future, energy security will become a challenging issue for Iranian policy makers.