International Energy Agency (IEA)

Criteria for membership

A candidate country to the IEA must be a member country of the OECD. In addition, it must demonstrate several requirements. These are:

• Crude oil and/or product reserves equivalent to 90 days of the previous year’s net imports, to which the government has immediate access (even if it does not own them directly) and could be used to address disruptions to global oil supply;
• A demand restraint programme to reduce national oil consumption by up to 10%;
• Legislation and organisation to operate the Co-ordinated Emergency Response Measures (CERM) on a national basis;
• Legislation and measures to ensure that all oil companies under its jurisdiction report information upon request;
• Measures in place to ensure the capability of contributing its share of an IEA collective action. 
  • An IEA collective action would be initiated in response to a significant global oil supply disruption and would involve IEA Member Countries making additional volumes of crude and/or product available to the global market (either through increasing supply or reducing demand), with each country’s share based on national consumption as part of the IEA total oil consumption.

The IEA Executive Director must make a finding to ascertain whether a potential member country can meet these requirements, during which the IEA Secretariat advises and works with the candidate country to advance the accession process. The IEA Governing Board makes the final decision on a country’s membership.