There is a commodity that sits beneath almost every international business trip, expatriate relocation, and cross-border supply chain, yet we rarely name it. Oil.
At first glance, this may seem like an old-world concern. After all, we live in an age of digital collaboration, virtual teams, AI-enabled work, and increasingly sophisticated alternatives to physical travel. The pandemic showed that many forms of global work could continue without people boarding planes. It became tempting to believe that globalization was becoming lighter, cleaner, and less dependent on the physical movement of people.
But that conclusion is only partly true. The future of global work will not be simply “virtual” or “mobile.” It will be energy-constrained. Oil will matter less for some forms of cross-border collaboration, but it will continue to shape the cost, carbon footprint, geopolitical risk, and feasibility of physical global work.
The question, then, is not whether digital work has freed global mobility from oil. It is whether it has loosened that dependence or merely shifted the energy constraint elsewhere.
Oil Still Powers Physical Global Work
The most direct link between oil and global work is aviation. Physical global work runs on air travel, and air travel still runs overwhelmingly on jet fuel refined from crude oil. Fuel represents roughly 30% of airlines’ cost base, making oil one of the most volatile inputs in the economics of international business travel.
When oil prices rise, the cost of deploying talent across borders rises with them. Airfares increase, assignment budgets tighten, approval processes become more selective, and organizations begin to ask harder questions about which trips are truly necessary.
But the oil-mobility link is not only a price story. It is also a geography story. After the closure of Russian airspace in 2022, for example, flights between Japan and Europe became substantially longer, adding roughly two hours to some routes. For companies, this is not just an aviation inconvenience. It means more expensive tickets, more time lost in transit, greater traveler fatigue, and thousands of additional person-hours absorbed by the logistics of global work.
This is where geopolitics, energy, and talent mobility intersect. A conflict that disrupts airspace, an oil-market shock in the Middle East, a change in OPEC+ production policy, or instability around key maritime routes can quickly reach the cost of an expatriate package, a regional leadership meeting, or a global project rollout.
In other words, oil remains one of the hidden variables of global work.
Digital Work Reduces Dependence, But Does Not Erase It
Of course, the story has changed. Digitalization has made global work less dependent on physical mobility than it once was.
Together with Jan Selmer, Margaret Shaffer, Markus Dickmann, Florian Froese, and Jan Lauring, I explored this in our work on ‘virtual global mobility’: the use of digital tools to perform some of the coordination, knowledge-transfer, and collaboration functions traditionally associated with expatriation and international business travel.
The promise is real. Virtual global mobility can expand participation in cross-border work, reduce costs, lower carbon emissions, and make international collaboration accessible to people who may not be able or willing to relocate. It also gives organizations more flexibility in how they deploy talent across borders.
But the substitution is partial, not total. Recent survey evidence continues to show that organizations still rely heavily on physical mobility. Temporary assignments and business travel remain central features of global talent management. This should not surprise us. Physical presence still does things that virtual connection struggles to replicate: building trust in new relationships, transferring tacit knowledge, reading political dynamics in a room, resolving sensitive conflict, or embedding oneself in a local context.
The managerial question is therefore not whether global work should be virtual or physical but instead which parts of global work need physical presence, and which do not.
Routine coordination, information sharing, status updates, and many forms of project collaboration can often be done virtually. But trust-building, high-stakes negotiation, cultural immersion, and complex problem-solving may still justify the cost and carbon footprint of travel.
This distinction matters. Organizations that treat global work as a binary choice, either “everyone must travel again” or “everything should be virtual,” miss the point. The challenge is to design the right digital-physical mix.
Sustainable Aviation Fuel Will Help, But Not Quickly Enough
A third path is also emerging: decarbonizing aviation itself. Sustainable Aviation Fuel, or SAF, is intended to reduce the carbon intensity of flying without eliminating flying altogether. In principle, this could weaken the link between business travel and fossil oil. The European Union’s ReFuelEU Aviation regulation, for example, requires SAF blending at EU airports, beginning with 2% in 2025 and rising substantially over time.
The ambition is important. But the current reality is sobering. SAF still represents only a very small share of global jet fuel consumption. It is also significantly more expensive than conventional jet fuel, and much of today’s production relies on limited feedstocks such as used cooking oil and animal fats. Scaling SAF will therefore take time, investment, infrastructure, and technological progress.
For global mobility leaders, the implication is uncomfortable but clear: the decarbonization of aviation is real in intent, but slow in execution. For at least the next decade, most flying for work will remain largely tied to fossil fuel.
This means the relationship between oil and physical global mobility is not disappearing soon.
Toward Energy-Aware Global Mobility
So what should global work leaders do?
First, mobility teams should treat oil as a strategic input, not just a travel-budget detail. Many organizations model assignment costs using current airfare, housing, tax, and schooling assumptions. Fewer ask what happens if airfares rise by 20% in six months because of an oil-price shock, refinery constraint, airspace closure, or geopolitical escalation. Scenario planning for global mobility should include an oil-price stress test, just as it might include a currency stress test, visa-friction stress test, or tax-risk assessment.
Second, leaders should become more intentional about the purpose of travel. Before approving an international trip or assignment, they should ask: What kind of work is this? Is it coordination, relationship-building, negotiation, cultural learning, problem-solving, or political sensemaking? The answer should shape the mobility format. Some work can cross borders digitally. Some work may need short, targeted travel. Some work may still require longer physical presence. The goal is not to minimize travel at all costs, but to make travel more purposeful.
Third, organizations need to recognize that digital work is not the same as energy independence. Virtual collaboration reduces dependence on aviation fuel, but it does not eliminate the energy footprint of global work. The digital infrastructure behind virtual meetings, cloud platforms, and AI-enabled collaboration also consumes energy. Data centers already account for a meaningful share of global electricity use, and AI workloads are likely to increase that demand.
The energy question does not disappear, it simply shifts. That is why the next generation of global mobility will need to be not only cost-aware, talent-aware, and carbon-aware, but also energy-aware.
A Closing Thought
When I started writing about global mobility nearly two decades ago, oil was usually treated as a travel-budget line item. Today, it looks more like a strategic variable. It shapes not only the cost of international assignments and business travel, but also their carbon footprint, geopolitical exposure, and organizational feasibility.
The future of global work will therefore not be simply more virtual or more mobile. It will be more selective, more hybrid, and more energy-aware. The organizations that navigate this landscape best will be those that understand when physical presence is worth the fuel it consumes… and when global work can cross borders without boarding a plane.