The single biggest shift I have observed is the collapse of idealism as the organising principle of energy transition, and the rise of strategic realism. Two or three years ago, the dominant framing — particularly in Europe — was still largely values-driven: climate commitments, net-zero pledges, ESG reporting. Governments signed strategies, corporates issued sustainability reports, and the implicit assumption was that capital and policy would align behind shared goals.

What I have seen since, across every region I work in, is something fundamentally different: transition decisions are now being made primarily through the lens of industrial policy, energy security, and competitive positioning. The IRA in the USA was a watershed moment — not because of the climate ambition, but because it reframed clean energy as an economic and geopolitical tool. Europe responded defensively. Gulf states accelerated their own positioning. Japan and South Korea rethought supply chain dependencies. Even in markets like Angola or the Philippines, the question being asked is no longer "can we afford the energy transition?" but "what does this transition give us strategically?"

For corporates, the shift has been equally significant. The companies making the most credible progress are no longer the ones with the boldest net-zero targets — they are the ones treating decarbonisation as a commercial strategy: locking in offtake relationships, repositioning asset bases, and accessing transition finance as a competitive lever. The gap between stated ambition and operational execution has widened in many places, but for a different reason than before. It is not cynicism — it is complexity.

None of the above points are considered in isolation, but rather all together — and it is quite typical that this is not how information is usually presented in the industry.

The dominant industry narrative positions SAF as a financing problem: if blending mandates are set and offtake is guaranteed, capital will flow. I do not think that is completely accurate. The more I work across different jurisdictions and asset classes, the more convinced I am that the core bottleneck is structural fragmentation: feedstock markets, certification frameworks, financing instruments, and policy timelines all operate on incompatible logic and incompatible time horizons. Investors need 15-to-20-year certainty. Typical policy mandates are being set in 3-to-5-year cycles. Feedstock availability is constrained by competing uses — waste oils go to road transport, agricultural residues are governed by land-use rules, and novel feedstocks like algae or power-to-liquid are not yet commercially proven at scale.

What I see in my project work, particularly in MENA and Asia, is that the jurisdictions moving fastest are those that have accepted the fragmentation and are solving for it systemically: co-locating feedstock processing, certification infrastructure, and logistics within integrated hubs; using sovereign mandates to de-risk the first tranche of production; and structuring contracts that share price risk between producers, airlines, and governments. Singapore is doing this more deliberately than most. The UAE has the assets to do it — but the policy scaffolding has not yet caught up with the commercial appetite. That is the gap I spend a lot of my time working on.

The Gulf energy majors are doing something more sophisticated than most external commentators give them credit for — and also something more limited than their own communications suggest.

The sophistication is this: players like ADNOC and Aramco are not approaching the energy transition as an existential threat to be managed. They are approaching it as a value chain extension opportunity. They have the capital, the infrastructure, the feedstock, and the sovereign backing to become producers of low-carbon molecules — blue hydrogen, blue ammonia, lower-carbon LNG — at a scale that European and Asian buyers genuinely need. That is not greenwashing. That is a credible industrial strategy, and in several of my engagements I have seen the internal planning rigour behind it.

The gap, however, is real, and it sits in three places. First, the carbon accounting frameworks underpinning blue hydrogen and CCS claims are still not harmonised with what European import frameworks will actually accept. Second, the internal culture of these organisations has not transitioned at the pace of the strategy announcements — decarbonisation projects still often sit in separate units, poorly integrated with core business. Third, the domestic demand signals are not yet strong enough. Without credible domestic carbon pricing or clean energy mandates in the Gulf, the transition stays primarily export-oriented — which makes it vulnerable to shifts in European import policy, shipping economics, and geopolitics.

I am genuinely optimistic about the trajectory. But the 2030 targets being announced need to be seen as directional commitments, not operational plans. The real test will come in 2027 to 2029, when FIDs need to be taken.

It looks almost nothing like the frameworks that get exported from Europe or the multilateral development banks — and that mismatch is one of the most persistent problems in this space.

The frameworks designed in Brussels or Washington tend to start from a decarbonisation objective and work backwards: set a net-zero date, design the technology pathway, build the policy architecture to enable it. That logic works reasonably well in economies that already have functioning energy infrastructure, established financing systems, and the institutional capacity to implement complex regulatory change. In the Philippines or Angola, the sequencing has to be different.

What I found, working on both mandates, is that a credible roadmap for a developing economy needs to be anchored first in energy security and energy access — and then structured so that the clean energy investments that address those needs also generate export revenue, technology transfer, or sovereign capacity building. In Angola, the biofuels strategy was not viable as a climate project at the first stage. It became viable as an agricultural diversification and rural employment strategy that also happened to reduce import dependency for transport fuels and create an exportable commodity. That reframing changed everything — the political commitment, the financing appetite, the investor interest.

Threading that needle requires accepting that the transition will be slower, more hybridised, and more politically contingent than a pure climate model would prescribe — but it also means the roadmap actually gets implemented, rather than sitting on a shelf.

Green hydrogen is roughly ten years behind where the industry narrative placed it three years ago, and the recalibration is still ongoing.

The honest picture is this: green hydrogen remains necessary technology for specific hard-to-abate applications — certain industrial processes, long-duration shipping, potentially aviation via e-fuels. But the idea that it would become a mass-market energy carrier, flowing through pipelines and fuelling cars and heating homes, has effectively collapsed. The economics do not support it, and they are not going to support it on the timeline that was being discussed at scale in 2021 to 2022.

What has happened in the projects I have worked on is a brutal encounter with real costs. Electrolyser costs have not fallen as fast as projected. Renewable electricity costs in the locations optimal for green hydrogen production are often not as low as the models assumed once you factor in curtailment, transmission, and water supply. Certification frameworks remain unresolved. And demand-side commitments from industrial buyers have been far more cautious than the supply-side build-out assumed.

Where I think green hydrogen has a genuinely credible near-term future is in captive industrial applications — co-located production and consumption within industrial clusters — where the economics are more contained and the certification complexity is lower. It could also serve as a feedstock for e-fuels that can be directly blended without any capex required at the offtaker side. For green hydrogen as an export commodity at scale, we need another decade, at minimum.

Closest to a real breakthrough: steel, in specific geographies and at the leading edge of the technology and policy curve.

Green steel — produced via direct reduced iron using green hydrogen, or via electric arc furnaces running on renewable power — is technically proven. It is being deployed at commercial scale in Sweden, in Germany, and beginning to move in the Gulf. The CfD framework for the Dutch producer was premised on exactly this: the technology is ready, the cost gap is manageable with the right policy instrument, and the premium product narrative is gaining traction with downstream buyers who face their own Scope 3 decarbonisation obligations. But such a policy must be anchored at the government level, otherwise it will remain at the ambition level.

Furthest behind: cement, and I say that with a fair degree of conviction.

Cement is structurally harder than the others. The process emissions — which come from calcinating limestone, not from burning fuel — are unavoidable with current chemistry. You cannot electrify your way out of them. The only credible pathways are carbon capture (expensive, energy-intensive, and geographically constrained) or novel clinker substitutes and alternative binders (technically promising but nowhere near commercial scale). The cement sector is going to need either very aggressive carbon pricing — high enough and durable enough to justify CCS investment — or a breakthrough in alternative binder chemistry that I do not think the industry is currently investing in at sufficient scale.

The disconnect is rarely about money. It is almost always about time, risk allocation, and what I would call institutional legibility — the ability of each side to understand what the other actually needs.

Multilateral financing institutions are structured to be patient, concessional, and mission-driven. Their processes are designed for public accountability: multiple layers of approval, environmental and social safeguards, procurement rules, reporting frameworks. Those processes exist for good reasons. But they create project timelines and transaction structures that are fundamentally misaligned with how private capital works. A private equity investor operating on a 5-to-7-year fund cycle cannot wait 18 months for an MDB board approval and then another 12 months for procurement.

What would fix it? Three things. First, genuinely streamlined project preparation facilities that produce bankable documentation, not just feasibility studies. Second, standardised blended finance structures that private investors can underwrite without bespoke legal negotiation on every deal. Third — and this is the uncomfortable one — MDBs need to accept that their impact is greatest when they mobilise private capital, not when they finance projects directly. That requires giving up some control, and some institutions are more willing to do that than others.

From Dubai, the energy transition looks very different than it does from London or Brussels — and I think that difference is important and underappreciated.

MENA's role in the energy transition is not going to be defined by whether or when it stops producing hydrocarbons. It is going to be defined by whether it can leverage its existing advantages — capital, infrastructure, renewable resource endowment, logistics centrality, and long-standing energy trading relationships — to become a producer and exporter of clean molecules at a scale that the rest of the world genuinely needs.

The UAE and Saudi Arabia have some of the best solar irradiation on the planet, and increasingly competitive renewable power costs. They have deepwater ports, pipeline infrastructure, and proximity to both European and Asian markets. They have sovereign capital that is patient enough to absorb the early-stage risk that stops green fuel projects from reaching FID.

What is missing is coherent integration of these assets into an export-ready offer. SAF is a good example. The UAE has airlines, airports, a growing aviation hub, proximity to waste feedstocks from across the Gulf and South Asia, and sovereign investors who understand the space. What it does not yet have is a SAF mandate that creates domestic demand, a certification pathway that links production to CORSIA and EU ETS eligibility, or a coordinated industrial policy that pulls these elements together into something a foreign airline or fuel trader can actually buy against.

The potential is genuinely significant. But potential and delivery are two different things — and the window for establishing first-mover positioning in clean energy exports is not indefinitely open.