Petro Diplomacy 2024 | Session 3: Financing the Energy Transition

Petro Diplomacy 2024: The Countdown to Net Zero
June 11, 2024
For the 10th consecutive year, AGSIW convened its Petro Diplomacy conference, bringing together private and public sector stakeholders from the United States and the Gulf Arab countries to discuss emerging trends in energy markets and regional politics.
Speakers
Torsten Ehlers, Senior Financial Expert, Monetary and Capital Markets Department, International Monetary Fund
Jamil Wyne, Co-Founder, Riffle Ventures; Co-Lead, Oxford Climate Tech Initiative
Rachel Ziemba, Founder, Ziemba Insights; Adjunct Fellow, Center for a New American Security
Robert Mogielnicki, Senior Resident Scholar, AGSIW (Moderator)
Session 3:  Financing the Energy Transition
The IEA says clean energy investments will need to quadruple in emerging and developing economies to meet rising demand for energy in a sustainable way and reach climate targets. However, capital-intensive renewable energy projects remain complicated to finance and will require an unprecedented mobilization of private capital. Yet according to the IEA’s “World Energy Investment 2023” report, less than half of the oil and gas industry’s unprecedented cash flow from the 2022 energy crisis has gone into traditional supply and only a small fraction to clean technologies. Saudi Aramco CEO Amin Nasser said in March that the world has invested more than $9.5 trillion in the energy transition over the past two decades, yet solar supplies just under 4% of the world’s energy. COP28 President Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber said April 26 that at least $6 trillion should be spent by 2030 to meet the goal of tripling global renewable energy capacity by that date.
The U.S. Inflation Reduction Act has done much to encourage investments in renewable energy through tax and financial incentives to drive the renewable energy program forward in the United States. Is the rest of the world doing enough, and what more needs to be done? The private sector has a role to play if the energy needs of millions of people without access are to be met, but this requires access to affordable finance that is out of reach for many African and other developing economies. How can limited public finances be leveraged to turn billions into the trillions needed to finance the transition?
agsiw.org