Our work for the energy and water provider to a hugely ambitious greenfield development in the Middle East would see reliance on diesel being phased out in line with the project’s ambition to be 90% sustainable by 2030. Our client had to balance competing pressures of readiness for the transition to e-fuels and still deliver up to 1.8 GW of thermal power generation in the near term. We developed a strategy where LNG would provide the bridge between reliance on diesel and the adoption of clean technologies still in development. It was our job to ‘transition’ the client’s organisation, accelerating its technical and commercial capability to build LNG import infrastructure and contract for molecules in the medium term, and move to beyond LNG in readiness for e-fuels by the end of the decade.
Setting direction
Our task was to provide the roadmap for the transition and build the capabilities that would be needed for each phase. That roadmap would have to chart the journey end-to-end, mapping out the fuel supply, logistics, infrastructure, commercials and end-user demand of the new value chains that would have to be built for each phase, not just the individual steps.
Energy ecosystems need integrated answers
Energy ecosystems are just that: ecosystems with complex webs of interdependencies. In building that ecosystem, siloed thinking leads to poor strategy and execution. We worked with multiple individual teams during the project: from the technical team looking at turbine generation to the commercial team assessing the feasibility of the LNG that would provide the bridge and the hydrogen team planning future e-fuel generation. As well as accelerating the maturity of these teams individually as they worked with unfamiliar fuels and markets, we accelerated their ability to cooperate and collaborate as part of a single energy ecosystem where each team understood its role in an integrated generation portfolio strategy.
Maturing capability, maturing teamwork
We aligned the generation, commercial and hydrogen teams around one integrated generation strategy. As well as increasing the maturity of the teams to deliver their part of the journey, we used the process itself to create alignment between the teams. Our collaborative approach brought them together to define shared decision-making criteria, roles, responsibilities and timelines.
Though the ambition for the development itself has been scaled back, the confidence and maturity the teams now have has given them the capabilities needed in complex projects to pivot as that ambition takes on a new shape.