OCSome years ago I led the process implementation team on a collaborative working programme across Shell's African assets, Kazakhstan and their Netherlands gas business. The work was not about technology. It was about who did what, in what order, and how many times the same information was rekeyed before anyone acted on it.
The programme carried an estimated annual benefit of over US$75m in production efficiency. Well restart times fell from six days to under three. Travel to the field dropped by 15%. Not one new asset was built to get there.
I mention it not for the number but for where the number came from. Processes nobody owned, handovers nobody had mapped, and decisions being made three levels away from the people holding the information. Ordinary organisational friction, compounding quietly for years.
I have seen a version of that in every energy business I have worked in, from supermajors to national programmes to regulated utilities. And it makes me sceptical of the story we currently tell ourselves about the energy transition.
01The money is already here
The prevailing narrative is that we need more capital. More funds, more government money, more private investment mobilised at pace.
Look at what has actually happened. Great British Energy has £8.3bn of capital funding allocated over this parliament, with an Investment Fund launching in summer 2026. The National Wealth Fund holds £27.8bn of core capitalisation, with a stated ambition to drive more than £100bn of finance. Infrastructure funds are sitting on committed capital they are actively trying to place. Development banks are competing for the same bankable projects.
Ask an investor what keeps them awake and they rarely say "finding money". They say "finding projects that will actually deliver what the model promised".
That is a different problem, and we are not treating it as seriously.
02Where the value leaks
When an energy or infrastructure asset underperforms its investment case, the cause is very rarely the technology. The turbines work. The plant runs. The software does roughly what the vendor said it would.
What fails is quieter:
- An operating model designed for the organisation that existed before the asset arrived
- Data spread across systems that were never reconciled, so nobody trusts the numbers enough to act on them
- Programme governance that reports status rather than surfacing risk
- Capability that was procured but never embedded, so the new way of working quietly reverts within eighteen months
None of these appear in a financial model. All of them determine whether the model turns out to be true.
03Why this gets missed
Partly because it is unglamorous. Nobody announces a process redesign. There is no ribbon to cut when a handover between two teams finally works.
But there is a structural reason too. The people who price these assets and the people who run them rarely sit in the same room. Investment committees see models. Operations teams see reality. The translation between the two is thin, and it usually happens after the money is committed rather than before.
I have spent most of my career in that gap, which is an odd place to build a profession. It is also where I think the next decade of value in this sector sits.
04What good looks like
The organisations that get this right tend to do four things.
They treat operating model design as part of the investment, not as something to sort out afterwards. They fix data foundations before layering analytics or AI on top, because both amplify whatever is underneath. They govern programmes on leading indicators rather than status reports. And they insist that capability is embedded in their own people, not rented indefinitely.
None of that is exotic. It is just harder to sell than a new technology, and slower to show up in a headline.
05The question worth asking
If you are developing, funding or regulating energy infrastructure right now, the question is not whether the capital is available. It is whether the organisation receiving it is built to convert it.
My experience says most are not, not because anyone is incompetent, but because nobody was ever specifically responsible for that conversion. That is a fixable problem. It is also, in my view, the cheapest energy we have available to us: the value already sitting inside assets we have built and organisations we already pay for.
We should go and find it before we spend another billion looking elsewhere.