SIMON BROWN: I’m chatting with Alex Monk, portfolio manager of Global Resource Energies at Schroders. Alex, appreciate the time today. The last four years have really been tough for the globalisation trend, which is decades in the making. We’ve seen a pandemic, we’ve seen war in Europe and the Middle East, and this really has in many ways put energy security at the heart of the story – and almost a deglobalisation in some senses.
SIMON BROWN: You mentioned geographic . That is part of the trick. Oil and gas, and let’s even throw coal into that, but certainly oil and gas, plenty of it, but not always in the ideal places for use. That might not even be wars, it might just be good old-fashioned logistics. ALEX MONK: Yes, I think what we probably saw again post pandemic was that everybody set ambitions around decarbonisation that were perhaps overly optimistic when thinking about the time it takes to rejig essentially our entire global energy system. This isn’t something that was going to take place over five or 10 years. It was going to take 20, 30, 40, 50 years to do. I think what gives us certainly a degree of confidence that that decarbonisation will take place over time is that it needs to.
ALEX MONK: And that’s certainly what is so exciting in some ways about this energy transition. We have a lot of the technology available to us today to solve those two core problems of energy security and decarbonisation, but we’re also only at the start. We’re seeing huge innovation in nuclear. That’s a potentially really interesting technology. There’s a lot going on within our energy system. From an investment perspective that’s super-exciting because it creates opportunities for returns for investors.
We have I think seen policy shifting over the course of the last couple of years, and it will continue to shift as we go forward. But it does remain an important driver of how our energy mix will evolve on a go-forward basis