Strip away the summitry and the transition resolves into a supply chain with a geography. The patient capital sits in Gulf sovereign funds, whose hydrocarbon endowments are being converted — with more discipline than their critics concede — into the transmission lines, storage plants and hydrogen terminals of the coming system. The manufacturing sits in Asia, where solar, battery and electrolyser production have achieved cost curves no other region can approach.
This division of labour offends two comfortable narratives at once: the Western assumption that the transition would be led from where it was legislated, and the activist assumption that petrostates must be its obstacles. The evidence now points elsewhere. The largest single commitments of transition capital this decade have come from the very treasuries the old story cast as villains.
The largest commitments of transition capital this decade have come from the treasuries the old story cast as villains.
The uncomfortable corollary is dependency: a transition financed and manufactured along one corridor concentrates leverage as surely as oil ever did. The task for everyone else is not to lament the geography but to negotiate their place in it — because the transition will not wait for a more flattering map.