BNEF：伊朗战争半年复盘对全球能源转型影响

This is Kamala Shelling and you're listening to Switched on the Bloomberg NEF podcast. It's been 6 months since the Iran war began. 6 months of partial or complete closure of the Strait of Hormuz. 6 months of sporadic and failed peace talks. 6 months of sky-high oil prices, strangled prochemical flows, and efforts to protect consumers from the worst hits to their pocketbooks. It's also been a boom time for some clean energy technologies like solar and electric vehicles.

So, as we reach this 6-month anniversary, it's been time for us at BNF to pause, take stock of how the last 6 months have affected the energy transition, and think about what might be coming next. With me in the studio today is Ethan Zindler to talk about how this war has impacted nine different regions across six continents. Ethan leads BNF's country and policy research, and he previously worked as climate counselor to Janet Yellen, the former US Treasury Secretary.

Our conversation today is based on his note 6 months in the Iran war's global impact. BNF clients can find this and other related material by heading to BNFGO on the Bloomberg terminal or at bnf.com. If you'd like to learn more about how BNF approaches strategy research on the energy transition, including developments in commodity markets, trends across different sectors, and the cross cutting technologies shaping the future.

You can find more information on bnf.com. And if you'd like to speak with a member of our team about becoming a client, email us at sales.bnf bloomberg.net. But for now, let's speak with Ethan about how the Iran war has changed the energy transition.

Welcome Ethan back to switched on.

Great to be here. So, you are here as a representative of and the mastermind behind this note looking back on the first 6 months of the Iran war, but you're one of 11 authors. This note is actually the result of you asking analysts from nine regional teams to write a short essay on what the war has meant to their corner of the globe. So, in that spirit, I've actually asked the other 10 authors what if they were sitting in my chair today, they would like to ask you about the Iran war.

Doesn't have to be their region, doesn't have to be their technology, anything at all. So those questions are going to provide the backbone of our conversation. Um we're going to do this by we're going to go uh region by region mostly in descending order by population and we'll start by talking about what happened in that place and then broaden out to bigger trends. So any questions?

No, thanks for having me on. I think it's uh you're kind in calling me an author. All I did was ask a question and then uh and then tried to you know get some terrific answers from the folks around the world. And thank you for your help also in getting this this piece of research out the door. So let's start with India and Southeast Asia. Um that is a region that has particularly dramatic exposure to imported fuels.

So how has the Iran war and the energy crisis affected that region?

So you know there's multiple stories within the region as you might imagine. Um it includes India which now is the country with the largest population on earth and it really depends on resources. So India and Indonesia are two countries that um get about twothirds of their power from domestic coal. And so the on the power sector they were relatively insulated and were able to tap into what they have. Other countries in the region different story.

Vietnam and Philippines definitely more exposed because they do rely a lot more on imports uh for fuels. Overall I would say across the region and this is a theme that will probably come to across much of the world. transport sector has been exposed and so drivers uh you know in countries where there is no no easy substitution because uh of the reliance on petrol or diesel fuel you've seen consumers face some real effects of that

that increase in prices for petrol and diesel and other fossil fuels for transport has that impacted the choices people are making in terms of the cars they are buying and the cars they are driving

so yes but with a giant caveat of if you're in a country where you are fully being exposed to the higher cost and are fully capable of taking advantage of lower cost equipment then you're making a move. Um so in other words there's some number of countries and and even here in the US some jurisdiction states where there have been efforts to essentially shield consumers from the cost of higher gasoline prices for instance.

In such cases, consumers essentially will be less motivated to make a substantial change in the type of vehicle that they drive. And then similarly, there are some countries, namely the United States, um that put tariffs on the import of foreignade equipment, uh whether it's solar modules or electric vehicles. And if you can't access the lowest cost equipment, then again, you may not make the move to make a switch. Um, but there are a good number of markets that fall squarely into the category of essentially unprotected consumers with relatively unfettered access to the lowest cost stuff.

And uh, we're seeing a lot of activity in those countries.

So, we're going to come back and talk about trade of clean technology a lot in just a moment, but first I want to touch on something else you said, which was um, efforts to keep prices for things like gasoline and diesel down. And I know that we've been talking a lot with our various policy teams. In fact, we were talking with Vicky on the podcast just a couple weeks ago about how there's this tension now between wanting to keep energy costs down for consumers, but then also not wanting to get in the way of the energy transition.

Um, not wanting to make fossil fuels too cheap essentially. So, do you think there's a chance that these attempts to protect consumers from oil and gas price spikes could actually halt or slow down the energy transition? So they're not they're not helpful in terms of people making decisions to switch over to let's say electric vehicles or to put new photovoltaic systems on the roofs if if they're being shielded from higher prices.

But I mean you frame the question as the decision that policy makers have to make between want to advance the energy transition and wanting to protect consumers. I'll throw a third thing in here which is how much these things end up costing governments. And so we are going to get to the point, in fact, we probably are getting to the point in some places where it's already too costly to continue to subsidize fuel cost for consumers.

And so the longer that the war drags on or the or whatever we're in right now, the conflict or low-grade conflict, um the more costly it becomes. And so, you know, some of the some of the things that we saw early in the earliest days were were framed as sort of temporary suspensions of say gasoline taxes and some of them were set to last as few as you know 60 days. Um, and so you are going to start to see I think more pressure on governments to lift those things and find other solutions um to the problem.

So on the topic of having to import fossil fuels, China is another major major importer of hydrocarbons. So let's have China be our second region we talk about, but it appears to have weathered the shock of the Iran war relatively well. So what's going on there?

Yeah, such a good question because China really is so on both the energy uh supply and demand side such an important part of the story and probably a big part of the sort of surprise I think that a lot of people have felt over the last six months. So, China was much better prepared for this type of shock to global fossil fuel prices than I think many people had anticipated due to um stockpiling and reserves in their own production among other things.

But also uh very importantly and something that maybe doesn't get as much attention, the fact that demand for gasoline has been falling