Educational Journey
Columbia Business School
Master of Business Administration - MBA • Business Administration and Management
Experience
Surinvest Ltda.
President
0 - PresentThe Bretton Woods Committee
Member
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Trustee
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Bretton Woods (World Bank - IMF) Committee
Member
Member since 0Global Legal International Network (GLIN Foundation)
Trustee
Member since 0Caspian Hydrocarbons Revenues Initiative
Steering Committee Member
Member since 0Research
Energy Transition in Unsettled Times
Introduction: There are times when crises provide more eloquent warnings about unattended problems than all discourses and learned studies. The crisis detonated almost 15 years ago by the gas supply cutoff from Argentina, awakened Chile to its perilous vulnerability resulting from its growing (and excessive) dependence on a single source of energy supply. This situation also triggered the opportunity to start addressing emerging issues, particularly environmental concerns. To this end, a simple “benchmarking†exercise was undertaken to enable Chilean power sector stakeholders to learn from what other countries have done in their energy programs in terms of their: (i) impact or results; (ii) all-in costs; and (iii) required institutional arrangements for implementation. The results were eye-opening. Whereas countries like Germany embarked on an ambitious recasting of their energy matrix, others followed a more gradualist and organic approach to increase their share of renewables. The former approach, required a solid top-down and disciplined investment effort, resulting in a significant change in the energy matrix, though at a major cost and increased energy risks, which became evident early on the Ukrainian war, when gas supplies were significantly curtailed, triggering an important energy crisis. There were others that acted more gradually, and hedging through some degree of diversification the risks of misjudging energy demand forecasts.
The Elephant in the Room; Preaching or Working on Climate Change
To lead people walk behind them(Lao Tzu) A lot has been debated about the effects of carbon emissions and their impact on climate change. Of all issues that need to be addressed, the one that stands out refers to the power sector, which absorbs more primary energy than any other sector, and accounts for anywhere between a third and half of carbon emissions worldwide. At stake is the need to assure continued economic development, and ensuring the associated improvements in standards of living, while doing so with declining carbon emissions. Over the decades, growth has been propelled by massive expansion of energy demand, powered by hydrocarbons that brought about increases in CO2 emissions. Achieving both growth and decarbonizing economies will be one of the most challenging developments over the coming decades. In recent years, a growing consensus has emerged on the need to reverse growth of emissions to prevent global atmospheric conditions from generating further temperature increases. To this end, 195 countries entered into an international agreement in Paris to limit temperature increase 1.5 degrees Centigrade of pre-industrial levels by mid-century – but there is still a long way to go to cap global warming at this level, and thus no basis for complacence.
Chasing the Unknown the Quest for Decarbonization
Isn’t it noteworthy that an agreement reached in the1990’sto combat climate change has triggered to this day so much conflict (with strong deniers of the existence of the problem and militant supporters of the need to address the issue)? Are the temperature increases over the last decade an indication that global warming is finally catching up with us? Or are the paltry changes in our energy matrixes and policies an indication of failure of the decarbonization effort, or the inherent limitations of human endeavors to address emerging global issues? Perhaps both obviously contradictory postures may signal that the discussion has become overly ideologized, and thus impervious to proper diagnoses that provide technically sound answers for effective response to the issue.
Walking on a Knifes Edge to Reconcile Energy and Amp Environment
Whenever the odds seem stacked against human aspirations – when economic growth looks set to remain feeble as far as the eye can see, when too many countries seem destined to grow old before they become rich, when climate change seems to have crossed the tipping point-it is worth remembering the distinctive virtue of our […]
The Energy-Environment Puzzle – Reconciling Conflicting Goals
Unpacking knotty performance issues. We are in the midst of profoundly significant, changing and challenging times. By now it should be clear that various technologies (such as geothermal, renewables, green hydrogen) to decarbonize energy generation and overcome our global warming issues don’t appear to have generated the much-needed global carbon emission reductions, despite heavy early investments in decarbonization to generate major savings in climate costs. Adding all up, the evidence strongly suggests that our progress doesn’t seem to add much. Could it be that we are running faster, only to stay in place — and in the end despite all the alleged efforts, our progress is bound to fall short of the agreed decarbonization and global warming goals? Clearly, developments so far, while helpful and promising, are just too limited to meet the mark. We need much faster or, better yet, more effective efforts to achieve tangible progress to meet the global demand at the pace the world is growing. To this end, we must become increasingly aware that we are seeking competing(if not conflicting) objectives between economic development, environmental improvement and affordability. This paper, which is aimed at explaining for skeptics and believers alike the need for a more “strategic†way of planning, to assess every step of the way the trade-offs we are making between the competing goals to archieve maximum impact with reasonably minimum or manageable input. To do so, we must ourselves wean out of the tendency to emphasize process over actions and results. International gatherings too often become vanity shows to celebrate the issuance of more rules and regulations that in the end make the investment processes more complex and expensive, which deflect us from focusing on substantive actions and results on the ground. For too long, international for a have pressed for combating symptoms, not causes, focusing o n processes, not results. A reorientation from words to deeds and closer attention on what we are achieving is now in order.
Planning at the Dawn of the XXI Century: The Ambiguous Road to COP26
How did we Get Here?- Economic and social development in the last few centuries has generated unprecedented progress, overcoming recurrent and widespread famines, extending life expectancy, increasing incomes in large swaths of the world. This has been underpinned by productivity gains in agriculture, industry, advances in communications, transport and energy, never experienced in recorded history before
