Banking on Gas and Energy

Yesterday, the 18th of February 2025, our Vice President - Mr Andrea Stegher – attended one of the strategic conference panel sessions at EGYPES2025 entitled “The Importance of Bankable Energies”, which sought to address a clear and achievable pathway for energy projects’ Final Investment Decisions (FIDs).

During his intervention, Mr Stegher highlighted the role the International Gas Union (IGU) is playing in improving an open and effective dialogue with all relevant policy makers, financial institutions and stakeholders at large to allow Gas in all its forms to play a substantial role in serving consumers’ needs and mitigating global emissions.

While reducing investment barriers through private and public collaboration, fast-tracking commercial viability and scaling viable technologies to secure large capital investments to advance the global net-zero trajectory were high on the panel’s agenda, Mr Stegher emphasised the criticality of avoiding dogmatic approaches to energies sources like Gas, which is playing an essential role in human progress and global growth, as recently highlighted in the IGU Manifesto.

While there are still several multilateral development institutions that consider investments in Gas projects not in line with their own decarbonisation pledges and net-zero commitments, Mr Stegher made it abundantly clear that “Gas is not a mere transition fuel, as it has been recently coined, but a fuel that is sustainable, reliable, available and affordable.

Both developed and developing regions of the world need to address a complex equilibrium to meet security, affordability and environmental sustainability. Infrastructure and access to finance that are based on a set of immovable criteria will not help us, as a global industry, to decarbonise faster or sooner; on the contrary. Pragmatism, realism and situational awareness need to guide the FIDs and project owners.”