El sentido pedagógico del aprendizaje de la convivencia

Peter Meurs, Managing Director Resources and Energy

Worley Parsons

The approach that adopted at WorleyParsons has been to develop our planning on three horizons:

â The first of these is planning for the present, which means dealing with budgets and strategies and managing our business today. This is something that we all have to deal with on a day-to-day basis.

â The second horizon is planning for the next one to five years, and how we can incrementally grow our businesses into areas that make real sense, which are areas with adjacent capabilities or adjacent geographical areas that we can spread into from our existing business. Some strategists refer to this as the zone of sensible excitement, as it is sensible for us to get excited about those areas based on a strong weight of evidence, and it is an area in which we are prepared to commit (as a business) significant funds, and to adjust the direction of our business in response to the changes that we see occurring. This is an area that our business can commit to with low risk.

â The final horizon, the area we are challenged with in discussions today, is the area where there is a lot of uncertainty and a lot that is unknown, to which it is not advisable for any business with long-term aspirations to commit all their resources or significant funds to pursue opportunities. The exception would be a venture capitalist who spreads that risk over a range of different investments. In this area our approach has been to identify what markets are most likely to be merging, and to position ourselves by buying or creating options for ourselves in that business space. An option is a small strategic investment in an emerging industry, but not a significant action for the business to undertake.

The approach to identifying these options involves a series of internal workshops, drawing on the best thinkers within our business. It has evolved from the traditional approach of only involving the top levels of the business, and now engages people from the technical, business development, and customer services areas to discuss the future of the business. The process of these workshops is quite simple and logical, which contributes to their success, and involves identifying the major disruptive forces in the business. How those forces will affect the markets in which we operate; and how we can position ourselves effectively in those emerging markets; or what are the best options that we can buy in those spaces.

Based on this approach, we have identified that the driving forces affecting our business can be loosely grouped into two categories: energy availability, and energy sustainability.

Energy availability encompasses issues of energy supply, demand, and security. One of the big trends which are currently occurring and which is affecting our thinking and planning for the long-term, is the continuing growth in energy demand. This is being overlaid by a market with volatility in oil prices, but with a strong upward trend overall. This also includes an environment in which there are abundant and cheap coal and uranium reserves available to us, and as a result of that we are seeing an increasing reliance in developing countries on coal-fired generation of electricity. This is not being matched in developed countries, where construction of new coal-fired stations has nearly ceased.

We have also seen the emergence of vast and cheap quantities of gas in the United States. This has been a result of the development of technologies that have enabled shale gas to be commercially viable. The change in our industry as a result of this has been phenomenal, and the impact has yet to be felt, but there is little doubt that the impact will be very disruptive. In the United States in the last twelve months, there has been a growing disparity between the price of oil and the price of gas. The price of gas has dramatically decreased as there is an over-supply of gas in the United States market. This has resulted in the production of energy from gas becoming cheaper and easier. China also holds large reserves of shale gas, which will have a major effect on our industry when they begin to explore those resources. Finally, the potential emergence of the electric car could be a catalyst for a shift away from the century of oil to the current century, which could be the era of electricity.

In the area of sustainability, we are seeing growing government regulation; continued uncertainty in business, which is delaying project decision-making; and a strong focus on improved efficiency as a method of mitigating risk in both carbon taxes and rising energy prices. The rapidly reducing cost of renewable energies, together with the projections of reductions in price for renewables against the escalating demand and price of oil, is pushing towards a tipping point for a switch from fossil fuels to renewable fuels on purely economic grounds. Growing environmental restrictions, and greater community awareness and activism, are preventing coal-fired power plants being built in developed countries, rather than government regulation.

Finally, water availability and disposal is dramatically affecting all markets, and as the focus on energy shifts, an increasing focus on water issues will also emerge.

Referring to the scale of the issues which currently face us, and quoting from the Institute of Mechanical Engineers, United States in regards to the Climate Change Act, ‘the scale of the engineering task required to deal with the Act is without historic precedence.’ This highlights that even conservative groups have identified this as a period of major change.

The International Energy Association also said that ‘the global economy will need to be transformed over the coming decades’, which highlights the need for transformation rather than incremental change over the relevant sectors. Also quoting from the IPCC Copenhagen conference, “climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time,” and this highlights the identification of climate change as a major, but not the only, challenge we face.

The CEO of Rio Tinto commented that, ‘someone over the next ten years has to begin to actually start addressing the climate change problem, even though every bit of capitalism, every bit of Net Present Value analysis, every bit of every other tool that you learn in the classroom, says that it is too far out a problem to have an economic payback. How do we address a problem which won’t begin to manifest itself into an absolute disaster for another forty to fifty years, when all of our economic models tell us we should do nothing?’.

It is the big challenge that we have as a business, and comes to the core of the problem when we are planning and strategising for the future. It is why government leadership and direction is absolutely critical in this space, and it is why industry keeps calling for government action; because capitalism, left on its own, absolutely should and would do nothing, because that’s what our models tell us to do. We need to be more active as an industry, and in the engineering profession, in providing advice and input into government policy, and in developing sensible government policy, because without that, we’re not going have any change at all.