The upcoming World Energy Leadership Summit in Istanbul will be a good forum to “test the waters” on how global markets view competition in the energy sector, according to CME Group Chief Economist Blu Putnam.
Turkey is a good crossroads to discuss the future of cheaper, cleaner and more efficient energy development in the developing world even as growth challenges and policy limit the expansion of energy infrastructure in many developed countries, Putnam said in a recent interview with Breaking Energy.
The US and Canada have led the world in natural gas development in the past decade, and their experience in first accessing reserves through new technology and then facing the required challenges for infrastructure, storage and transportation that resulted from the flood of new natural gas availability could be instructive for attendees at the WELS event. “The rest of the world is going along the natural gas path, but more slowly than the US and Canada,” Putnam said.
Putnam started as Managing Director and Chief Economist of CME Group in May 2011, and his work helps the exchange operator find new avenues for research and develop analytic insights as it grows both the range of sectors its contracts cover and makes inroads in new markets, many of them international. “There is a lot of innovation coming in the exchange sector,” Putnam said, mentioning the Chicago-based company’s burgeoning partnerships with foreign exchange operators. “We need to keep up with what our clients are doing.”
The World Energy Leadership Summit is being held this month by the World Energy Council, and is intended to address the “trilemma” facing the energy business today: how to develop energy that is stable, affordable and energy sensitive. Breaking Energy will be reporting from alongside the summit, read more about the event here.
Large themes that dominate the sector today include the future of hybrid vehicles given the fast-rising efficiency of traditional combustion engines, and the increasingly “networked” future of energy issues. In one example, if “water is the new oil” because of increasing stress on global access to water and implications from developing water infrastructure and using water, Putnam pointed out that while that bears political consequences but also provides opportunity for firms (like CME) that seek to help companies manage their risk exposure.
