World Energy Council CEO talks energy transitions under Trump 2.0

Latin America is well positioned to become an important player on the green hydrogen and derivatives stage.

Multiple projects are planned for the region, which boasts abundant land and energy resources. 

Challenges include permitting, securing offtakers and driving down the cost of production.

In the second part of a two-part intterview, Angela Wilkinson, secretary general and CEO of the World Energy Council, talks with BNamericas about hydrogen and energy transitions in the era of Donald Trump. The first part can be seen here. 

In Panama in October, the Council is due to hold its annual gathering of world energy leaders, dubbed World Energy Week.

BNamericas: In terms of sustainable fuels such as green ammonia and e-methanol, our view is that investment in plants will eventually flow in Latin America, but later than originally expected. What are your views? What would need to occur – because that's one of the big questions from our readers – for this investment to flow, for this all to happen? 

Wilkinson: I think that, first of all, it takes a bit of courage to say we're going to create a new market and persistence to actually get it to come up to what we would call capital investment logics.

Investors who want 10% returns on everything into perpetuity have to ask themselves these days, what future are they creating? Honestly, I just think we can't keep up with this growth of capital for capital's sake. When you look at Latin America, Brazil started its own fuel supply chain after the last energy shock, in the 1970s. It made a deliberate decision to invest in biofuels, right? You've got e-fuels in Chile. You've got e-fuels in other parts.

There's great potential. The challenge is that you can't just get them to scale overnight. They're not pop-up shops. They require ecosystems and supply chains to be put in place. And I think there's far too much emphasis in the world on a model of innovation, which is venture capital and technology entrepreneur, which scales through the market, whereas actually what we're talking about is place-based ecosystem innovation that requires a degree of regulatory courage and innovation.

But, actually, if you can get the capital flowing, then the returns on that capital are much bigger and much longer and much more stable into perpetuity.

But it's not a simple venture capital entrepreneur model. And I think we have to work out whether we're going to continue to think about increasingly global, big, trillion-dollar deals, increasingly micro-financing off-grid solutions. And the big gap in the middle is going to require a different model of innovation and scaling.

And we call that place-based ecosystem innovation. And I think the blended financing models for that, the investment models for that, are very different than those of other spaces. 

BNamericas: And finally, in terms of energy transitions, the elephant in the room here is clearly the US. President Donald Trump signed actions to undo initiatives to limit greenhouse gas emissions, issued a moratorium on new wind power projects and is now seeking to revive coal. Is it a case of watching to see how the US energy investors respond, given that, for example, wind and batteries are competitive and climate concerns are so deeply rooted?

Wilkinson: Well, I think, first of all, energy transitions are happening everywhere. 

What I've seen come out of this administration is a greater emphasis on oil, gas and nuclear. And this is really about how they get to that energy abundance because they need energy abundance to compete against China at the AI future. That's what I'm hearing around a lot of the administration pieces: there's an 'enemy' and there's a different way of thinking about what needs to be done. 

That's not the story for all regions. It's not China's story. China doesn't seem to be training to compete against everybody. It's trying to work out how it preserves the rules of the game and stability so that all regions could rise simultaneously.

I hear different things as I go around the world. But I think that there's politics and then there’s the structural realities. And the structural realities are, you know, Texas is using a lot of renewables because it's cheaper and there's a lot of opportunities for the technology to be deployed.

That's not going to go backwards. For me, energy transitions are never about one resource versus another. There's no such thing as all good or all bad technologies. But it is about using all levers and knowing how to use them smartly. And those levers are not just technological and financial; they're also societal and regulatory.

Our focused agenda is humanizing energy, not because it's a softer agenda, but because it's a smarter agenda. You actually have to bring the ecosystem together. And they're all different tribes and they speak all different vocabularies. And you actually have to have a conversation about what can be done, not just what you would like to do. 

BNamericas: That's it from me. Is there anything you'd like to add?

Wilkinson: The are two things I'm looking forward to in the next two years. First of all, we've got World Energy Week in Panama in October 2025. And I'd really like to see a great participation across the Latin America region in that, because we will also try and bring North America to bear. This is the opportunity for a real Americas conversation around energy and the future of energy. 

The theme of Panama World Energy Week is 'Energizing connections, powering a healthy planet'. It's not a commercial conference, it's not about selling your technology. We're the longest-standing global energy leadership platform in the world, and there's an Americas' conversation to be had, and that needs to feed into a global conversation that's getting ready for it. 

And then next October, we're in Saudi Arabia, and we have the first World Energy Congress of the next 100 years in energy. The theme of the 2026 Congress is 'Inspiring transformations, delivering transitions', and will bring the world energy leadership community together to make faster, fairer and further reaching energy transitions happen.