2022 Paris Infraweek Interview: Pierre PALMIERI

In the current environment, several things stand out. First, in the very short term, there are greater needs to enable Europe to import LNG, which will play a very important role given the situation we know regarding Russian gas supply. That means regasification plants and more entry points across Europe, and also probably the capacity to distribute this gas more quickly and more widely across the continent. So, LNG infrastructure in Europe.

Second, and even more important, is the acceleration of everything related to renewable energy projects. We can see that in this context, more than ever, we need to move forward with all these major programs — wind, solar, hydrogen — but also all the projects that aim to connect the different electricity grids with one another to create flexibility in the European electricity market.

Then everything related to carbon sequestration, and everything related to mobility as well, because we often think about supply, but we also need to think about energy demand. There are many projects and an acceleration of these projects in the coming years.

Third point: everything related to health and telecom infrastructure — what I would call the 'S' in 'SG.' A lot in the health sector, as I just mentioned, but also fiber optic projects, for example. There has been a lot in Europe in a number of countries, but we're still behind, especially in the United States. So obviously there's a very active role to play there.

And lastly, which is perhaps deeper and more long-term: in many infrastructure projects, we will increasingly measure not only the return but also the cost — what are the impacts generated by a project as such. For that, you need methods, you need data, and then you need to be able to quantify it from a financial and economic standpoint. So all the projects that allow us to move in that direction — what we might call a kind of digital infrastructure — I believe that is extremely promising. So that's the whole long- and short-term trend.

First, in the very short term, we had to support our clients. As you know, the gas market was extremely turbulent, with price levels we could never have imagined, very strong volatility, and supply disruptions. Many of our clients were doing very well because they had long-term LNG contracts that obviously meant they had no solvency issues — these were assets with a lot of value. But in the very short term, because of margin calls — since they were hedging — they found themselves facing very significant liquidity problems.

And so banks in general, and we in particular, played a role in providing the necessary liquidity to all these actors in order to stabilize this entire ecosystem. That's the first point.

The second thing is that we are accelerating everything related to financing renewable energy projects, as I mentioned earlier when I said it was one of the great underlying trends, and I think everyone agrees on that. We are beginning to rebalance a certain number of resources from fossil fuels toward renewable energy — capital resources but also expertise. We are building more and more industrial expertise.

We launched a major program called 'The Shift,' which essentially asks each business line, in the context of major environmental and social transformations, to rethink its roadmap, rethink its strategy, but more importantly, redefine its mandate. We also launched very large cross-functional initiatives involving hundreds of people on major cross-cutting topics like mobility, which brings together our metals teams, automotive teams, teams financing gigafactories, infrastructure teams for charging infrastructure, and so on. But also on biodiversity and many other cross-product, cross-sector topics.

And I think the big challenge for a bank like ours, which has enormous expertise, is to mobilize all of this collective intelligence to address all these topics in their multidimensionality, in their political, economic, industrial, and even anthropological complexity.