End of 2025

This year had been an interesting experiment for me, to develop more focused content around energy transition, establish thought-leadership on bioenergy, but also to consider my faith in the Lord Jesus Christ more in the way I show up in work and life.

The markets were rough, but God opened up several opportunities for me to drive my message on the role of renewable fuels in the energy transition. This year, I took part in several conferences in Singapore, Vietnam and webinars for Australian audiences. Bioenergy has achieved a level of traction that I have not seen before at a regional and global level – I am now more convinced that it would have a more promising role to play than what the electrification champions might think.

In any case, we are all trying to deal with the issue of climate change. And it appears that the economic system that has been set up is way more sticky, and stubborn when it comes to holding on to carbon-intensive economics. Part of the issue is that risk perception, as well as the way traditional finance works, has really made things harder. I reckon if the world was less financially connected, certain regions might have had worked harder on energy transition and made a bigger difference.

2025 was complex for geopolitics and certain markets have demonstrated incredible resilience even as we all battled with insane valuations around AI, which I observe as a capital misallocation (for the sake of the world) when compared to energy transition investments. Trying to drive growth in consulting in Asia Pacific remains a huge challenge and rightly so; the markets here are very different and business strategy takes a very different approach from the sort championed by Anglo-Saxon consulting houses.

The follower approach to things in Asia (sans China) however, is something that I have to continue leveraging on as I am bringing capabilities and experience from European and Australian markets into Southeast Asia. My main challenge is still to develop and tailor better offerings that would be attractive to Asian, particularly Southeast Asian clients.

On the ministry front, the work of learning from scriptures, teaching, sharing it and applying it in life is ceaseless. One epiphany I had this year concerns the fullness of Christ. We often want to take scripture, be selective about Christ’s teachings and discard what we don’t like. Paul doesn’t do that; he even recognises how he is sharing in the suffering of Christ. Even what we consider the ‘bad’ and challenging parts of life lived by Christ are worthy of emulating – not the pursuit of pain but the appreciation of the deeper meaning of what suffering is about. Our goal is towards this fullness, not just as individuals but as a church, as members of the body of Christ.

God, reality, life is so much bigger than a single mind or person can fully comprehend and contain. And so what we can receive into ourselves is really just a piece, just a glimpse. When Christ is in us, we bring that bit of who Christ is to those in the world. Including the hope we have in Him. But as a church, we can be more than one person and reflect the different dimensions and aspects of God. The diverse gifts that God grants us to bring to others is perhaps a good way to see how rich God’s blessings can be. Not just the gifts but the blessings received through the gifts of others.

And putting these together, I want to end this post with the verse from 1 Corinthians 2:9

“Eye has not seen, nor ear heard,
Nor have entered into the heart of man
The things which God has prepared for those who love Him.”

This verse combines concepts and ideas from Isaiah 64 and Psalm 31:19. Paul also added the point about ‘entered into the heart of man’ – the idea that no one can conceive or imagine what God has prepared. It is sufficient for us to follow faithfully, to sense God’s leading and to keep growing in knowledge, in steadfastness, in faith. And the hope comes, the joy comes, and the blessings comes with it.

Christmas thoughts

This Christmas, I rejoice with a few of my friends who have come to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. They have been working through the implications of declaring their faith and are determined to follow Jesus.

I often wonder how to share my faith with others. I question myself for being too direct or not direct enough. Or talking about tangential stuff that people would not be relating to God. I fear coming across as being irrelevant, or just preachy.

But really, God does the work. He convicts the heart and transform people through their faith in Him. Our role as believers is to simply present the gospel, share our story and let God do the work. We will invite others sometimes to our communities. And there we share our faith not just through our words but also the love, the food and the unity of our church. The same applies outside when people see how we lead our lives, how we love them and how we seek to follow Christ.

So in the new year, I want to think less about myself and think less of myself so I won’t try to be doing God’s work. I would like to just do my part.

Low-carbon Hydrogen

I came across a point made by a supporter of low-carbon hydrogen when others were arguing that green hydrogen should be reserved for hard-to-abate sectors, but not for other sectors that can easily decarbonise through a lower-cost pathway instead. The point was that if low-carbon hydrogen was only going to target the hard-to-abate sector, the market size simply isn’t enough to create the scale necessary to drive down the cost of low-carbon hydrogen.

This comes at a time when we are discovering that some of the sectors that could actually pay for low-carbon hydrogen are those with much lower-cost approaches to decarbonisation (for example, food product or food services companies). So why would they be willing to pay higher price for low-carbon hydrogen? Technically, this is where economics starts to break down. Part of the reason is that the end customers are willing to pay – this is especially possible for consumer products where the agrifood industry may be able to differentiate the introduce the food prepared using low-carbon hydrogen. This is exactly what some Seven cafes in Japan is doing.

And to a certain extent, every industry starts out this way; if solar panels were simply looking to the locations with huge energy demand in the day, and also lots of solar resources for power generation, the market is going to be incredibly small. And certainly insufficient to enable the lower cost from economies of scale. So finding use cases and continually expanding them is important. While it might be admirable to keep trying to create premium products and then price it well, the alternative way of getting economics in your favour is actually to keep innovating on use-cases and focus on growing scale in a way that lowers unit cost. This then allows for further expansion of demand and use which improves learning at manufacturing and drives the cost advantage further.

That is the story of China’s manufacturing rise. And Lidar technology is a great example. The original use case for lidar technology was very limited to very specialised fields where great precision was needed in sensing and mapping physical spaces. It was initially used almost exclusively in military applications and would probably have remained so if not for China entering the picture and driving down costs through sheer manufacturing scale. By pushing down prices to particular thresholds, the mass market use case in EVs and other driver-assistance technologies emerges and serves to expand the pool of demand further.

During the hype of low-carbon hydrogen during 2020-2023, people were expecting that the cost of hydrogen production could be pushed down to such levels. Yet if we examine the value chain and recognise that the opportunity cost of using renewable electricity for hydrogen production, we would see that it was difficult for hydrogen production to compete with electrification as a commercially viable approach for decarbonising a lot of low-heat industrial applications.

An alternative path to commercialising low-carbon hydrogen is needed; and it is more about finding other use cases. It could be locations where fuel is needed to run mobile applications, or where transport of liquid fuels were prohibitively expensive and being able to easily produce it make sense. And finally, one of my favourite approach, which I am sure would be the first early commercialisation pathway: colocating green hydrogen facilities with biogas/biomethane production facilities, producing green hydrogen, then use Sabatier reaction (methanation) to produce e-methane, boosting the overall output per unit biogenic feedstock.

Yet even then, it is still necessary to drive costs down in order to be able to produce a product catering to a large and expanding market. Even for that pathway highlighted, the actual demand possible for a single hydrogen project would be limited by the available biogenic carbon dioxide which is limited by the scale of the biofuel/biogas plant. These are all bottlenecks of the renewable industry that needs to be managed. Wind and solar, especially solar is a lot more disconnected from local supply chain and ecosystems in order to pull off a successful project as they are modular and largely plug-and-play. While it means government have less hard work on creating the supply chain, there is less local benefits reaped or job opportunities created from building out solar facilities than if the market starts looking into biofuels and hydrogen.

Ultimately, the economics of hydrogen requires very strong government collaboration and the actual boots-on-the-ground work of creating the supply chain, infrastructure and delivery mechanisms. To tap into some pockets of willingness-to-pay at the moment would help.

The Albatross

Being the fanboy I was of Dr Goh Keng Swee, I visited the Albatross File exhibition soon after it was inaugurated. I’m really thankful for SM Lee’s efforts to get it declassified and made public. After 60 years of nationhood, it is great to let out this ‘secret’ that our founding fathers kept about our separation from Malaysia. The truths revealed explains in part why Singapore had gone through a referendum to become part of the Malaysia Federation but could become an independent sovereign city state without any democratic process. Even Lee Kuan Yew described it as a bloodless coup. It was actually pretty much a coup, but of course, it was politically expedient for all at that point to describe Singapore as having been ejected from Malaysia.

Photo by me, taken at the NLB exhibition

The storytelling through the exhibition was great and it enabled me to digest a fair bit of content within a short time and appreciate the story line pieced together by Susan Sim and her team. It was a great work though given the somewhat sensitivity of the topic, there is very little doubt there had to be a lot of checks for political sensitivity and alignment to the historical narrative of Singapore.

I think this exhibition does a lot to prepare the public for the eventual launch of the founders’ memorial in 2028. For me personally, it was never really a question of whether it makes sense for our country to spend money on building the founders’ memorial, but more about how we can ensure that the generations that follow can remember and appreciate the miracle that is Singapore. This exceptionalism cannot be reduced to a single person or a particular set of circumstances. And many more stories need to be told, not just in history textbooks but passed down within families, between generations and across communities.

Our founding fathers were brilliant politicians and strategists, not just operators who kept the city-state running and punching above its weight. It would be dangerous to think there is nothing too hard for us now; or to throw up our arms in despair because of the difficulties of the conditions we are subject to globally, especially now.

I eventually bought the book which I’m looking forward to dive into.

Crowding out

In economics, there is this concept of crowding out when government spending drives out private sector spending because it soaks up available financial capital and drives up interest rates.

In Singapore, I think there is some kind of political and psychological crowding out. We have grown to be a hyper-meritocratic society and we are proud of it, believing that it is the best way of organising ourselves and our systems. And we rarely talk about the injustice perpetuated by the system because we don’t want to undermine this part of the cultural fabric.

Yet we are confronted with the reality of inequality in the society, where students from underprivileged families are expected to be measured and assessed equally before an examination in school with their peers who had better backgrounds and well-resourced parents, tutors and even siblings. How do we respond to that? Do we just say, the system will take care of it?

In many other societies, private charities, foundations and many other organisations step in to help. In Singapore, we almost think that it should be the government’s role. How many of us would think it is a gap worth bridging? How many of us, would think it’s the problem of school teachers, and try to load it on to the public service?

During PM Wong’s National Day Rally speech this year, he talked about some ground-up initiatives and community organisations, giving great examples of how we want to nurture the Singapore Spirit and encourage Singaporeans to step forward to shape the character of our society. He acknowledged that the government cannot force or direct this, but to encourage, recognise and celebrate.

And then he talked about this tension between the government and the people sector:

In many countries, you see such ground-up collective actions because the governments are not working, the governments are ineffective. So people are frustrated at the lack of action and progress. And they step forward to take matters into their own hands.

Singapore is in a different position. No one wants the government to do less. No one wants the government to become ineffective. Instead, we strive to be more efficient and responsive. And there are areas where we believe the government can and should do more – especially to provide stronger social support for those in need.

But it is not just about what the government does – and we certainly do not want to end up as a society where people rely solely on the government. It is about all of us – government, businesses, workers and unions, community groups and civil society – doing our part. All coming together for the good of Singapore and our fellow citizens. And moving forward together as one.

I think there will never be a straightforward way to demarcate, ‘this is the government’s job, this is private organisations’ job, this is the community’s role’. In many societies, cooperatives and community organisations provide many services – especially in more rural regions.

These organisational forms and structures could supplant and take up ‘market space’ (as new businesses may not be able to compete or provide similar services commercially since these organisations are already providing them effectively), or even ‘political space’ because government cannot claim credit for having achieved some of those social outcomes.

As a society, thinking about the sort of soft cultural institutions and the hard organisations, we might have to decide what kind of mix we want to form a society where we all have a stake in it and not just rely on a formal government structure. The way we have developed, where people are constantly moving around, uprooting themselves to get on the property ladder, not having a particular sense of belonging to a geographical community has made it harder to foster a sense of ownership or belonging to a group. It has also encourage a lot of selfish-thinking where people are just figuring out what rules or tricks they could follow on the path to prosperity and self-enrichment.

How can we help our citizens reclaim that responsibility and stakeholdership towards the Singapore society? How can we do that in a manner that continues to maintain our unity as a nation, and strengthen our identity as Singaporeans?

Carbon capture

I think there is a place for carbon capture and utilisation. But just not the way we have been thinking or approaching it. Carbon capture and storage in some kind of cavern or project and expecting it to hold on to the carbon dioxide does not make sense. But many other carbon sequestration approaches do: applying biochar to ground, injecting carbon dioxide into cement to strengthen the concrete, or any processes that somehow mineralises carbon dioxide into some kind of other compounds including carbonates.

All of the approaches where carbon dioxide is somehow transform into some other form which is more permanent and serves a function make sense. The technologies involve in terms of filtering the carbon dioxide to a certain level of purity, conveying it and handling it, will play important role in the low-carbon economy.

The reason is that carbon dioxide is still an essential part of many industrial production processes. In any case, the main challenge of climate change isn’t really the presence of carbon dioxide – it is the fact that we are taking out fossil carbon and then turning it into carbon dioxide, releasing it into the atmosphere faster than it can be cycled back into other parts of nature. This build-up of carbon dioxide, strengthens the greenhouse effect, making things really nutty for the climate.

But when we are taking biogenic carbon dioxide and using it, there is nothing wrong because the carbon was sequestered from present carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Using it merely ‘recycles’ the carbon around. Human systems that does carbon capture can play that same recycling role. Take for example the capture of biogas from the anaerobic breakdown of organic matter. That is a mix of methane and carbon dioxide gas; the carbon dioxide gas can be filtered out and then used for industrial processes, while the pure methane (or biomethane as we call it) can be used for energy purposes – combustion to produce heat and drive turbines to produce electricity.

Moreover, the carbon dioxide produced from combustion can be captured, purified, and utilised just like the carbon dioxide filtered out from the biogas. This carbon dioxide can actually be combined with green hydrogen to form many other hydrocarbon molecules that act as our more familiar fuels that are compatible with many of the engines and systems we have. Not just that, the combusted fuel will emit that same ‘biogenic’ carbon dioxide, which would not count as greenhouse emissions because they are in the short-term cycle. Nevertheless, we can still capture that carbon dioxide and then return it to those uses we talked about.

To me, that’s the role of carbon capture in the future – it is really to recycle the carbon just as nature already does it. It is not to erase the carbon dioxide that has already been emitted. It is really naive to think that spending more energy trying to capture the emitted carbon dioxide can be more worthwhile than using alternative forms of energy that do not emit so much carbon dioxide in the process. That would be the role of these technologies in the future.

Decarbonising Singapore’s power sector

Singapore’s power sector is responsible for about 40% of the total emissions of Singapore (NCCS, 2022) and in 2024, almost 95% of the power produced in Singapore was generated using Natural gas (EMA, 2025). I estimated that we consume about 300 PJ of natural gas just for power production alone, assuming that gas power generation on average is at about 60% efficiency. And from that same dataset you’d also realise we have 0.9% of coal-fired power in the mix.

The recent EMA announcement about the 300MW biomethane pilot for power plants (EMA, 2025) implies a 3% reduction in fossil natural gas use, replaced by biogenic carbon dioxide from the combustion of biomethane, which is not considered a greenhouse gas (GHG) emission. Assuming this quota and capacity is used in full, it should lead to about 740 ktCO2e of GHG emissions abated.

Another news was about Tuas Power replacing all of its coal with biomass for power generation by 2028 (Tuas Power, 2025). This implies that the 0.9% of coal contributes to the fuel mix will no longer be emitting carbon dioxide. I did some back of envelope calculation on the emissions from the coal power generation and estimated it to be at around 300tCO2e per annum only. This is likely because the plant’s capacity factor isn’t very high. If the 133 MW capacity was firing in full all the time, they should be emitting around 700tCO2e.

Now if we follow the 2022 emission profile figures, the power sector is responsible for about 21MtCO2e of emissions from Singapore. Those reductions of about 0.75MtCO2e of emissions seem relatively insignificant. Indeed, it looks like only 3.5% of the total emissions will be reduced in the grand scheme of things.

Sure, we are going to import more renewable energy and as a proportion of total power generated, we will increase the percentage figure. The grid emissions factor will probably decrease especially since we are going to have more MWh of green electricity. But for the existing power generation capacity to decarbonise in the short term, biomass and biomethane remain the more readily available solution. Those pilots and announcements may herald the beginning of greater ambitions.

Blunomy & bioenergy

My blog has always been relatively free of direct stuff on my work but here’s just a post where I wanted to document some of the work that the Blunomy/Enea team had worked on over the past couple of years.

Moreover, it has been over a year since I stepped up to take care of our Renewable Fuels practice at Blunomy for the Asia Pacific. Things have been really challenging and tough on the energy transition front for the world, and for the business of consulting but when I look at these analysis and work we’ve put out, I’m reminded of how far the industry and market has come.

Some of these materials I’m putting links to are available as ‘publications’ on our website, but some of them have been put out by our clients who have decided to make some of our work public.

This corpus of work followed public sentiments and appreciation of biogas and biomethane as a source of energy across Europe, Australia and New Zealand. Starting with awareness-building and education on this source of green energy that contributes also to circularity, we went on to develop analytical pieces focusing on feedstocks, understanding feedstock value chains, as well as more advocacy pieces that cuts through the challenges in the industry to recommend suitable policy intervention should the government determine this was a worthy cause to pursue.

Blunomy continues to build upon our experience and expertise. During this period, we also performed due diligence on more than 50 projects across different parts of Europe, looked into impact assessment as well as the help clients develop relevant investment cases for this business. Until biomethane becomes a more mainstream form of green energy, the work will not end. Even at that point, there will be new challenges and issues to overcome.

Media and narratives

I used to love The Economist, and I even used to collect various articles to prescribe them to read for my students whilst I was teaching Economics at A Levels. It’s been a great influence on the way I write and approach sharing my opinion on things, and I enjoyed the dry wit and British humour, but these days I find the anti-China slant a bit uncalled for.

Take the recent report on China’s dominance in renewables. One of the article that talked about the improvement of air quality in China has the headline, ‘China’s air-quality improvements have hastened global warming’. I used to laugh at The Economist’s self-deprecating humour and when they lambasted silly but political manoeuvres of US presidents. When they try to criticise illiberal practices in China, I get it and understand the Western liberal lens that drives those considerations. However, this is a blatant low blow, a stark contrast to the highbrow approach that I would usually associate with The Economist.

The article isn’t even so much about China’s air quality but the science behind how some of the aerosols emitted by coal plants could have helped with cooling the atmosphere and how geo-engineering techniques based on that could play a role in climate change. Though latest studies suggest this will probably not be enough to cope with challenges in the shifting agriculture landscape as a result of climate change.

We are entering a new era where narratives are being distorted by English-language media, and it doesn’t help the rest of the world understand China any better.

I recall in 2018, when The Economist started a new column on China called ‘Chaguan’ (which really means Tea House in Chinese), they wanted to understand China better and to help the world do that. That hadn’t quite work.