The disruption from the Strait of Hormuz will yield a “structural shift” in the energy consumption of the billions of people who remain disconnected from the digital economy, Shell Foundation CEO Jonathan Berman said at Semafor’s The Next 3 Billion on Tuesday.
Forecasts estimate it will be about three years before there is a return to some sort of normalization, he said. While there are some stakeholders that will be able to withstand that disruption, Berman warned that consumers with the least access to the digital economy are not among them: Those people “will make an adjustment,” he said, resulting in “a permanent shift to energy that is much more reliable, much closer to them.”
The effects of the Iran war have been particularly damaging for regions that are heavily reliant on energy imports, such as East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, where farmers have felt the pressure of rising fertilizer and fuel costs.