Эксперты AFPM оценили пять лет переходной энергетики: от хаоса инвестиций к осторожному оптимизму

The next disruptor is already here: AFPM Summit panel grades five years of energy transition bets By: Catherine Watkins, Hydrocarbon Processing The 2026 AFPM Summit brought roughly 1,500 refining and petrochemical professionals to Grapevine, Texas (U.S.) this year, the largest turnout the event has seen in several years. Early on Day Two, a packed sustainability-track session took the unusual step of grading the industry's own homework: "The Next Energy Market Disruptor Is Coming. Are We Ready? Lessons from the Last Five Years' Key Projects," moderated by Brian Boeger of Axens North America, with Daniel Orr of Worley Consulting and Meaghan McCaffrey of Burns & McDonnell's 1898 & Co. as speakers. Orr opened by tracing how capital moved. Pre-pandemic, projects were underwritten the old-fashioned way, on throughput and margin improvement using conventional market pricing. Somewhere around 2016, renewable diesel programs and tightening state and federal incentives started pulling investments toward clean energy, and COVID accelerated that shift into a full trend line: by 2025, clean energy had grown to roughly 65% of energy-sector investment against fossil fuel's 35%, a rough mirror image of 2015. McCaffrey then walked the room through a technology-by-technology scorecard comparing 2021's expectations to 2026's reality. Renewable diesel and renewable natural gas delivered close to what was promised, riding existing pipeline, terminal and storage infrastructure to market fast enough to capture incentive windows before they closed. Carbon capture made real progress but slower than advertised, dragged down by permitting and pipeline buildout. Hydrogen and blue and green ammonia were the biggest letdowns: most U.S. hydrogen projects were delayed or canceled outright, and of roughly 80 ammonia projects McCaffrey had tracked, only a handful were actually built. Sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) landed somewhere in between, hampered less by demand than by a policy gap. From there, the panel pivoted to what discipline should look like next time: avoid final investment decision (FID) paralysis, pursue renewables selectively rather than everywhere at once, anchor projects in real regional demand, keep capital discipline, treat project fundamentals as hard gates rather than checkboxes and get ahead of supply chain risk instead of assuming compressors and transformers will show up on schedule. Orr's practical add was to pull logistics studies, red-flag reviews, and feedstock and offtake agreements much earlier into the process, ideally within six to eight weeks of project kickoff, rather than discovering fatal risks after a board has already been pitched. Audience questions steered the conversation toward the newest disruptor in the room: AI and data center power demand. Both speakers said client conversations now start with power availability and offtake on day one, that OEM track record and supply chain queue position are now front-loaded discussions, and that skilled labor, not just equipment, is becoming a genuine bottleneck as construction crews get pulled between data center builds and traditional refining and petrochemical work. A couple of things stood out. First, the panelists flagged that the same tax credit economics drew wildly mismatched players into the same lane, from multibillion-dollar multinationals down to literal one-person shops working out of a garage, all chasing identical incentives with very different capacity to execute. Second, despite a summer 2026 record for daily U.S. air travel, SAF volumes are still lagging targets mainly because the policy underpinning renewable diesel's success, a federal blending mandate known as the Renewable Volume Obligation, has no real equivalent for SAF; airlines want it, refiners can build it, but the demand-side mandate that made renewable diesel pencil just isn't there yet. And asked to sum up the industry's response to the last five years in one word, Orr landed on "chaotic," McCaffrey on something closer to over-exuberant. Their word for what comes next: cautiously optimistic.