In February 2020, I was standing on a drilling site in Côte d'Ivoire, supervising gold prospection operations for Endeavour Mining. Fifty sites. Each one a methodical act of extraction — soil analysis, drill positioning, environmental logging. At the time, I was thinking about geology. Looking back, I was learning something more important about where the energy transition actually begins.
It begins underground. Not in a solar panel factory in China, not in a battery gigafactory in Germany, not in a green hydrogen electrolyser in the North Sea. It begins with someone like me, standing in a field with a drill and a clipboard, pulling metal out of the earth.
And yet, four years later, working in structured finance and covering the transition, I watch capital markets systematically look away from that fact.
"Everyone is racing to finance the energy transition. Almost nobody is financing the thing the energy transition runs on.
The arc
Supervised gold prospection operations across West Africa. Soil analysis, environmental impact assessment, resource modelling. Where I first understood the upstream of the energy transition.
Energy Analyst at the IEA. Clean energy flows, government engagement, Sahel infrastructure. Began co-founding the Climate Transition podcast, commissioned by Sciences Po's European Chair for Sustainable Development.
Sustainable Investment Consultant. Physical and transition risk across a €400m+ portfolio. Due diligence on climate exposure across sectors, geographies, and asset classes.
Structuring the deals that move money into decarbonisation. Sustainability-linked loans, blended finance, critical minerals, CCUS — the hard parts of the transition that still don't have a market.
What the finance side is missing
I spend a lot of time structuring sustainability-linked instruments — loans and bonds where the cost of capital moves depending on whether a borrower hits agreed sustainability targets. We do this for industrials, for energy companies, for logistics businesses. The framework exists. What we haven't done well is apply it to the upstream.
A sustainability-linked facility for a lithium producer could covenant on water usage intensity, on community benefit payments, on scope 1 emissions per tonne of ore processed. A blended finance structure with DFI participation could de-risk the first-of-kind projects in frontier markets that commercial banks won't touch alone. These are not exotic ideas. They are the standard toolkit of transition finance, applied one sector upstream of where we usually look.
"The mine is not the opposite of the transition. It is the foundation of it.
The view from the ground
When I left those drilling sites and moved into finance, I brought something with me that most of my colleagues don't carry: I've seen what extraction looks like from ground level. I know what a poorly managed environmental impact assessment looks like — and what a good one costs. I know that the difference between a mine that destroys a community and one that builds it is almost never about the geology. It's about governance, accountability, and the financial structures that incentivise good behaviour or bad.
The energy transition needs both ends of the supply chain to work. It needs the solar farms and the hydrogen plants and the offshore wind. But it also needs the copper and the lithium and the cobalt that make all of that physically possible. Transition finance that ignores the upstream is not transition finance. It is transition theatre.
The mine is not the problem. The mine, done right, is the point.
