Energy Risk Awards 2024: The winners
The generally calmer market conditions of 2023 compared with 2022 gave risk managers some respite from dealing with extreme volatilty. While falling prices across the complex brought challenges for producers – many of which were helped by this year’s winning banks, research and data providers, and advisory firms – generally market conditions returned to something closer to normality.
This provided an opportunity for firms to reflect on lessons learned and shore up businesses for the future. Our winners have all used the relative calm of the past few months not to relax or retreat and lick their wounds, but to put in place innovative and creative plans to prepare for the future, whether that’s more short-term supply disruptions or longer-term climate risk.
The volatility of 2022 showed that many firms weren’t able to identify all their exposures quickly enough. Much work has been done over the past 18 months to tackle this so that firms are better able to understand their real-time risks and exposures and to identify any protection gaps across their businesses.
As firms continue to struggle with high interest rates and rising costs, the provision of working capital was a major theme across the awards. Many of this year’s winners helped firms identify and address funding and liquidity gaps in their clients’ portfolios, with some then extending credit for projects such as storage provision so that firms can buttress their businesses against future supply shocks. Winners providing innovative working capital solutions include Societe Generale, Macquarie and Bank of America, while winners such as OpenGamma and Aegis Hedging addressed cashflow predictability, enabling huge potential cost-savings.
Working capital is also being constrained as more firms find themselves having to operate in environmental markets. Buying green certificates such as emissions allowances, renewable energy credits and guarantees of origin ties up substantial amounts of capital. This year’s Climate risk manager of the year, STX Group, addressed just this issue.
A large proportion of our award winners are focused on enabling the energy transition and our winners’ entries showcased the determination and pioneering spirit required to get some of these challenging projects past the post. For example, Axpo, winner of our inaugural Renewables firm of the year award, signed a raft of first-of-a-kind power purchase agreements that are enabling much-needed renewables projects across Europe. Parameter Climate also carried out game-changing work in the climate risk transfer segment.
Our inaugural Voluntary carbon market (VCM) house of the year award went to Tramontana Asset Management for its groundbreaking clean cooking and agroforestry projects across India and Sri Lanka. These are setting new standards for quality and integrity in the VCM, which is essential if that market is to overcome its recent credibility issues and grow to its full potential. It offers a key mechanism for firms to decarbonise cost-effectively and has the potential to outgrow all other emissions markets. Climate Impact X and Anew Climate also won awards for their pioneering work helping to raise standards and inject transparency and liquidity into the hugely important VCM.
The period from January 2023 to April 2024 – the time under consideration for the 2024 Energy Risk Awards – may have seen some ‘normalcy’ return to commodity markets, with prices and volatility falling, but it was also a time when many ground-breaking projects came to fruition that were anything but ‘normal’. The projects recognised in this year’s awards address the major challenges in the commodities complex today through creativity and innovation. Drive, determination and a pioneering spirit feature throughout, as these firms take the commodity markets in new and exciting directions.
See the winners below:
Derivatives house of the year:
Oil and products house of the year:
Macquarie
Natural gas/LNG house of the year:
Macquarie
Base metals house of the year:
Electricity house of the year:
Emissions house of the year:
Voluntary carbon market house of the year:
Environmental products house of the year:
Weather house of the year:
Renewables firm of the year:
Liquidity provider of the year:
Climate risk manager of the year:
Commodity and energy finance house of the year:
Deal of the year:
Sustainable finance house of the year:
BNP Paribas
Commodity trade finance house of the year:
Societe Generale
Commodity exchange of the year:
OTC platform of the year:
Commodity broker of the year:
Commodities research house of the year:
Macquarie
Climate risk research house of the year:
Data and analytics firm of the year:
CTRM software house of the year:
Technology firm of the year:
Hedging advisory firm of the year:
Technology advisory firm of the year:
KWA Analytics
Climate risk advisory firm of the year:
Innovation of the year:
Newcomer of the year:
One to watch:
Anew Climate’s Epoch Evaluation platform
One to watch:
One to watch:
