The latest episode of IJGlobal’s Infra Dig podcast focuses squarely on energy transition in a far-ranging discussion that touches on most of the salient points in this challenging subject.

IJGlobal content director Angus Leslie Melville talks to Adrian Del Maestro, vice-president of global energy advisory at AECOM, about key developments in a sector that is prompting massive investment worldwide.

The podcast is slightly longer than normal – weighing in at 46 minutes – as conversation flows to cover as many of the issues that can be covered across climate change and energy transition.

You can access this latest episode on Apple Podcasts and through Amazon Podcasts. It is also hosted across a slew of other platforms and is open access on all of them.

Adrian starts off by running through climate change issues, the drivers for international investment into energy transition, the state of the global market and challenges being tackled.

As conversation evolves, Adrian makes an interesting observation on data centres: “What we are seeing with data centres is exponential growth and that demand from data centres is going to grow even more going forward – particularly with the advent of artificial intelligence.

“I saw a data point that I thought was particularly interesting – that a ChatGPT programme uses 10x more energy than a Google search. So, this will grow as you see these data centres grow and as you see artificial intelligence begin to grow across multiple sectors.

“There is going to be even more demand for energy and that is going to put even more pressure on the grid as you have these different sources of electrification – different sources of energy demand – that are going to increase pressure on the grid to manage these different effects as we are trying to decarbonise.”

As to the decarbonisation of steel, Adrian says: “The steel sector – like the cement sector and petrochemicals – are all part of heavy industry and they have a really big challenge to decarbonise.

“We are still very much in the early stages, but you are beginning to see the growth of hydrogen as a potential fuel source to decarbonise some of these industries, but it is still very much early days.”

Tune into the full podcast for a slightly-longer-than-usual podcast, but one that makes a good fist of explaining the issues being faced and the challenges that have to be overcome.