Latin America and Caribbean countries have the resources the world needs for the energy transition, but need to make substantial changes to benefit from them, a World Bank official said.
The region is focused on producing a long list of resources, from critical minerals to low-carbon hydrogen, for the energy transition.
It produced resources for economic transformations in the past, but did not reap benefits. This time it could be different.
"We still have the problem of opportunities being left on the table," William Maloney, the World Bank's chief economist for Latin America and the Caribbean, told Argus.
He said the region should look to Nordic countries.
"What we want to do is avoid another cycle of saying ‘okay, take our resources and give us 30pc, so we have budget support,' " he said on the sidelines of a bank-sponsored conference on innovation in Montevideo, Uruguay.
The region is home to more than 50pc of lithium resources worldwide, according to the US Geological Survey, and also dominates in reserves of critical metals, including copper, silver and tin that are used in different components of the energy transition. It has vast natural gas reserves from Trinidad and Tobago down to Argentina.
Maloney said the region should look at what Sweden has done with its forestry sector and Norway with oil.
He said that Sweden's forestry sector has a network of state and private institutions working together to create knowledge and add value to the products. "This is what we have to do with our lithium, natural gas or oil," he said.
Forestry products accounted for 8.6pc of Sweden's export earnings in 2023, according to the government's statistics agency.
He said Norway came up with a plan when oil was discovered that allowed the oil majors to produce, but contracts included specific clauses on knowledge transfer and technology that let the country develop its own petroleum industry.
Oil and gas accounted for 62pc of Norway's exports in 2023. It has 48.2 trillion cf of natural gas and in 2023 was the fourth natural gas exporter after the US, Russia and Qatar.
"The idea is to approach foreign capital and foreign technology with ideas that go beyond taxes and beyond employment to learning how to do things ourselves," he said. "It does not have to be us or them, there is a negotiation to be had."
