Southeast Asia has more than 100 gigawatts of gas-fired power in development. What separates the projects that get built from the ones quietly removed from a slide is far less often the geology or the financing than it is a small number of people.
A note from Andy. With APPEC and Gastech a few weeks out, oil and gas will dominate the conversation in September. So this month I want to look at the part of the Asian gas build-out that does not make the brochures. It is a leadership problem long before it is an engineering one, and the numbers make that case better than I can.
Announced is not delivered
Global Energy Monitor's April 2025 count put more than 100 gigawatts of gas-fired power and around 46 million tonnes a year of LNG import capacity in development across Southeast Asia, meaning announced, in pre-construction or under construction. It is an impressive figure and it is the one that gets quoted.
Here is the figure underneath it. In a briefing published this March, the same researchers found that over the past decade Southern Asia's LNG importers, principally India, Bangladesh and Pakistan, have shelved or cancelled two to three times as much planned import capacity as they have brought online.
That ratio is the ground truth of this build-out. Announcements are cheap and abundant. Commissioned plant is neither. And when you go back and ask what separated the projects that got built from the ones quietly removed from a slide, the answer is far less often the geology or the financing than it is a small number of people.
The constraint is three or four seats
It is not an org-chart problem. It is a handful of roles.
Project and programme directors who have taken something from final investment decision all the way through to commissioning. Commissioning and start-up leadership, which is the least glamorous job on any of these assets and the most decisive. And the technical authorities who sign off on safety-critical decisions, whose signature is the reason a schedule holds or slips.
The population who have genuinely done that, at this scale, in this region, is small enough to list. Everyone is fishing the same pond, and the people in it know exactly what they are worth. In practice that pushes clients towards one of two moves: look a level down and back the judgement rather than the exact CV, or look into an adjacent geography or asset class and accept a translation cost. Both work. Holding out for the perfect match does not, and I have watched sanctioned projects sit for months waiting on a name that was never going to be available.
First-of-a-kind is not the same as first-for-you
A large share of these projects are genuinely first-of-a-kind in their market, whatever they look like on paper. A regasification terminal is a well understood piece of engineering. A first regasification terminal in a jurisdiction with no operating precedent, an untested regulator and an offtaker whose creditworthiness is the actual project risk is a different animal entirely.
That distinction ought to change who you hire, and it is where I see the most expensive mistakes made. The instinct is to reach for the closest asset match. I would argue the opposite. Give me someone who has delivered one genuinely hard project under real uncertainty, in a different sector if it comes to it, over someone who has delivered five straightforward ones in exactly this one. Familiarity with a process flow diagram is not scarce. Temperament under ambiguity is, and it is the thing that gets tested at three in the morning, eighteen months in, when the schedule and the regulator disagree.
That was the lesson of standing up leadership for the UK's first carbon capture and storage project, and it travels.
Build versus buy on country leadership
The same tension runs through country and joint-venture leadership into the harder markets. You can develop from within, which is slow, or bring in someone who already holds the local licence to operate, which is fast and expensive. Most operators I speak to are being pushed towards buy, not because they prefer it but because the timeline decided for them.
The honest problem with buying it is that local credibility does not transfer as cleanly as people assume. A country lead's real value is a specific web of relationships with a specific regulator, ministry and set of partners, and it depreciates the moment any of those change. Bought credibility is quick, costly, and can evaporate with a cabinet reshuffle. Built credibility is slow and it sticks.
Most of the operators I work with need both. Very few are explicit with themselves about which one they are doing on any given hire, and that is usually where the appointment goes wrong.
On the ground
Three things I am watching over the next few months. They are the same question in different clothes: do the people exist to deliver what has been announced?
Commissioning and start-up leadership. The seat that decides whether a schedule holds, and the one clients reach for last, usually when the plant is nearly built and the calendar has stopped forgiving. I expect it to be the binding constraint on more than one Asian project this year.
Country leads into hard markets. Local credibility is beating functional fit on almost every one of these mandates. What almost nobody prices is how fast that credibility depreciates when a ministry or a regulator changes.
Technical-authority succession. The generation that carries sign-off authority is thinning faster than most succession plans assume. It is a quiet problem today and a very expensive one in about three years.
Sign-off
If you are building leadership teams across operators, EPC and energy infrastructure, from project directors to country leads, that is the ground I work on, and I am easy to reach.