 this morning and what I know is going to be extremely informative presentations from our keynote speaker, Dean Delevali, followed by three panelists who are going to make brief remarks following Dean. And then we'll have a Q&A session. I'm Guy Caruso with the Energy and National Security Program here at CSIS and really pleased to have you all here. You may have noticed a bit more security than normal because we're having some more events later today with the secretary of Homeland Security, Johnson, J. Johnson, will be here. Then following that, the secretary general of the People's Republic of Vietnam will be here. So it's an exciting day here and this is part of our U.S.-Australia Speaker Series. So we have a fair amount of orientation toward Asia today and it's sort of CSIS' version of the pivot toward Asia, you know. So and we're very pleased to have Dean Delevali as our leadoff speaker from BHP Billitone based in Australia, one of the largest resource asset-owning companies in the world. Strong investments in all regions including North America, particularly coal, iron ore, copper, petroleum, oil and gas and other minerals as well such as uranium and I think the Padash, it's a truly enormously resource-rich company and as you can imagine being based in Australia has a very strong market presence in Asia, particularly China and India and I'm sure Dean will touch on those markets as well because he has had enormously rich experience with 38 years with BHP in all aspects of the business and recently was named its chief commercial officer. So the strategy that BHP follows is very much one of the things that Dean has very deeply experienced and he'll talk about that today. So we're really pleased that Dean and his colleagues at BHP could be here for this part of our US Australian speaker series and then we've got three very good commenters from different perspectives. We're going to have Catherine Spector will follow Dean with brief comments from her perspective as chief commodity strategist for CIBC, a Canadian financial institution. Catherine's based in New York but CIBC is based in Canada. Following Catherine will be Allen Townsend who's a senior energy specialist at the World Bank and also looks very closely at emerging economies and their energy and then our own Scott Miller who's the shoal chair for international business here at CSIS and it's rich and long experience in the commodities, consumer commodity business while he was at Procter and Gamble. So we really have a great lineup and I'm not going to take any more time because Dean's time is limited and we want to hear from him, the panelists and then we'll have hopefully plenty of time for your questions. Dean, you really appreciate your coming and sharing some of your insights because I think we're going to see a very different perspective from BHP and that's why we're so excited to have Dean and our fellow panelists here to talk about that today. Thanks very much Guy and good morning everyone. It's great to be here with you today in your great nation's capital. I think it's my second visit here and I have to say it never ceases to impress me. So BHP Building like many other organisations around the world we seek to understand what the ramifications of changes on the way are and the questions we ask ourselves are what does the new normal in China mean? What is the reform agenda in India going to revolve into and what's going to happen in Paris this year? When we look at these we actually bring a slightly different and unique aspect to how we look at them in the fact that we do bottom-up builds, we understand what their customers' needs are and we take a very commodity-based view to start with but obviously with an overlay of economics on top. So hopefully it's a little bit different to what you would see from just a straight top-down view. But before I talk about our view I would like to talk about our company a little bit and I know Guy's given a very good rendition of it but the fact I was in at an event yesterday and I was introduced as the Chief Commercial Officer for maybe the largest company in the world you've never heard of so I think I wouldn't mind just to make sure you heard of it before I left today. I feel I was completely remiss if I left Washington you had not heard it. So BHP Billton, as Guy said, we've actually been around for 130 years this year. We've been supplying commodities to the world throughout that period. We are headquartered in Australia and we continue to evolve. It was only this year in June that we actually de-merged 10% of our company to focus back on to four very large core pillars. And they are coal which is based in Australia, iron ore but also based in Australia but with operations in South America we have our copper business which is based in Santiago and Chile and of course our petroleum business based here in the US and Houston and we have another option in Potash which I almost have accountability for but that's something for the future that we operate in about eight countries. The other unique thing about our organization is that we have a central marketing team. They are based in Singapore, Asian focused and looking. The fact that 65% of our customers are in Asia and they have sub-branches in Shanghai, in Tokyo and New Delhi. So with that focus certainly and our customer interface we feel that we are as close as we possibly can be to our customers and to the knowledge we need to make the right decisions about our business and to understand what's going on. We operate high quality large assets that's our strategy to stay upstream and we are quite unique in that we offer commodities for steel making we offer commodities for the energy market and quite unique in that and that we offer coal, oil, gas and uranium so we offer the full suite and obviously we have our Potash business as I said which is something for the future that's possibly as diets change and commodity requirements move on. So it is quite a portfolio spread and we think this gives us resilience by the size and quality of our assets where we're based and the markets we're in it makes our company quite resilient. So we talk about economic development and resources and energy are crucial at all stages of economic development and there is a recurring theme here. First you have the urbanisation phase as developing economies evolve investment led growth and in infrastructure drives an increase in steel demand and again we have the commodities as you supply that. Then you generally move to an industrialisation phase so as economies mature and move into manufacturing led growth demand for electricity and copper increases and then thirdly we have the consumer led growth. Citizens enjoy the benefit of the first two phases their wealth increases and consumption led growth further increases demand for energy resources and agriculture as people's diets change and shift towards higher protein. The US economy here is a great example of that development cycle which started at the time of the industrial revolution very well documented and is used as a benchmark in all other economies. So we talk about commodity demand in Asia and specifically here so what we've seen in Asia over the last 15 years is extraordinary it's the greatest industrialisation event the world has ever seen. China and East Asia experienced the largest migration in human history with 200 million people moving into urban areas in the decade to 2010. While regional planners faced the challenge of accommodating these new urban residents the existing and typically wealthier urban population seeks better quality housing and modern amenities typically associated with the high quality of life. As China works to rebalance its economy from investment towards consumption demand for growth commodities has slowed to a more normal and sustainable to a sustainable level compared to the frenetic pace we saw earlier which drove a lot of supply into the market. And while the pace of economic growth has slowed the incremental contribution is now from a much larger base. In the last seven years China's economy has doubled to become the second largest economy in the world and its growth is still pegged to outpace the OECD. China remains a significant contributor to world's total growth and its demand for energy and commodities continues to be within our expected range and no doubt we'll see some volatility and some bumps and lumps in the way but certainly continues on the road that you'd expect. So just talk about energy. Global energy demand is projected to grow by 25% by 2030 so that's according to the statistics of the International Energy Agency. While developed countries continue to improve energy efficiency energy demand in emerging economies is increasing significantly with electricity generation and transport leading the way. Asia is expected to account for 60% of the global energy demand growth. China and India alone will make up more than half of that total. By 2030 1.7 billion people are expected to have access to electricity for the first time. Significantly improving their living standards as we all know. Energy for industrial use in manufacturing will also grow to meet rising demand for consumables. With increasing incomes people in developing countries will have a higher standard of living and seek basic comforts and they will want the things that you and I and everyone else in this room wants on a daily basis. If you look at India less than 10% of households currently have air conditioning and yet by 2030 we project that could be 40% a significant increase. And if you just take as a ratio of how you actually ratio other commodities and other amenities you get the feel for the pace and the growth what's going to happen. As more and more households in developing countries buy cars the need for transportation fuel will increase. China's demand for automobiles could grow to be close to 300 vehicles for every thousand people by 2030. Still well below what you see here in the United States are around 700 per thousand people. So it's a lot more vehicles in China it's going to be a lot more steel a lot more copper and certainly more fuel to drive them whichever type of fuel they use and if you can actually take that and correlate that and actually the corollary of that is then you have to house these vehicles which really means you have bigger buildings with bigger basements bigger garage more steel so it all tends to build on each other. Income growth in developing countries will see a change in diet towards more protein rich foods fruits and vegetables driving an increase in global crop demand. In the face of limited land and water resources greater crop yields will be required from a combination of improved farming practices and more fertilizers such as potash. So how are we going to do this within the environmental footprint we know we need to contain ourselves to. The volume of resources to support population economic growth will put pressure on the environment developed countries will have to reduce the environmental impact while developing countries will need to sustain development without significantly increasing their environmental impact. National efforts to reduce emissions can come under great will come under great scrutiny as a focus shifts in December for the next UN climate summit in Paris. At BHP building we have accepted the science of climate change the work of the IPCC for over two decades. Complimentary policy measures are needed to improve energy efficiency drive low cost reductions in emissions support the development of low emission technology to build resilience to the impacts of climate change and to address sustainable development. We are taking action to reduce our own emissions and work with others to support effective policy development. We are also exploring opportunities to invest in low emission technologies like carbon capture and storage. Every nation will choose its own energy mix which balances affordability and security of supply to fulfill their demand while reducing emissions. Fossil fuels for energy use in the developing world will remain the dominant source as their affordability and scale of existing infrastructure make them hard to replace. In 2030 50 percent of the newly installed electricity in capacity in China and India are likely to be from renewable energy. This will have significant implications for copper demand which is used for wind turbines solar panels and distribution networks. Even with the strong growth in renewables the energy supply mix in these two Asian giants will continue to be dominated by oil gas and coal. As we look to 2030 we forecast that over 79 percent of the world's energy could still be supplied by oil gas and coal under our central scenario. However we are unlikely to see gas replace coal globally at the scale and pace seen here in the U.S. The fastest growing Asian economies have easier access to large coal reserves than they have to cheap gas. Driven by strong political support and policies renewables are likely to be a rapid growing source of energy as Asian governments look to secure energy supply and balance development while limiting carbon emissions. The Asian growth story is set to continue for many years which will underpin strong energy and commodity demand and the world has the resources it needs to meet this future demand despite what some people may say. The future security of energy and mineral commodities is a matter of governance not geology. What is above the ground usually matters more than what is below is a favorite saying in our organization. Things like access to resources, development decisions, supply chain factors, transparency in trade and the way markets operate will all influence the source of future supply. Countries will have to compete for investment if their resources are to be developed. Countries that conduct business openly and transparently have the potential to attract greater more responsible and longer term business investment. The fiscal and political environment that governments create can either facilitate or impede investment in your production. Stability, consistency and certainty as well as transparency are vital ingredients to bring capital and investment opportunities together. Equally strong, equally strong partnerships created and fostered by governments can further support economic growth and jobs in both developed and developing countries. The Trans-Pacific Partnership is a striking example which will set a path towards free trade in the Asia-Pacific. We have been at the forefront of pursuing transparent markets for our products so that the firm pricing reflects supply and demand fundamentals. So in conclusion, we are positive about the future. Demand for energy and commodities will continue to be strong over the long term. This is underpinned by population growth with the addition of two billion people in the next 35 years. Again a staggering number. Two billion people who aren't here, who will be here in 35 years if you take the UN forecast right, who will aspire to everything you and I aspire to on a daily basis. The Chinese economy is now building upon a much larger base and the transition to consumption led economic growth will continue to shape global markets. Economic growth is reliant on energy and all energy sources from fossil fuels and nuclear to renewable energy will be important. To supply the resources the world needs free trade, good governance and transparent and open markets and commodity prices must be based on real supply and demand fundamentals to ensure adequate supply of the commodities needed. So there is a bright future ahead and we are prepared for it and we are looking forward to the next fives of the commodity made. Thank you. Thank you very much, Dean. But I ask the panelists to come up. Thank you, Dean, for that comprehensive view of the global commodities trends and especially the position that BHP is in in terms of adapting to the right called the center of gravity shift of energy and commodities in general to Asia. So we are going to hear some comments now from our three panelists and then we will go into the Q&A session. So I would like to ask Catherine to lead us off from CIBC. Catherine, thank you for being with us today. Thanks, Guy. And thanks very much, Dean, for setting us up with some good things to talk about here. I'm going to give a bit of an energy centric view here and just a few key themes that I think are relevant to this discussion. One to start with just given the price action we've seen in oil in particular over the last six months or so, I think it's worth sort of revisiting the question of short term versus long term. When is something a paradigm shift in the markets and when is it part of a normal cycle? And I think we're all still sort of working through that question with respect to this oil market. But one thing I would throw out there is that I've been starting a lot of my presentations to clients lately by reminding people why it was that oil prices were so high for so long, not too long ago. Because I think in a market like this memories tend to get very short very quickly. And there were some good reasons that oil prices were high. We outside of the US in the non-OPEC countries on a net basis really have not seen any growth. We've actually seen contraction in oil production in non-OPEC outside of the US over the last five years or so. And that was of course in a $100 oil price environment. So now we are in an oversupplied market and it can be a little bit hard to see through that. But we're increasingly in a market that will be supplied by growth from the US and Saudi Arabia. A bit of a bipolar supply scenario. And in the long run, even with a sort of a mediocre rate of global oil demand growth, that's probably not enough. So really the US is not the marginal oil barrel here. We're going to need a different marginal oil barrel eventually and that will take a price higher than 60 anyway I think to get that done. The other theme that has gotten a lot of play or the other narrative that's gotten a lot of play since prices have fallen is this whole shale versus shake sort of narrative that was of course on the cover of The Economist and is very catchy and very novel. But I think it's probably a little bit overdone. The biggest sort of binary variable here in this oil market over the last six months has of course been the change in Saudi strategy which has been a game changer really. But I think it's a vast oversimplification to chalk that all up to a battle with new be US producers. I think that there are a lot of other variables driving the strategy and one that probably doesn't get enough play is concerns about the long term oil demand growth trajectory. We have really never seen a period of time where oil prices were this high for this long. And for that reason we don't have a great data precedent for what that does to demand elasticity to supply elasticity even to the way that the economy interacts with oil prices. A lot of our modeling on that topic is from the 70s and 80s still. So we don't really have a precedent for this. And I think that one of the chief concerns of Saudi Arabia and probably other producers over the last decade has been what a sustained period of high oil prices would do to structural oil demand. So in a way what we're seeing now is a bit of a grand experiment. We're going to find out whether or not that demand rebounds or how much of the change has been structural and long term. I think I'm fairly comfortable saying that OECD oil demand growth has probably peaked and will be flat to declining on average going forward. And I think probably the most important example of that is U.S. gasoline. There's been a variety of reasons why we've seen a structural decline in U.S. gasoline demand or demand growth. One is our shift of part of that pool into biofuels. One has been policy driven with increased fuel economy standards. But part of it has been driven by consumer behavior in response to price. And that's not necessarily coming back. Once you build even a more efficient SUV you might buy more SUVs but you're not going to buy SUVs with 10 year old efficiencies anymore. But what's probably even more important to look at we all know the big delta is in the non-OECD countries. And as much talk and concern as we hear about what's going on in China right now this year's oil demand in China has actually looked pretty good. And I think it's important to remember that even a bad energy demand growth year in China still makes China the biggest contributor to global oil demand growth in the world even in a bad year. And I think we would be remiss to think that the type of growth that we saw in the middle of last decade around 2004 was going to continue forever. And at that time one of my pet peeves was the charts that sometimes people would put up in 2004 saying if Chinese oil demand continued to grow just like this for the next 30 years China would if we straight line that out China would use more oil than anybody could possibly produce which is probably true. But of course those kinds of trends are never straight lines. And typically what we see in a country's development trajectory with respect to energy intensity is that we see a big spike in energy intensity as GDP first starts to grow and a country moves into a manufacturing stage. And then we see sort of a logarithmic decline in that energy intensity as either the manufacturing becomes more efficient and then of course they move into more of a services based phase of GDP growth. In China I don't think we should necessarily be surprised if that decline curve is even steeper than what we've seen in some other parts of the world. Really out of necessity China can't develop the way that other countries have developed before it for environmental reasons demographic reasons and probably other reasons as well. That said even if energy intensity declines steeply in China we are still looking at a significant amount of growth year over year and over time and that's really important. The one point I would make on oil is that we also have got lulled into a bit of a false sense of complacency over the last few years because we had such a range bound market in oil and now we're back to volatility which is really what we all used to be accustomed to in oil but I think that this creates some winners and losers and if I could throw out one sort of idea for feedback is that perhaps on some level command economies deal better with volatility than free market countries do in a lot of ways. And that is why I don't think we can necessarily expect Chinese demand to behave exactly the way other countries do with respect to economic growth or even response to price. This is a command economy with a lot of artificial levers that can change that equation. I've been very oil focused a very brief comment on natural gas whereas on the oil side globally we have a few concerns I think about both long-term demand and long-term supply on the oil side. Gas is a little different I think it's a very very positive outlook for both long-term gas supply and long-term gas demand. The trick is when one of those timelines gets a bit ahead of the other for a little while and of course that does tend to happen with gas because of the very high capital intensity of the distribution of gas internationally so you can get legs and leads and I think we are in for a period here of several years where perhaps the supply does get a bit ahead of the demand. That said given the backdrop of climate and other air quality concerns particularly in developing Asia now I think it's hard for me to see a scenario where long-term gas demand does not have a very positive outlook so let me stop there. Thank you very much. Thank you Catherine now we're going to turn to Alan from the World Bank. Thank you Guy and Dean that was a fascinating talk. I greatly appreciated your insights on various things. I'll pick up on some of the themes that Catherine mentioned I also apologize for being very energy focused perhaps we'll leave it to Scott to break that Jane. What I wanted to pick up on mostly was a comment that Dean concluded on which was a world where commodity prices respond to market signals to supply and demand and the fundamentals there. I think that we're living in a world where the visibility that we may have had on these issues in the past isn't there. When we look forward it's cloudy it's not clear and it's cloudy for a number of reasons. Let's address some of those reasons. 2010 about one percent of the world's electricity demand came from what we call modern renewable energy and last year it was about five percent. At five percent of global electricity demand the amount of modern renewable energy and this is mostly solar and wind and it's in markets like China and western Europe and the United States. It's equivalent to about seven and a half trillion cubic feet of natural gas it's equivalent to about 500 million tons of coal. On the natural gas front that quantity is about 20 percent of global trade in natural gas both pipeline and LNG. For thermal coal that goes into power generation it's 50 percent 500 million tons so if that variable renewable energy is coming into markets it's coming into markets when the wind blows when the sun shines it's not coming in necessarily when electricity is at its most valuable and it's highly subsidized. From year to year responding to subsidies people invest in that or not and it's very very volatile. A market can add tens of thousands of gigawatts in one year and then go down to a few thousand the next year and then back up. And why is that happening it's happening because of concerns obviously about the energy mix and the impact on carbon emissions and the like. Over that period from 2010 let's take the commodities. Thermal coal exported from Newcastle in Australia a key marker in Asia. Central Appalachian coal a key marker for coal in the United States. Natural gas prices everywhere uranium oxide and oil. Now the oil price decline started later but every commodity that I mentioned in that time period the price has fallen by half. You might be thinking to yourself I'm going to go out and invest in renewables. The S&P clean energy index over that same period has also fallen by 50 percent. So we have an energy market that in this context of climate concerns and in the context of the economic growth we have kind of looks like it might be cannibalizing itself right. The renewables curse might be real and as I'm signed up member of the World Bank I'm usually not allowed to even acknowledge that the renewable curse might be a real right. That's a story that people tell us to scare us but there are some evidence there that in these markets the prices of commodities are being undermined by these policies and when those prices go down it changes the competitiveness versus the renewables that we're trying to increase the market for basically. So that I think is a kind of interesting phenomenon. It impacts if you make the decision today to invest in particularly natural gas or power generation of any kind of conventional sort you are especially in markets that are competitive and that's a lot of the world's market and an increasing number of developing country markets you are looking at prices that are going to be undermined by zero variable cost renewables and you have to take that into account when you make those investments. The problem there is that these are very the investment cycle for a new coal plant, the investment cycle for an LNG project, the investment cycle for deep water oil, the investment cycle for a lot of things has if anything increased but the investment cycle for shale gas or renewables wind and solar particularity is a matter of months. So an LNG project if I want to do that five years if I want to produce more gas in the Hainesville a matter of weeks, a matter of weeks. So this is leading to problems with visibility and a lot of downside risks for people holding certain kinds of assets which is one of the reasons why people increasingly talk about asset monetization. If you were holding carbon intensive resources should you produce now because they might be worth nothing in the future. That would be an academic issue if not for the fact that the Saudis actively talk about asset monetization whether they're serious or whether they're just trying to scare American shale producers who knows but they talk about it. The final thing that I want to comment on very briefly is subsidies. For me personally I'd like to see a world in which there were no subsidies not on the consumption of oil, gas and coal which you have in many emerging countries still and you have some of that even in developed countries and a world with no subsidies on renewables because I think the removal of subsidies across the energy space will improve visibility. It will respond to what Dean was saying about market fundamentals based on technology supply demand not on potentially restorative government tax and subsidy policy. I think what replaces that if it's rational would be a carbon tax. This is the thing that would if we could somehow commit to one this is the thing that again improves visibility because it provides signals about the social cost of carbon intensive fuels and allows them to be traded off against each other. Let me conclude by saying that I see no possibility for any near-term removal of distorting subsidies whether on renewables or fossil fuels and I see no-term prospect for a meaningful global carbon tax which means that I my prediction is that even in the even in the medium term the energy markets are fundamentally unpredictable no one knows what's going to happen thanks well for those of us who've been doing it for about 50 years that's a very humbling remark so thank you Alan and next we'll have Scott Miller who we rely on here at CSIS when it comes to global trade issues international trade and particularly multilateral agreements that are such as TPP so Scott over to you thank you guy and it's a pleasure to be here today I want to start out with real really extending compliments to Dean for his optimism what you heard is a story that that captures the mood I personally feel when I go to Asia Asia is an optimistic place it's a place where you see potential and growth and I think that's an important part of the story as we think about forecasting forecasting is notoriously difficult to do but I think there is a real rational basis for optimism the notion of three billion two billion more people in the next 35 years I used to be a guy who's sold disposable diapers so that's a really happy thought but the composition of that population growth particularly in East Asia in the Pacific is very exciting there is a there's a global middle class emerging and Goldman Sachs estimates that that the middle class worldwide is growing by 70 to 90 million people a year and will continue basically that growth rate through 2030 so it's not just more people it's more people who are prosperous more prosperous than their their fathers and mothers who are looking for a better life who are more engaged and create this global middle class which has great implications for political stability and and economic growth so I think that's a story that is both optimistic but it's also rational I want to make the point that look at the counterfactual is look at forecasts of 40 years ago 1975 the world was in the midst of a major disruption in hydrocarbon pricing because of the of the actions of OPEC starting in 1973 but but 40 years ago the professor earlicks paul earlicks famous book the population bomb which was published in 1968 and by the way I checked amazon today it's still in print okay but it was a bestseller in 1975 I will tell you paul earlick was wrong about almost everything all right and you can go back if you want to chuckle read the read the book okay indeed newsweek magazine and time magazine in in 1975 those of you a css interns at the back uh see me later as to what a magazine is realize you may not have picked one up or seen it in in reality but both have published couple cover stories on the coming ice age and the phenomena of global cooling all right the point is in the long run optimism pays off the pessimists over the past 40 years have been wrong about everything from hydrocarbon supply to crop yields to geopolitics and so optimism pays off it also pays to be humble because uh any forecast even a 15-year forecast as such as the one dean laid out here uh has to has to acknowledge we have to acknowledge ourselves what we don't know I would point out as I occasionally point out to my children 10 years ago the iphone did not exist okay if you've gone this far in the meeting without checking your iphone you're unusual okay and we organize our life around this technology but it was first sold in uh June of 2007 so things happen even in a relatively medium term that are hard to predict but I do think the optimism is warranted now I want to uh I want to talk really about where where dean concluded his remarks which at the conclusion talked about the fiscal and political environments that governments create and the stability consistency and transparency that are that are the prerequisite for investment because I think that's the real message uh to all of us here in the united states in the OECD and in the world that the in order to achieve what's really possible from these relatively optimistic futures um I think the major particularly major developed economies the united states and europe especially are frankly doing too little right now to promote growth to promote investment and to promote innovation uh if you look at the world bank's most recent that will be june 2015 global economic outlook their forecast for the OECD as a whole in 2016 is 2.1 gdp growth that includes mexico and korea uh but europe europe era the euro area was expected to grow 1.5 percent and only 1.8 percent in 2016 after actual contractions in 2012 and 2013 the u.s economy is projected to grow at under 3 percent uh 2.7 percent this year 2.8 next uh that ought to be disappointing to us and candidly i'm astonished that voters and politicians or elected officials in the united states and elsewhere are willing to accept this as a new reality uh we there's no need for that we shouldn't be to my in my view here at home we are telling ourselves too many stories about things like secular stagnation and making excuses for slow growth uh but currently if you look at the u.s economy are we recovering and growing yes is it slow absolutely look compared to any other recession uh and and the recovery from the recession but we we sit at labor utilization rates labor force participation rates which are very near 40 year lows uh if you look at corporate balance sheets there's our immense amounts of cash essentially on the sidelines that are not finding productive investment opportunities and you know corporations are are quite rational entities they respond to incentives we've got the incentives wrong if we intend to grow so uh so i i think there is real opportunity and that that that the uh the united states and europe can stand up and contribute to the optimism that you sense when you're in asia uh finally as the guy said i'm the trade guy and i'll close with a thought about trade policy because it is one of the components of economic growth and and very important contributor to the rising tide of the global economy over the past 30 years uh you know if you look at since the mid 1980s there's been a period of time we call globalization this was driven by technological change advances in container shipping advantages in communications technology as well as policy changes the opening of china uh the fall of the berlin wall and the fall of communism uh the yorga round of the gat lots of policy initiatives to free trade and to to move in a direction of liberalization of trade restrictions and of economic deepening economic engagement during that period that 30 year period merchandise trade as a share of global output grew from 23 percent in 1985 to 45 percent in 2007 so here you have this generation in which trade uh change in trade grew about twice as fast as change in gdp okay it was remarkably beneficial it created real welfare gains for the world people were better off because of this now here's the recent history and it's not very sunny uh there was an expected collapse in 2008 with the financial crisis but believe it or not the world economy if you look at share of merchandise trade as a share of the global economy we've not yet reached the high we achieved in 2007 we're still below that in terms of propensity to trade that's six years after the crisis uh so look a lot of reasons for this in fact there's not real clarity whether this is a secular change or a or a cyclical one but i do think it implies a policy problem uh that it seems no one cares much about so i'll take my take my uh my microphone time here and and raise the issue because i think we should care about it we have a stalemate in geneva uh we had lapsed negotiating authority in the united states lapsing interest willing enough in 2007 um you know there basically have been stasis to actual reversions and closing of markets in a lot of the world uh and now i'm still very optimistic about the future but i think we really have work to do and that work frankly starts with those of us here in the advice business and those of us in the united states thank you thank you thank you scott and uh alan and cathvin for your remarks and uh let me uh start the questions off with uh a couple to to dean that emerged from his remarks you mentioned uh the challenges we all face with the climate change issues and we have the huge c o p meeting council the conference of the parties meeting in paris in december uh we're certain that some of the countries where bhp billeton has strong markets like china and india will be making policy changes and in and i know your company is positioning yourself as you mentioned to do things internally and externally like you mentioned uh carbon capture and and storage would you like to elaborate a bit more on some of the things uh bhp is doing in the climate change space yeah i would thanks guy but i'd really like to just maybe go back to what alan said before i think where the world can get it wrong is when you actually put policy in place as opposed to good governance and i'd say that the renewables situation is one we actually force a sector to actually to increase its share as opposed to letting the market forces drive it and so one of our one of the underlying planks of our of our climate change policy is to say we should price carbon i prefer that to say the carbon tax because the carbon tax always raises hackles but if you say if you effectively price carbon then that will drive the right behaviors it'll drive the right technology it will actually push investment in the right area which will give you the lowest cost abatement it will ensure that you can continue to actually supply energy and it does not interfere with the competitors of your your economy because if you offend any of those three then whatever you do is doing for failure you can either skew your you can skew your uh mix by by forcing it or you can let the market supply that and i think that's that's one of the fundamental things and if we if we see anything that comes out of paris we'd like to think that there it's probably it's probably a wish too far to say we're going to have a price on carbon we're going to pick a two-degree path and we're all going to happily wander off but if you get a framework where we actually start to get that and we can build on that i think that would be great success but coming back to what BHP is doing when we look and we do very very detailed analysis of where the world's demand for energy is going to be we do is quite agnostically because we supply all sectors so we don't we don't necessarily count anyone horse in the race winning as long as a horse wins and we're normally on that horse we're happy to to go that way and so when we look at what's what's required we can't see a world where you're not going to use fossil fuels you got you got a world where potentially two billion people are coming at least 1.7 billion hooking up electricity for the first time and it would be a dangerous thing to deny them that i think i'd be far more fearful of that than the effects short-term effects of climate change so we have to accept that's going to happen then you then you say but if you continue to pump carbon to atmosphere what's going to happen and so that leads us then to the point of we're going to have to find ways of going to a lower carbon environment and economy and there's a whole range again we we see renewables we see nuclear we see fossil fuels all driving part of that and so we would like to position ourselves as part of the solution as we could sit back and say well we're just the suppliers at someone else's problem so hence our strategy that's one of the things you want to do is invest in low emission technology and that can range from high efficient low emission power generation to carbon capture and storage but even the whole can continue on to basically batteries and and storage and the like and we see that by by being involved in that obviously private private uh the private sector has a role to play that will show some leadership it'll maybe inspire others it will actually see things that may not have happened but ultimately the only work if there is a is a greater global governance on top which price which prices carbon and leads us to the right way and and the last point i'd make is i think the one thing that i despair at times is that mankind often consigns themselves to future incompetence and yet you have a look at what we've developed and we always managed to do something different and better and and i think the iPhone example is a great one i can remember being the car in 1989 in Finland and the Finns were the one who actually invented iPhones and uh my cousin making a call from his car and i thought was the most wonderful thing i've ever seen and that wasn't that long yet and uh and yet we in the future we can sign ourselves to almost at stupidity at times we can't we can vent something but we can't solve the problem so i'm an engineer i'm a professional problem solver i'm a terminal optimist well let me uh pick up on that optimism because it would certainly was a thread through your remarks scott chimed in saying he's very optimistic and maybe you know some of these above the ground issues got resolved but we also realized that you know there's challenges especially in these emerging economies and kathryn mentioned uh with china we can't always count on that exponential straight line growth and we're now seeing structural changes in both the chinese and in indian economies which could change the way you accompany like yours deals with those markets uh i'm sure as a strategist and a and a chief commercial officer bb php you uh you're certainly worried or trying to meet these challenges so how do you deal with the china as you see it five ten twenty years from now and similarly with india you mentioned some some of the very optimistic data but i know within side that data there there are challenges for your company well the way we do it is there's two lenses we apply the first lens is you look at what what the economy is going to demand to meet its next phase and so and i think we're seeing as i sort of sent china move into a consumption led economy our central view is that that it's going to occur it will occur efficiently there will be bumps and there'll be lumps and bumps along the way as i would say but certainly it seems to be heading the wrong in fact if you look at the the source of chinese GDP now it's it's basically the services sector exceeds the industrial sector that's a clear sign we we track many signposts for each of our economies and so then that allows us to basically say what are the basic commodities needed to supply to actually for this country to achieve its goals the second lens is then what you have a look at what is a country endowed with and then what is your offering on top of that so you have a look at india for instance we see india as it goes into its basically for people go to the urbanization phase and then to its industrialization phase they are certainly well endowed vinyl that metallurgical coal is something they're not so we fact that into our thinking we have a look at the sources of energy of each of the economies and then we fact that into our thinking and that's what the idea of having our portfolio is for essential crisis that we can basically tailor our offering to match each of the phases of the economy as a ring thank you very much dean now i'd like to open the floor we've got a fair amount of time i think for q's and a's we we do want to end at one p.m as we've promised dean and the panelists so let me just say would you please identify yourself and your affiliation and and try to although we don't discourage comments if you want to make a comment keep it short mainly questions i think you were the first in the in front row here i'm katelyn antrum i work with the rule of law committee for the ocean so i spent a lot of time looking at china's development of transportation network that reaches to africa to the gulf even up north to russia where they're building nine ice breaking lng tankers so we're seeing now with the asian infrastructure bank a chance to for them to focus even more on this how do you see a growing transportation network and network in in natural resources around that region centered on china affecting the commodities market say in 20 years it was that integrated into your thought about 2030 years that something that'll come later obviously the further out you go the further out you go the more difficult it is and i think alan summed it up nicely in that in when you're doing commodity forecasting you always hope to be directionally perfect but your price point always completely wrong but directionally perfect is what we aim to do but i would see opening up transportation and the like it's almost like free trade i mean what it does is it allows an economy to shift to a shift they're purchasing power to the lowest cost and so when you see reservationist when you see restrictions when you see bans what it's effectively doing it's it's putting an impulse on an economy and so you're not allowing the cheapest source of energy to actually arrive at the at the point prepared to pay that price so i just see it as a great as a great factor the other thing it will do also is that it will make fossil fuel sticky it's the more infrastructure we spend on fossil fuels and there is significant money spent on fossil fuels now and if you just do some calculations and convert over to to something else there's a massive amount of sunk cost is right off to take but the more the more we actually build on the sticky it'll be well then it'll cross the dilemma of how does it compete and and i think it'll lead into having to decarbonize and basically i think carbon capture and storage for fossil fuels will float to the top again hi Dave ramos mommy of the africa agribusiness magazine you know oil gas oil coal and cement account for 75 percent of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide so unlike feel good methods like changing light bulbs or driving an electric car to really move the dial on climate change we got to focus a revolutionary approach to changing or reducing greenhouse gamut gas emissions in these sectors and also oil and coal have huge environmental and security externalities and so going forward where do you see a company like bhp bulletin aligning with the agriculture sector you know billion and a half people in the world are farmers to produce non food based feedstocks for fuels and also distributed energy so where do you see that partnership because historically the extractive sector and agriculture sector have been a war and combative relationship so where do you see an alliance going forward thank you it's not that it's not just that sector i think the uh i think the fossil fuel sector has also been combative as well it's uh which is not helpful um look our our company strategy is pretty clear it's on the it's on the website you know we want to own and operate large long life resources we want to stay upstream we want to sell it basically at a point of commodity into large markets so i don't see our company strategy changing um what we what we see is that uh we will have an offering of commodities which will support the markets as they develop and so while we're not in the renewables business and we don't uh not likely to be in renewables business we see that copper is going to be a great facilitator of it um you have a look at some of the statistics i've seen there the average it took one hectare to feed three and a half people i think back in 1980 um if we're going to meet the global population that's going to have to jump to five and so we're going to have to see yields and crops go up significantly um hence we see potash is as one of the one of the key three key elements you can't you can't actually can't substitute you can do about it for a while but you can't substitute it you'll sooner or later you need it so we're actually going to have that in but as far as actually uh taking equity and going to some of these businesses that would be contra strategy um the investments we're going to make in in low emission technology we see as uh as a way of actually abating our own our own emissions which we've targeted to do which we've we've basically taking a leading position here by saying that even though we're growing our business we're going to hold emissions from our businesses at 2006 levels and we're working working hard on that and achieving those numbers but so we we'd say it's more of a supportive and investive and basically synergistic role hello i'm randall doile from georgetown university i want to see mr valley have lived in australia three years they went there as a young man who was 18 and it was at heraldy holter naval base in western australia my son now teaches high school english there in melbourne um i want to touch on each of the hasn't really been touched on and distracted to use her and perhaps maybe the other three will comment on it and that's political risk um i hear the numbers i hear the figures all this but um i'm sure you have a political risk department in essence of you know potentiality for instance like us china interaction the south china sea and and all that and i'm sure you can't make your evaluations separate from that because that's certainly a certain part of the reality and so i'm wondering that when you are in essence trying to make some some estimations of what's going to happen in the future trend lines things of this sort how much does political risk figure into that because being a company of your magnitude in global region so far i'm assuming that you have to take that into consideration of future investment and extraction of resources maybe i'll just give a quick answer and i'll explain about giving away too much so we we run a central case so we run the world as as we would see we basically we build up um very deep analysis on commodities case by case and we run a central case then on on top of that we do very very even deeper analysis on on steel because it affects two of our major commodities and we actually do a very deep analysis on the energy sector and when i say energy sector we look at everything from electric vehicle penetration through to wear gas oil um what the substitution are we look at um you know disruptive technology what could they do where could they be we also we also price carbon to everything we do so we run a central case on carbon and we do that by having a very detailed build up on what it costs to abate a ton of carbon and then we we figure out where the world is going essential case and you can say it's a three degree world or a four degree world and how many tons of carbon need to be abated and what the cost of that is beyond the central point and that's factored in so once we've run a central case then we run four scenarios around that and those scenarios can be a world where it's ambivalent about carbon where basically it's world goes into a crisis state where everyone's worried about energy security stability and basically growth and abandons the worry about that and it consigns at the future generation and then we go to to a very green world where we're all driven to hit two degrees faster than what we would have and we and we actually in each of those cases then we will then we'll flex what the likely scenarios and demands that will put political implications in so China and the US cooperation works uh India grows or India stalls we factor all those things and we basically rerun demand for each of those and out of that basically we actually re-forecast our price and then we work economic valuation so when people say you've got a stranded asset would say well we've tested that already because we've basically picked we've picked the worst case we're factored in what it could be if you did have a disruptive technology this happened you took a two degree world and uh and we factored in we understand evaluations and act accordingly so you're absolutely right we do do it and we basically and we build on on year on year any more than that it'd be given to my secrets any other uh panelists like the comment on that Scott how how about your experience with political risk with proctoring game more more well it's it's always a factor in in businesses and and in in many cases companies like PHP built on like PNG and others are tend to enter uh enter foreign markets for the long term they're looking for long be a long run participant in the economies where they enter they often serving the local consumers so the questions get answered over a long period of time near-term political risk is is often manageable and you try your best to do that uh but basically one of the things that the one of the core benefits of the sort of the the multilateral order particularly the rules-based trading system is it has a way it's a it's essentially hedging it's a way to to to constrain the the the the the tails of risk doesn't work all the time doesn't work everywhere and there are there there are always things things fall apart remember our company made a decision to locate in uh Latin America headquarters and the absolute right place to do that in 1987 was Caracas Venezuela okay and so sometimes things don't work out the way you plan but you do you do both hedging and you you do you continue to have a risk horizon that you're evaluating all the time the the the international economic order is very important to as a way to to to constrain the outliers and to manage that risk over time oh yeah thanks i'll i'll make a quick comment here someone's microphone is on your side there i'll make a comment with feedback too uh the uh you know when i joined the bank in the late 90s we didn't think too much about uh the development issues associated with fragile and conflict affected states um and now that's a very substantial part of our operational activity um we didn't think too much about uh disaster risk management and responding to disasters again that's something that is a is a major part of our um uh of our activities now um you know the the bank lends with no regard to the the political nature of uh of the countries we don't take positions and elections or anything like that so we have a different profile on political risk um but what i what we observe is uh not so much uh political risk but but bureaucratic stagnation in so many countries that make the operating environment where whether uh public lenders like ourselves or private companies like bhp very very difficult um we we we see a lot of places that operate according to the uh according to the philosophy of you never make a mistake if you never make a decision right and that's the reality in a lot of countries that good projects whether infrastructure or natural resources are waiting to be invested in by people who who have the expertise and the management the technical ability uh to to go ahead with that and the risk taking initiative right and these projects sit there and never get developed and we all may be retired but before some of these good projects uh might get developed and I can think of multi-billion dollar projects uh just in countries I work in in Asia where that's been the case and and that is increasingly I think the biggest political risk that investors face is is that you know uh you you want to move forward and you can't get decisions made in the in the market which which you're interested in thank you hi it's uh john kio here from the australian financial review I had a question for dean um dean in the last few days we've seen the price of uh bhp's biggest commodity in australia's biggest exporter to iron ore really plunge uh below 50 dollars to a decade low what's your assessment of what's driving the iron ore price going lower at the moment um is it driven by supply and demand fundamentals as per some comments in your speech and also do you see any link between what's going on in the iron ore market and the chinese stock market look i think short-term volatility in commodity prices is something you're always going to be completely wrong on so i'm not even going to speculate um and i really take the long-term view um we you know we saw that uh you saw this unprecedented demand for iron ore going back a decade ago um prices went high it's incentivized a lot of supply that now probably shouldn't be there it's it's going to be difficult and uh so now you have a demand which is still strong but it's a very well supplied market and so you i think you've basically seen the effects of that i mean and they will bounce around from day to day the labor shoot and undershoot that's uh long term it is going to come back to fundamentals it's it's a very transparent market it's open market and it'll it'll respond um i don't know that you could actually correlate it to be if i was that clever to correlate it between what's on the stock market you probably uh you make a lot of money but i can't correlate that bill you're gonna have to be the last two questions we'll start with mark karr in the back and then that's fine thank you i um been reading some more and thinking more about uh and the one element of political risk of state corruption and i know you know you folks have a global view and uh bureaucratic stagnation and other things uh how does state corruption like massive corruption in some of these markets impact the um the direction of these things go yes hi and thanks guy jim ostrov um an editor with plaques and for mr delavale uh in recent years the price iranium as you know has tanked down more than 50 percent from 2011 interested in and in recent years we've had major producers whether it be real tinto recently in australia paladin even camico announced they're not moving ahead or closing facilities because of the surprise situation i'd be interested in your outlook going forward for iranium prices and in particular anything you would say about the outlook for olympic dam thank you i was going to try and pass the question on to uh to castron but i don't think i can pass that one on it'd be a bit unfair but i will say how i should be castron's i've wasted a great opportunity here another view um look olympic dam is a great resource it's uh it's in a it's a great part of the world many billions of tons there its time will come it's really about us matching it to market it's obviously contains a lot of iranium which we see as a very very important co-product to copper out of olympic dam uh i'm not i won't talk about price for future price forecast obviously for iranium we see we see the growth of nuclear power when we look at our energy mix as as an important part of that there's no doubt that uh there's been a massive big road bump uh as a result of fukushima and so well i think what you're seeing is the basically demand and supply fundamentals playing out also the other unique thing about the iranian business is that uh as unlike say an energy coal uh an energy coal operation where you may have 60 days or 30 day supply ahead of you uh at the average nuclear power station could have three years maybe five years of supply so there's no there's no immediate need to run to the market at any point in time so to start correlating and you know it could be short term it could be months in that business to what what you see price is extremely difficult to do the other the other thing i draw your attention to is if you go and have a look at i mean iranium hasn't been around that long right and you have a look at so as a product you have a look at the amount of iranium produced since about 1945 and you have a look at how much has been consumed just and there's obviously is an overhang there it's a lot of it is sitting in weapons a lot of it has actually been converted the the megatons the megawatts are still paying out and i think that also is another factor inside the inside the supply site so if you put all that together you have a look at the i wouldn't say inertia but the lack of urgency to go and buy it uh then it it'll play itself out and if if supply is cutting off and demand continues to go then it's going to induce new supply that's the market will once again behave well i work for a canadian bank so i'm not sure i'm the best person to to address corruption yeah i i think that um in terms of oil supply certainly that it's not it's not a new theme i mean oil is not always conveniently located obviously um but i think that that is one uh one of many variables has made north america attractive over the last 10 years um it's not necessarily the cheapest barrel but it's also not necessarily the most expensive barrel and has a lot of other above ground conditions that that may get an attractive investment um from government governance to uh to access to capital which which has also been clearly very very abundant over the last 10 years um so uh yeah i i don't have a lot to add i don't know if any of the other panelists want to want to address that thanks very much um so the world bank uh we probably don't need a definition of the word corruption uh unfortunately um we uh we really do wrestle with governance and and transparency and outright corruption issues uh in in all of our business beating back to the beginning pretty much it's uh it's it it is a uh a growth killer um project killer and it's very difficult to deal with having said that uh we uh for those of you who don't know the world bank houses the extractive uh industries transparency initiative the e i t i uh one of the things that uh i think that uh is is noteworthy has been very strong support from uh the world's extractive industries uh the producers private companies being transparent about payments made to government wasn't an automatic and kind of instinctive thing for those companies but uh we have a very broad support industry now and increasingly among the countries uh as well still a few that that are joining slowly with different concerns but we're getting towards a more transparent space at least in the extractives and i think that's a good thing and i think this is a this is a this is something that's going to be hard to reverse having you know a country joining uh extractives industries transparency initiative it's going to be noticed if they then withdraw um we we have a long way to go but even in in countries where you know you you you think corruption sometimes nigeria comes to mind uh nigeria released uh uh the pwc missing millions report you know which makes fascinating reading for those of you who who can wade through 199 pages it's an amazing report and it may not change things overnight but the transparency on the nnpc missing millions is is rather remarkable and that just came out a few months ago so there's that you know the broader corruption thing i can tell you it takes decades all right um we have a few good examples of countries that really deal decisively with i mean singapore comes to mind but um reaching that tipping point where all of a sudden one day it's part of the landscape it's part of the business you just you kind of you don't see a lot of it happen from my perspective but you know what's happening to a point where it becomes unusual and and and really not a significant part getting to that tipping point it just takes a long long time and no matter what you read in the headlines no matter which head of state you see my president embrace because the guy is a shining example of good governance don't believe every headline you read i thought we just had we were one of the the founding signature so that's that process as well i was going to ask the question i'm glad it was a good positive so we've reached our a lot of time and i want to thank you all once again for uh you're being here and for your uh penetrating and uh interesting questions please join me in thanking dean and alan catherine and scott thank you very much