On 28 February 2026, the United States and Israel launched coordinated strikes on Iran. Within hours, Iran's Revolutionary Guard issued radio warnings prohibiting all navigation through the Strait of Hormuz. By the first week of March, tanker traffic through the strait was down 90 percent. The IEA launched the largest emergency reserve release in its history and described the closure as the greatest global energy security threat in history.

I have spent thirty years working in energy markets. This is different. Not because of the price. Brent was trading at around USD 103 per barrel in March and the US EIA projects it peaking at USD 115 in the second quarter of 2026. The difference is structural. What the Hormuz crisis has exposed is not a temporary disruption. It is a permanent vulnerability.

What actually flows through Hormuz

Roughly 21 million barrels of petroleum liquids per day pass through the Strait of Hormuz, approximately 21% of globally traded petroleum. But the oil figures may be less significant than the gas. Qatar, the world's second-largest LNG exporter, depends entirely on this route for its maritime shipments. In 2025, over 112 billion cubic metres of LNG, roughly 20% of global LNG trade, transited the strait. Large-scale alternative infrastructure for natural gas simply does not exist.

What it means permanently

Every LNG-dependent economy, every project financed against an import assumption, every government that has treated energy security as someone else's problem is now reassessing. The transactions I am working on in 2026 reflect this. Solar in the Philippines. Data centres in Thailand running on local power. A coal plant in Malaysia being evaluated for transition, not because coal is fashionable to retire, but because the calculus of what is secure has permanently shifted. The strait may reopen. The vulnerability it revealed will not close.

The IEA's World Energy Investment report for 2025 records total global energy investment at USD 3.3 trillion. USD 2.2 trillion to clean energy, USD 1.1 trillion to fossil fuels. The ratio looks compelling. Then the Strait of Hormuz closed. Brent crude rose above USD 100 per barrel. Emergency reserve releases were coordinated globally. Governments from Japan to Germany quietly asked how quickly they could extend the lives of facilities they had announced they were closing.

This is not hypocrisy. It is the actual problem, clearly stated for the first time in a decade.

Two legitimate imperatives

The energy transition is real. The science is unambiguous. The technology is cheaper than it has ever been. Solar, wind, and storage are now the most cost-effective sources of new electricity generation in most markets worldwide. Energy security is also real. It is older than climate policy. And it turns out that the clean energy infrastructure we have built is not yet capable of replacing the fossil fuel supply chains we still depend on.

What this means for the markets I work in

In Southeast and South Asia, the conflict between transition and security plays out in concrete, daily decisions. Vietnam adds solar while defending coal capacity. Indonesia exports record volumes of thermal coal while making net zero pledges. The investment opportunity lies in the projects that serve both imperatives simultaneously. Solar that reduces import dependence. Storage that improves grid resilience. Coal plant transactions structured around transition and carbon capture. The capital is there. The structures exist. The gap is honest thinking about what the problem actually is.

More than 75% of global coal capacity sits in developing markets. India generates 72% of its electricity from coal. China, 63%. For reference, the United States is at 23% and Germany at 30%. The UK has essentially phased it out. Most of the coal transition in wealthy countries over the past three decades was enabled by a rapid shift to natural gas, an option that is substantially less available and substantially more expensive in the markets that now hold the majority of the world's coal capacity.

The IEA is unambiguous in its Net Zero by 2050 scenario: no new coal mines, no mine extensions, and global coal use declining by 90% by 2050. I am not disputing the science or the goal. I am disputing the gap between the goal and the plan.

The arithmetic problem

Coal demand has been at near-record highs for the past decade. It did not decline during the global energy investment boom of 2020 to 2025. In Vietnam, coal capacity has been added at pace even as solar installations lead the region. These facts are not failures of ambition. They are the revealed preferences of growing economies that need power today.

What the 1,400MW mandate tells me

Among my active mandates in 2026 is transaction advisory for the M&A of a 1,400MW coal-fired power plant in Malaysia, with a strategic focus on energy transition and carbon capture. This is the most honest kind of energy transition work available right now: taking existing coal infrastructure and structuring its future in a way that reflects reality rather than aspiration. Coal will decline. But it will happen on the terms and timelines of India, China, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Malaysia, not on those of their creditors. The sooner the global investment community accepts this, the sooner serious capital can follow serious projects.

Global energy investment reached USD 3.3 trillion in 2025, the highest in history. USD 2.2 trillion went to clean energy, twice the USD 1.1 trillion going to fossil fuels. The direction of travel is clear. But three things are happening simultaneously that the headline does not capture.

Upstream oil investment is falling, not because demand is falling

The IEA records a 6% fall in upstream oil investment in 2025, the first year-on-year decline since Covid, the largest since 2016. The cause is not declining demand. It is lower price expectations and a wave of consolidation focusing capital on existing assets rather than new fields. Lower upstream investment now means tighter supply in three to five years, at precisely the moment when the Hormuz crisis is reminding the world how little slack there is in the system.

Renewables investment has plateaued

After 10% compound annual growth since 2020, Wood Mackenzie forecasts flat real-terms renewables investment through 2030. China is reducing policy incentives for solar and wind. Battery storage investment held at USD 20 billion in 2026 after a 50% jump the prior year. The era of effortless renewable growth appears to be giving way to a more contested landscape.

And then there is AI

The electricity demand implications of artificial intelligence infrastructure are only now beginning to show up in grid planning models. Every forecast made before 2024 is, to varying degrees, wrong on the demand side. The energy market I am working in today is being shaped by a technology whose power requirements were not included in the models still being used to justify investment decisions. This is not a small adjustment. It is a structural shift that will define energy infrastructure investment for the next decade.

The most consequential decisions I have made in thirty years of advisory work were not made under pressure. They were made in the quiet that follows pressure, in the space between the information arriving and the response leaving.

I have practised meditation for years. Not as a wellness routine. Not as a productivity hack. As a practice, in the older sense of the word: something you return to daily, not because it is always useful, but because it gradually changes the quality of the mind that is doing everything else. What it has taught me, more than anything, is the difference between reaction and response.

What this looks like in practice

A transaction is about to fall apart. A counterparty has moved its position at the last moment. The room is waiting for you to say something. This is not the moment for stillness in the conventional sense. But if you have been practising stillness consistently, something else happens: the noise inside your own head reduces. The fear of saying the wrong thing, which is almost always the thing that causes people to say the wrong thing, becomes quieter. You can hear the actual situation rather than your anxiety about it.

My father, L. Bruce Kekule, spent forty years photographing wildlife in Thailand. The patience required for that work, lying still in the grass waiting for an animal to emerge, for the light to change, for the moment to arrive, is not unlike the patience required in negotiation. You cannot force the shot. You can only be present for it. The practice of stillness is simply the practice of learning to see.

Nobody who is doing it well will tell you they have achieved balance. What they have achieved is something more honest, and harder to name.

I am the founder of Dalal and Partners. I am the wife of Tipp Dalal, who leads Triple i Logistics. I am the mother of two daughters. I am the daughter of L. Bruce Kekule, who taught me patience by example, and of Nok Kekule, who taught me everything else. These are not roles I perform in sequence. They are simultaneous, always, and without exception.

Balance implies a set of scales that you periodically adjust. In my experience, the image is wrong. The right image is more like a conversation that never ends, one in which every participant sometimes has to wait, but nobody is ever forgotten.

What I have actually found

Being a mother has made me a better advisor. Not because it has given me perspective in the abstract, but because it has given me specific, daily practice in the things that matter most in business: patience, long-term thinking, the willingness to hold a position under pressure, and the knowledge that you will be judged not by what you said but by what actually happened. I am not recommending my particular arrangement to anyone. I am saying that the question worth asking is not how to balance everything, but what you are actually trying to build, and whether the life you are living is pointing in that direction.

The transactions that do not close teach you more than the ones that do.

This is not a consoling platitude. It is simply true, and I have had thirty years to test it. A deal that closes cleanly tells you that your judgment was right, that your relationships held, that the timing was correct, and that you executed well. All of that is worth knowing. But it does not tell you very much about what you are actually made of.

The transaction that falls apart in the final stages, after months of work, after relationships have been staked, after commitments that were not quite commitments have been made, that one tells you everything. How you respond when the thing you have been building is suddenly not there. Whether you protect the relationships even as the deal dies. Whether you can absorb the loss and return to work without carrying it into the next engagement.

The thing nobody says about resilience

Resilience is talked about as though it is a property of individuals, something you either have or you do not, something you develop through adversity. There is some truth in that. But in my experience, the more important component is structural: how you have set up your work, your relationships, and your own expectations so that a single failure cannot unravel everything that surrounds it.

I have been doing this work for thirty years. There have been mandates that did not come to anything, relationships that did not survive a difficult negotiation, decisions that looked right at the time and look different now. The thing that has kept me working well through all of it is not toughness. It is the knowledge that the work itself, done properly, has meaning, and that meaning does not depend on any single outcome.

The most underrated skill in any negotiation is knowing when to say nothing.

This is not a technique. Techniques are things you deploy. Silence is something you inhabit or you do not. Most people in high-stakes professional situations are not comfortable with silence. They fill it. They fill it with qualifications and clarifications and additional points they did not need to make, and in doing so they give away the thing they were trying to hold.

Silence as information

In a negotiation, silence is not an absence of communication. It is a particularly dense form of it. When you say nothing after a number has been put on the table, you are communicating that the number is insufficient, that you are not in a hurry, and that you are not afraid of the discomfort the silence is creating. All of that is valuable, and none of it requires words.

The capacity for silence in a professional setting is a direct function of the capacity for silence in general. This is why I believe in meditation, why I believe in the kind of long, patient attention that my father brought to his wildlife photography, why I think the things we practise quietly are the things we draw on loudly. In thirty years of working across cultures, across languages, across enormous differences in how business is conducted and how trust is built, the quality that has served me most consistently is the willingness to stop talking and actually hear what is happening in the room. That is available to everyone. Most people are just too busy speaking to use it.