What happens when you bring a billion dollars to the high-stakes world of offshore energy development? According to Allan Marks, one of the world's foremost experts on project finance, success depends on navigating a complex web of technical challenges, regulatory frameworks, and financial structures tailored to fundamentally different risk profiles.
Offshore energy development—whether wind turbines or oil platforms—faces universal challenges. Projects must withstand harsh marine environments, secure federal permits across multiple agencies, use specialized vessels, and construct elaborate transmission networks to bring energy ashore. Yet beneath these similarities lie striking differences in financial approach.
Oil and gas developers typically maintain tight control over technology and operations, keeping risks on their balance sheets while riding the volatile waves of commodity markets. When prices surge, these projects generate extraordinary profits. When markets crash, they weather the storm through diversified portfolios. The opposite holds true for offshore wind, where developers aggressively shed risk through contracts with equipment manufacturers and other partners. With fixed-price power contracts providing stable revenue, wind projects can support highly-leveraged capital stacks—often 60-70% debt—maximizing returns through financial engineering rather than commodity speculation.
The current political climate creates particular challenges for U.S. offshore wind. While projects with existing leases continue development, regulatory uncertainty affects the entire supply chain. Each delay increases exposure to inflation, interest rate fluctuations, and supply chain disruptions. Meanwhile, America faces growing competition from both Europe's mature offshore wind sector and China's explosive growth, which has added more capacity in 18 months than Europe built in two decades.
Government support remains crucial across all energy sectors. Long-standing oil and gas tax benefits like the intangible drilling cost deduction (established 1916) helped enable America's shale revolution, while the Inflation Reduction Act's decade-long tax credits aim to provide similar certainty for renewables investors. Allan emphasizes that effective energy policy must transcend political cycles, allowing companies to make confident long-term investments in America's energy future.
