Strategy & Growth
Building a New Growth Engine for a National Energy Major
Helped a state-linked energy major turn a diversification mandate into four funded growth platforms, a five-year roadmap and a governance model the board could act on.
The challenge
The group's shareholders had set a clear diversification mandate: reduce dependence on upstream and downstream hydrocarbons and build new revenue streams ahead of an accelerating energy transition. The ambition was well understood at board level, but eighteen months in, the mandate had produced a long list of adjacent-market ideas — specialty chemicals, low-carbon fuels, industrial services, energy-transition consulting — with no shared framework for deciding which to fund, in what order, or with what capital.
Internally, the leadership team was split. Business unit heads each championed the adjacency closest to their own asset base, and the executive committee had no consistent way to compare a capital-intensive joint venture against a lower-risk services play. Without a decision framework, the diversification agenda risked becoming a list of pilots rather than a funded portfolio.
What we did
- Screened roughly 30 candidate growth adjacencies against a common framework — capital intensity, time to first revenue, and fit with the group's existing assets and capabilities
- Ran a series of executive committee working sessions to pressure-test the shortlist and force explicit trade-offs between the business unit heads' competing priorities
- Built five-year financial models and detailed business cases for the four platforms taken forward, including make, buy and joint-venture options for each
- Designed the stage-gate governance model — a board sub-committee and capital-release gates — needed to fund and monitor the platforms going forward
- Stood up a small transformation office to carry the first 100 days of execution on each platform before handing over to the newly named internal owners
The outcome
The board approved four growth platforms — a low-carbon fuels joint venture, a specialty chemicals unit, an industrial services arm, and an energy-transition advisory offering — with committed capital and named executive sponsors, all within the 18-month engagement.
A stage-gate governance model is now embedded in the group's annual planning cycle, giving the board a repeatable way to evaluate future adjacencies rather than relitigating the framework each time.
Two of the four platforms reached first revenue before the engagement closed; the group has since reused the screening framework, unprompted, for a second wave of opportunity assessment.
Facing something similar?
Our Strategy & Growth Advisory practice works with GCC leadership teams on exactly this.