By: James Lindsay, Director, Investments
Imagine if every transaction you made, every strategic move you took, carried a hidden surcharge you couldn’t control—a cost dictated by a headline thousands of miles away. That’s the “volatility exposure premium” in action, and right now it is fundamentally restructuring entire industries.
Global volatility is impacting everything from the fertilizer on our farms to the steel in our skyscrapers and the massive power demands of the AI revolution. Energy and oil-related inputs account for roughly six percent of the Consumer Price Index (CPI). Because of this, energy shocks do more than raise prices—they influence monetary policy, driving up interest rates and punishing those tied to rigid, single-source supply chains.
We are currently witnessing the end of an era defined by efficiency and globalization and facing the beginning of one defined by domestic resilience. This shift was a defining theme at CERAWeek 2026 in Houston this week. As U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright noted, “when demand goes up, supply has to go up.” This means we have to think differently and be honest about the fact that we need to diversify our energy supply locally to protect against global vulnerabilities – like we have seen recently with the Strait of Hormuz.
True resilience is found by shifting that new supply toward modular, localized and electrified technologies that sit outside the reach of geopolitical friction. By decoupling production from volatile commodity chains, we move from managing a crisis to eliminating the exposure premium entirely.
Unfortunately, investors are still pricing for a world that no longer exists. There is a massive valuation gap as the markets are still betting on a “return to normal”—a fantasy that ignores our geopolitical reality by assuming the global stability of the last decade was the rule, not the exception.
Over the past five years, natural gas prices have experienced repeated multi-fold swings across regions, while key shipping routes—from the Strait of Hormuz to the Red Sea—have faced recurring disruptions. Despite this, many industrial assets are still underwritten on historical cost and logistical assumptions that have proven to be dangerously unreliable.
This disconnect is most visible in sectors like ammonia, cement and steel, where energy can account for 30–70% of operating costs.
As a result, flexibility—modularity, fuel switching, localized production—is systematically undervalued.
What appears more expensive on a static basis is often structurally cheaper in a consistently volatile system.
The past 20 years rewarded efficiency at any cost; the next 20 will reward the ability to adapt and localize supply chains. We are currently seeing a historic reallocation of capital toward flexible systems, with infrastructure CAPEX accelerating at twice the magnitude of the initial digital build-out of the early 2000s.
Having spent over a decade in the oil and gas industry, I haven’t seen a capital reallocation of this magnitude since the unconventional energy boom in the 2010s—which saw the U.S. pivot from zero exports to becoming the world’s leading supplier of crude oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG)—but this time, the momentum is structural, not cyclical.
At Builders Vision, we see this volatility as not just a risk to be managed, but an investable opportunity to build businesses that don’t just survive shocks—they grow alongside them. Across our three sectors, we see this transformation taking place in real-time:
In an era of persistent uncertainty, the most compelling market opportunity lies in the transition from global fragility to localized strength. For investors, the energy transition is no longer an ESG line item—it is a practical strategy for capturing alpha by removing the volatility exposure premium embedded in core industrial assets.
To navigate this shift, we focus on three strategic pillars:
The most immediate opportunity lies in supply chain arbitrage: the gap between the perceived cost of bio-based or circular materials and their volatility-adjusted cost.
Today, petroleum-based plastics or natural-gas-linked fertilizers may appear cheaper on a spot basis. But when geopolitical shocks hit key nodes like the Strait of Hormuz, those “cheap” inputs quickly become margin liabilities.
We look for platforms—from recycled materials to green ammonia—that can capture market share the moment fossil-fuel-linked competitors are forced to raise prices.
In a volatile world, the so-called green premium increasingly looks like a stability discount.
Capital is beginning to shift toward modular, flexible systems that can be deployed closer to the point of need. Examples range from on-site thermal storage for a steel mill to compact fertilizer production for regional agricultural hubs.
Distributed infrastructure allows operators to partially decouple from global logistics and energy volatility. It also creates a real option on energy—providing the ability to scale incrementally, respond to local demand and avoid the concentration risks traditionally embedded in large centralized assets.
Finally, every investment should undergo a fragility audit.
This means interrogating the energy intensity and supply concentration embedded in a company’s margin structure. If a business relies on a single carbon-linked input that must traverse geopolitical chokepoints, it’s essentially waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Increasingly, value is found in hardened cost structures—companies that have engineered their operations for adaptability, rather than relying on a return to “normal” in the global commodity markets.
In a world of frequent shocks, one capability matters more than any other: the ability to keep production online while competitors are waiting for a shipment that may never arrive.
The market is bifurcating.
Investors will increasingly have to choose between assets tied to fragile supply chains and platforms designed for resilience.
The opportunity now is to back the scalable, modular systems that can operate through volatility—and in doing so, define the next generation of industrial infrastructure.