What is a nation without energy?
Security of supply is the sovereign risk of our age. When geopolitics closes a strait or a market stops answering tenders, no state can leave the power fleet, the grid or the forces exposed. Coal, fuels, LNG, crude, strategic materials — governments increasingly secure them state-to-state. The reasons differ; the consequence is the same.
Integrity must be restored
Sometimes because open tenders have been captured, and the state-to-state route is how integrity returns to the supply of a nation.
Security outweighs process
Sometimes because supply security outweighs process — in an age of geopolitical tension, markets abandon a buyer precisely when supply matters most.
There is only one source
And sometimes because there is only one realistic source of supply — and competition never existed to begin with.
of the world's oil and gas reserves are held by state-owned companies. The counterparty is a state — whether the contract says so or not.
of imported fuel in several developing nations already arrives under G2G supply contracts.
of credit secured in recent G2G fuel programmes — against a 30-day commercial standard.
Three arenas. One discipline.
States contract state-to-state for their most sensitive and strategic requirements — the ones open bidding cannot secure. We provide G2G procurement services and advisory across all three arenas. The stakes differ; the discipline is the same.
Critical minerals & energy
Fuels, LNG, crude and coal for the power fleet, the grid and the forces — and, increasingly, the materials of the energy transition: lithium, copper, cobalt. Often structured as resource-backed arrangements, where infrastructure or finance is exchanged for access to supply. The heart of our practice, and of this site.
Infrastructure & development
Roads, ports, energy grids — and now the infrastructure of intelligence: AI datacenters. Data is the new oil, and in the age of AI compute has become a sovereign resource. These deals arrive as complex structures — debt or equity, sanctions and security woven through — and with strings attached, in construction and in operations. Design decides whether the strings serve the state, or bind it.
Defence & security
The most established G2G channel of all: equipment, training and logistical support contracted government-to-government — the model of the US Foreign Military Sales program, which alone concluded US$117.9 billion of state-to-state sales in one recent year. Chosen for security of supply, guaranteed performance and alliance — and in need of exactly the same benchmarked pricing and audit-ready governance.
In a G2G deal, the buying government is playing away from home.
The deal is negotiated in the seller's market, under conventions the seller's team uses daily. The counterparty's trading arm does this thousands of times a year; a ministry's procurement team does it once a decade. And the difficulty compounds:
The executor is also the overseer
In most G2G structures, the team that negotiates and executes the deal is the same team that provides its oversight. However capable and however honest, that is a structural conflict of interest — and no internal control can cure it. Compliance and governance standards can only be credibly met when assurance stands outside the process it assures.
The information asymmetry is total
The seller knows the netbacks, the freight economics and what every other buyer pays. Without a tender, there are no competing bids to reveal any of it — the market price must be reconstructed, not discovered.
No competitive reference — and no alibi
In a tender, the winning bid is its own justification. In a G2G deal, every number must be defended on its merits, alone — by the officials who agreed it.
Recourse is diplomacy
A sovereign counterparty cannot be pursued like a contractor. Recourse must be designed into the mechanics before the first cargo — it cannot be enforced through the relationship afterwards.
Quality is asserted in one country, discovered in another
Certificates issued at load port, findings that contradict them at discharge — the gap between what was certified and what arrives is where fortunes are lost.
The deal outlives everyone who signed it
Ten- and fifteen-year terms span governments, ministers and price cycles on both sides. Only the review mechanics decide who carries the market nobody predicted.
The scrutiny is asymmetric too
Parliament, the auditor and the press will examine the deal for years. Without a contemporaneous record made in its defence, even a good deal is indefensible.
powerabode provides the commercial architecture — and the governance around it.
A G2G price is never a flat number. It is a formula — a public benchmark, a differential, a slope. Deal design is the craft of setting those few numbers right, and keeping them right for the life of the contract. It delivers four things:
Competitive
Every well-designed G2G contract is priced against the world market: a public benchmark — Brent, Platts — plus a differential, or an oil-indexed slope for LNG. The whole competition lives in those few numbers. One point on the slope of a fifteen-year LNG contract is worth hundreds of millions. We negotiate exactly there.
Compliant
When the benchmark is public and the differential is explained, the deal carries its own defence: parliament and the auditor can trace every price back to the world market. Compliance is built into the formula — not written up after it.
Governed
Long contracts meet markets nobody predicted. Floors and ceilings protect both states when prices spike or crash; review clauses reopen a formula that drifts from reality; escrow and payment mechanics keep discipline on both sides — for the life of the deal.
Smart procurement
Price is one lever among several. Extended credit — 180 days instead of 30 — is a discount in the time value of money, and relief for the currency. Local-currency clearing eases the dollar constraint. And the right duration for the right product — months for fuels, decades for LNG — is itself a source of value.
One contract, state to state
Buying government
- pricing formula
- quality regime
- sovereign counterparty
- state trader
- review & reopener clauses
The G2G contract
- pricing formula · quality regime
- delivery & penalty mechanics
- review & reopener clauses
Selling government
- ministry
- state enterprise
- delivery & penalty mechanics
Independent Architecture & Assurance
designs the architecture, governs the regime —
and stands outside the process it assures
Parliament
receives published benchmarkingAuditor‑General
receives published benchmarkingWe are a neutral party in the procurement process: we take no position in the trade, carry no cargo, and represent no supplier. That neutrality separates execution from oversight — and it is what makes the governance credible on both sides of the table.
One part, or all of it.
Governments engage us for a single role or the full procurement mandate. Every role is delivered to the standard of the international majors' contracting floors — brought to the government's side of the table.
Market access, on your mandate
We identify and qualify credible sources of supply — acting solely for the buyer. We represent no supplier and take no position in the trade.
Procurement process design and execution
Where competition exists, we design and run the tender to the discipline of the international majors. Where it does not, we build structured price discovery that does the tender's work without one.
Negotiation, led or shadowed
We lead the negotiation on your behalf, or sit behind your team and direct it — bringing the counterparty's own playbook, because our people spent their careers writing it.
Deal architecture
Pricing formulas linked to international indices, quality regimes with payment banding, delivery, penalty and rejection mechanics — written before the first cargo.
Governance where no competition exists
Published benchmarking, compliance standards and an audit-ready deal file — a contemporaneous record that protects the officials who sign.
Capability transfer
We train, coach and supervise the government's own team through the live deal — so the second deal needs less of us than the first.
Post-award management
We stay on: performance against the contract, and the structured joint optimisation between the two states that unlocks the value no tender ever could.
One role or all seven — the standard is the same.
Where competition never existed, we add what competition never could.
Competitive tenders only ever discipline the rates — and rates are a minority of the value in any supply relationship. The greater part lives in efficiency and specification: logistics, scheduling, quality bands, cargo sizing, working capital, the match between what is specified and what is needed.
That value is unlocked only through a structured, joint optimisation process between the two governments and their enterprises. We introduce that process, and we manage it — with an agreed baseline, measured outcomes, and results both parties can defend at home.
Sovereign negotiations are won away from the table.
A G2G negotiation is never two people at a table. On each side sit ministries of energy and finance, state enterprises, regulators, auditors, parliament and lenders — a dozen actors, each with its own mandate, its own risk and its own clock. Orchestrating them is the negotiation.
Our negotiation practice is led at principal level — trained at Harvard in three-dimensional negotiation during a twenty-year career inside the majors, and in international oil and gas law at Imperial College London. Tactics at the table is the smallest dimension. The second is the design of the deal itself — the structure in which value is found and divided. The third, decisive in sovereign work, is the setup: the right parties, in the right sequence, with the right alternatives, before anyone sits down.
One label, four forms of deal.
G2G is rarely a simple buyer–seller agreement. In practice it takes four forms — and each needs its own architecture:
Direct term supply
State buys from state — term contracts for fuels, crude and LNG, priced against public benchmarks, bypassing the trading desks entirely. The workhorse of G2G: months for fuels, a decade or more for LNG.
Resource-for-infrastructure — barter
No cash changes hands: a partner state builds the railway, the port, the pipeline — and is repaid in cargoes, each valued against the market benchmark on the day it loads, until the debt is cleared. Powerful — and only as fair as the valuation mechanics behind it.
Transit & storage frameworks
Landlocked nations contract state-to-state with coastal neighbours for ports, pipelines and storage — diversifying routes, pooling demand, and cutting the transport premium out of every litre.
Bilateral joint ventures
Two states invest together — in refining, terminals or upstream assets — binding supply security into shared ownership for the long term. The deepest form of the deal, and the hardest to unwind: design matters most here.
Mitigating FX and currency risk
For many buying nations the dollar is the real constraint — not the fuel. Since world energy markets settle in dollars, a country with thin reserves can struggle to buy at all. Well-designed G2G structures answer this directly.
Extended credit windows defer dollar demand — 180 days instead of the commercial 30 — backed by sovereign letters of credit. Local-currency clearing settles the trade through paired escrow accounts at the two central banks, without touching scarce reserves. Designed well, the payment architecture is worth as much as the price itself.
Strings attached — from ports to AI datacenters
Infrastructure finance rarely comes clean. Ports, tunnels, corridors — the capital arrives with conditions in construction execution, and conditions again in operations. The age of AI has written the newest chapter: hyperscalers and their supply chain build sovereign AI datacenters at national scale, and they too come with strings attached — on power, on land, on data, on who operates what.
Debt or equity, the structure decides who really controls the asset. Reading the strings before signature — and pricing them — is deal design. The scale is real: Canada's federal G2G contracting agency alone signed C$6.1 billion of state-to-state contracts in a single year, each carrying its own conditions.
The discipline of the international majors' contracting floors — delivered as sovereign capability.
We bring the craft of the international majors' contracting floors: the discipline that writes drivers into remuneration, intent into specification, and accountability into long-term relationships.
Built by people who ran these processes inside IOCs — delivered as architecture the governments' own institutions operate.
“We are outsiders from the inside.”
In this work, the transparency of the adviser is part of the deal.
Our remuneration is hybrid: a fixed architecture fee, and a deal-specific component driven by results.
A fixed architecture fee
Agreed in advance and independent of the deal's size — so our advice on whether and how to contract is never coloured by the trade.
A result-driven component
Tied to measured outcomes against the agreed baseline — savings realised, recovery achieved, benchmark held. Never a share of the trade itself.
Always disclosed
Both components fully visible to our client — the same standard of transparency we design into the deal itself.
Outsiders from the inside.
G2G Deal Design is a practice of powerabode. powerabode is not a consultancy — it is a commercial-systems company: the doctrine of the integrated supply chain, productised, and embedded in systems that operate inside the client's own environment.
Through decades of operated ventures, the majors handed their national partners everything except two crafts: unlocking the reservoir, and the art of commercialisation. powerabode exists to close the second void — permanently, as systems and capability that do not resign, do not rotate out, and do not bill by the hour.
With a background in underground infrastructure for both energy and fibre optics, I realised how important energy and connectivity are. Advising governments and their agencies in procuring energy sources has developed our portfolio of working with NOCs and IOCs.
About the company
powerabode was founded in 2018 in Dubai. The founders are Dutch, and the team is built with frontline energy executives with long international careers in energy, working with NOCs and IOCs across the globe. The activities of powerabode are supported by their in-house developed AI ecosystem. The systems focus on cost efficiency, governance and compliance of the contracting and procurement supply chain activities in energy.
For corporate enquiries to the parent company, powerabode DMCC: info@powerabode.com — or visit www.powerabode.com. For G2G Deal Design engagements, write to contact@g2gdealdesign.com.
Government-to-government deals, in plain terms.
What is a government-to-government (G2G) energy deal?
What does G2G Deal Design do for the buying government?
How are compliance and governance standards met without a tender?
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How is G2G Deal Design remunerated?
A conversation, in confidence.
Deal design engagements begin with a private discussion of the procurement need at hand — its commodity, its counterparty, its constraints. We work with governments and state enterprises across Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Europe, and respond within two working days.
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