Issue Infrastructure: national strategies lock in access for decades

Summary

Infrastructure portfolios are expanding into frontier domains, including Arctic ports, links between space and ground systems, mineral processing hubs and carbon sequestration networks. National industrial strategies are treating access to resources and their processing as strategic economic infrastructure rather than as upstream inputs. EY cites examples ranging from the EU's Net-Zero Industry Act and India's Production-Linked Incentive schemes to Saudi Arabia's Mining Strategy. Choices about where assets sit, how they are designed and who owns them fix access routes, processing capacity and dependencies for decades, making resource competition harder to reverse. Infrastructure investors and engineering, procurement and construction firms are therefore taking on long-lived exposure to geopolitical fragmentation and supply chain disruption.