Oil and gas will have a role to play in the energy system for decades to come, BP's chief executive Bernard Looney said on Monday, adding that the industry should try to produce hydrocarbons with the lowest emissions possible.
Any scenario, even the International Energy Agency's Net-Zero by 2050 scenario, predicts that there will still be demand for oil in 2050, Looney told CNBC on the sidelines of the ADIPEC energy conference in Abu Dhabi.
According to the IEA's Net-Zero by 2050 scenario, in a world on track to achieve net-zero emissions within three decades, global oil demand would drop by 75 percent to 24 million barrels per day (bpd), from around 90 million bpd in the pandemic year 2020 and around 100 million bpd in the pre-pandemic 2019.
"So any objective person that looks at this from an objective standpoint is going to say hydrocarbons have a role to play," Looney told CNBC.
As the world will not be moving away entirely from oil and gas, the question becomes "what do you do about that", BP's top executive noted.
"What you do about that is try to produce those hydrocarbons in the best way possible," Looney said.
"It may not be popular to say that oil and gas is going to be in the energy system for decades to come but that is the reality," he told CNBC.
BP, like most European majors, is now pitching itself as an integrated energy company looking to transform into a broader energy firm from an international oil major.
BP has said it would cut its oil and gas production by 40 percent by 2030 through active portfolio management and no exploration in new countries. Shell said earlier this year that its oil production peaked in 2019, while Italy's Eni sees its oil production peaking in 2025.
By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com
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Tsvetana is a writer for Oilprice.com with over a decade of experience writing for news outlets such as iNVEZZ and SeeNews. More