Saudi Aramco: The World Needs To Cut Emissions, Not Oil Production 

The COP28 climate summit and the world should focus the debate on how to cut emissions, not on reducing oil and gas production, Saudi Aramco’s chief executive Amin Nasser said on Tuesday.  

“The focus should be on emissions. Today the focus is not purely on emissions, it is: we need to either shut or slow down big time your conventional (energy),” the top executive of the world’s largest oil firm said at the Energy Intelligence Forum in London, as quoted by Reuters.

Earlier this month, OPEC Secretary General Haitham Al Ghais said that representatives from the oil industry and from OPEC would attend the COP28 climate summit in Dubai next month.

“I hope all voices will be at the table at COP28,” Al Ghais said last week.

Speaking at the Energy Intelligence Forum today, Aramco’s Nasser said that the Saudi oil giant is working on renewables, e-fuels, hydrogen, and carbon capture and storage (CCS). But the world will need oil and gas for decades and renewables won't meet this need for decades, he added.

The additional oil and gas demand over the coming decade needs new upstream investments to offset the 5-7% annual decline rates, Nasser noted.

“We need a better dialogue between industry and COP delegates, as industry is the only one capable of delivering new or old energy solutions,” Aramco’s CEO added.

In the energy transition, you don’t want to move from fuel dependency to material dependency, so you need widespread and diversified supply countries, Nasser said.

The COP28 President Designate is Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and group CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), one of the biggest national oil companies.  

“This industry can and must help drive the solutions. For too long, this industry has been viewed as part of the problem, that it's not doing enough and in some cases even blocking progress,” Al Jaber said at the opening of the ADIPEC energy conference in Abu Dhabi earlier this month.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

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