“The world risks a severe deficit of oil and gas,” Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin said Saturday at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. “The world consumes oil, but isn’t ready to invest in it.”
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Saudi Energy Minister Abdulaziz bin Salman Al-Saud speaks at a conference in Riyadh on January 27, 2021.
Photo: Fayez Nuraldine/AFP (Getty Images)
Oil-producing heavyweights like Russia and Saudi Arabia will not go quietly into the night. This week, ministers from those and other countries slammed the latest report from the International Energy Agencycalling for all new oil and gas development to stop by next year, using some pretty heated (and funny) rhetoric.
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The “euphoria” around the transition to clean energy is “dangerous,” Qatar’s Energy Minister Saad Sherida Al Kaabi said during remarks at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in Russia on Thursday. Others, like Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak, painted a doomsday scenario of unstable oil markets if the world followed the IEA roadmap. Without investments in new oil and gas exploration, he said, “the price for oil will go to, what, $200? Gas prices will skyrocket.”
It comes at a time when policymakers are under immense pressure to deliver on promises made as part of the Paris Agreement, a landmark accord widely recognized as critically important to avoid the most devastating impacts of climate change.
Almost 200 countries, including Russia and Saudi Arabia, ratified the Paris climate accord in 2015, agreeing to pursue efforts to limit the planet s temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The agreement requires net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
Remarkably, the world s leading energy advisor delivered its starkest warning yet on global fossil fuel use last month, saying the exploitation and development of new oil and gas fields must stop this year if the world wants to reach net-zero emissions by the middle of the century.