As oil and gas will continue to play a major role alongside renewables, the focus should be placed on reducing their carbon footprint, according to Saudi state oil company Aramco’s head of the upstream business line.
'While new energy has a role to play, it will be a while before it is ready to shoulder a significant burden of the growing world energy demand. In other words, the existing and new energy will continue to run in parallel for a long time to come,' Nasir K. Al-Naimi said in an interview at the International Petroleum Technology Conference (IPTC) in Kuala Lumpur.
Al-Naimi named groundbreaking technologies, innovation and collaboration among energy players - oil and gas companies, new energy companies, energy equipment manufacturers, service providers, technology developers and all other stakeholders, including governments, as three factors needed to maintain secure and reliable energy.
Taking these factors into consideration, Aramco sees cleaner gas, both domestically and internationally, as an area of growth for the company. And to this end, he said Blue Hydrogen and Blue Ammonia from oil and gas, combined with carbon capture, utilization and storage, or CCUS, has large potential.
Because oil will continue to be an important part of the global energy mix, he envisages a much larger refining and marketing business at a growth rate of 8-10 million barrels per day.
He also foresees substantially more chemicals integration in refineries by taking advantage of research on direct conversion of crude into petrochemicals and more non-metallic materials with major opportunities in large end-use sectors.
By Sibel Morrow
Anadolu Agency
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