00:00Today on Forbes, the slow greening of the world's biggest oil company.
00:06Amin Nasser, the CEO of Saudi Aramco,
00:09declared this year that the age of fossil fuels is far from over.
00:14He said, quote,
00:15''Peak oil and gas is unlikely to come for some time, let alone 2030.
00:20We should abandon the fantasy of phasing out oil and gas
00:23and instead invest in them adequately, reflecting realistic demand assumptions.''
00:29Of course, he would say that.
00:31He's the head of the world's biggest oil company,
00:34which is ranked number three on this year's Forbes Global 2000 list,
00:37down one spot from last year on lower oil prices.
00:42The Global 2000 list is our annual ranking of the world's largest public companies,
00:47which was released last week.
00:49As CEO of Aramco,
00:51Nasser oversees the production of more than 12 million barrels per day of oil and gas.
00:57Aramco is such a behemoth that both its output and $117 billion in net income
01:03is more than three times higher even than ExxonMobil,
01:06which is down six spots to number 14 on this year's list.
01:10Chevron, number 22 and down four spots,
01:13looks like a comparative pipsqueak with merely $20 billion in profits last year.
01:19And Aramco isn't going anywhere.
01:21With proven reserves of well over 200 billion barrels,
01:25it can keep that pace for decades to come.
01:28So yes, Nasser is biased.
01:30But the thing is, he's not wrong.
01:33Renewable, zero-carbon energy is so far an addition, not a transition.
01:38For all the endless hype about the transition away from oil, gas and coal,
01:42the reality is that the world has never relied more on carbon-spewing energy sources
01:46than it does now.
01:48Nasser said, quote,
01:50In the real world, the current transition strategy is visibly failing on most fronts.
01:56So far, renewables can't scale fast enough.
01:59Their upfront costs are too high, and they are not as convenient.
02:03For all of China's advances in erecting solar panels, for example,
02:07it still burned a record 5 billion tons of coal last year,
02:1010 times U.S. coal consumption.
02:13Electric vehicles now make up 19% of global car sales,
02:17yet global petroleum consumption continues to inch past 100 million barrels per day.
02:23According to Claudio Gallimberti, an analyst at consultancy Rystad Energy,
02:28quote,
02:28Oil demand remains sticky and will continue to rise, quote,
02:33as low-carbon alternatives are not yet sufficiently developed
02:36or economically competitive to offset the growing demand for transportation and industrial services.
02:43So it might surprise you to learn that Aramco, ironically,
02:46is already one of the world's biggest investors in the low-carbon transition.
02:51Nasser has dedicated 10% of its $50 billion a year in capital spending to renewables
02:56and launched the Aramco New Energies division.
03:00This year, they completed the Sudair solar project with 1.5 gigawatts of capacity,
03:05while the 2.7 gigawatt Shuaiba solar field will be completed next year.
03:10By 2030, Aramco promises 12 gigawatts of solar and wind.
03:14The company is in talks with Spanish oil giant Repsol for a stake in its renewables business,
03:20building on an existing Repsol JV to make zero-carbon jet fuel
03:24using so-called green hydrogen and captured carbon dioxide.
03:29At Aramco's Jubail refining complex,
03:31they are building a system to grab 9 million tons a year of CO2.
03:35That will complement an existing process that captures carbon emissions
03:39from an ethylene glycol plant and turns it into low-carbon methanol.
03:44Yet if Aramco is going to deliver on Nasser's promise to capture and sequester
03:4844 million tons per year of CO2 by 2035, it will need some new tricks.
03:55To hunt them down, Aramco has more than doubled funding to venture capital arm Aramco Ventures,
04:00with $4 billion available for investments.
04:03Among the most promising is a new investment of tens of millions of dollars
04:07that Aramco Ventures has made into a New Mexico-based startup called Spiritus.
04:12Born out of Los Alamos National Lab, Spiritus co-founders Charles Kadu and Matt Lee
04:18have developed a novel technology that they claim absorbs CO2 from the air.
04:23And unlike competing CO2 capture technologies,
04:25which rely on giant fans and compressors to suck in air,
04:29Spiritus' devices work passively, as quiet as a tree.
04:35For full coverage, check out Christopher Hellman's piece on forbes.com.
04:40This is Kieran Meadows from Forbes. Thanks for tuning in.
Comments