Sultan Al Jaber was selected to lead COP28 — the most important climate summit. He also runs the oil and gas behemoth Adnoc.
In the months before the signing of the Paris Agreement, the then-crown prince of oil-rich Abu Dhabi wondered aloud about the fate of his sheikhdom at the end of the fossil fuel era. “After we have loaded this last barrel of oil, are we going to feel sad?” Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan asked attendees at the 2015 Government Summit in the United Arab Emirates. “If our investment today is right, I think—dear brothers and sisters—we will celebrate that moment.”
Soon the sheikh handed the job of running the Abu Dhabi National Oil Co., the world’s 12th-largest producer of oil and gas, to an Emirati renewables executive named Sultan Al Jaber. The move seemed to signal a shift in a country sitting atop about $9 trillion in untapped oil. The extraordinary wealth generated by Adnoc has filled a sparsely populated desert with gleaming cityscapes, lush golf courses and giant airports over just a few decades. It was to be entrusted to someone who’d spent much of his career making investments in renewable energy and trying without success to build a zero-carbon city in the desert. The mission: Figuring out how to sell energy indefinitely, even if that means doing so—at some point—without planet-warming emissions…Read More…
Source: Bloomberg
