Saudi ‘call to ac­tion’ with car­bon trad­ing sys­tem to boost sus­tain­abil­ity

The National - News - - THE BIG PICTURE - SARMAD KHAN

Saudi Ara­bia plans to de­velop its own car­bon trad­ing mech­a­nism as part of a move to de­velop a circular car­bon econ­omy by the time it hosts next year’s G20 sum­mit next year.

The world’s big­gest oil ex­porter is look­ing to achieve stan­dards set un­der the United Na­tions Sus­tain­able De­vel­op­ment Goals and is look­ing to de­velop a sys­tem where car­bon emis­sions are re­duced, reused, re­cy­cled and re­moved to be used in other eco­nom­i­cally vi­able ven­tures to boost the econ­omy, en­ergy min­is­ter Prince Ab­du­laziz bin Sal­man told del­e­gates at the third Fu­ture In­vest­ment Ini­tia­tive in Riyadh.

The king­dom will de­velop a “closed loop sys­tem”, which will help to re­store car­bon bal­ance and con­trib­ute to global eco­nomic growth in a sus­tain­able man­ner, he added.

“Con­sid­er­ing our piv­otal role [as a global en­ergy pro­ducer] it is our re­spon­si­bil­ity to find a so­lu­tion through in­no­va­tion and col­lab­o­ra­tion to cre­ate a sus­tain­able frame­work of growth,” he said.

The prince said Saudi Ara­bia will soon re­veal “a fair car­bon trad­ing sys­tem, learn­ing from the Euro­pean ver­sion, which didn’t work”.

As Saudi Ara­bia hosts the G20 next year, one of its main fo­cuses will be on global en­ergy ac­cess and a clean en­ergy sys­tem that will be the back­bone of the king­dom’s circular car­bon econ­omy con­cept, he said.

“Car­bon is not the en­emy ... with the circular car­bon econ­omy, car­bon will be an op­por­tu­nity,” he said. The ini­tia­tive is Saudi Ara­bia’s “call to ac­tion”, Prince Ab­du­laziz added.

Saudi Ara­bia pro­duces 10 mil­lion bar­rels per day of crude and has about 260 bil­lion bar­rels of proven oil re­serves. It is also among the top 10 gas pro­duc­ers glob­ally with more than 900 bil­lion cu­bic me­tres of proven gas re­serves.

De­spite ad­vance­ments in the re­new­ables and the progress made in re­duc­tions in emis­sions glob­ally, Prince Ab­du­laziz said the world can­not achieve car­bon bal­ance through these two means alone. This is be­cause much of the world’s en­ergy is con­sumed in sec­tors that are dif­fi­cult to de­car­bonise – heat, in­dus­trial pro­cesses and trans­porta­tion.

How­ever, the con­cept of re­use has been proven, he said. The king­dom, which tra­di­tion­ally flared as­so­ci­ated gases in oil pro­duc­tion, has been cap­tur­ing them and us­ing them in ways that have cre­ated jobs, fu­elled power plants and con­trib­uted to GDP growth.

Saudi Ara­bia will re­duce lo­cal en­ergy con­sump­tion de­mand by as much as 2 mil­lion bar­rels of oil equiv­a­lent by 2030, Prince Ab­du­laziz said.

“I find this to be a pro­gres­sive con­cept, very bold and the in­dus­try will ap­pre­ci­ate such a proac­tive step be­ing taken by a ma­jor oil-pro­duc­ing na­tion,” said Dr Sul­tan Al Jaber, UAE

Min­is­ter of State and group chief ex­ec­u­tive of Abu Dhabi Na­tional Oil Com­pany. “To­day they [Saudi Ara­bia] ex­tended an open in­vi­ta­tion through this new ini­tia­tive to col­lab­o­rate and co-op­er­ate with the king­dom to ad­dress this global chal­lenge.”

De­vel­op­ing such a con­cept, he said, is not a lux­ury, but a ne­ces­sity. “We must em­brace the fact that our in­dus­try is be­ing dis­rupted and in­stead of re­sist­ing it, we should em­brace it and come up with real, true so­lu­tions cen­tred around cus­tomers and true part­ner­ship mod­els,” Dr Al Jaber added.

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from UAE

© PressReader. All rights reserved.