Natural gas in energy supply is not going anywhere and its demand will only rise with growth in economies and global population, which will require additional LNG projects to come online after 2030, the energy minister of one of the biggest LNG exporters, Qatar, said on Wednesday.
“Everybody’s trying to get the inflation down, so if we have a reasonable economic growth going forward, I think you’ll see that all the supply and demand will catch up and you’ll need another phase of development of gas in the [2030s],” Saad Sherida Al-Kaabi, Qatar’s Energy Minister and President and CEO of QatarEnergy, said at the Qatar Economic Forum in Doha.
Qatar, which is currently working on huge LNG expansion projects, expects to sign additional long-term contracts to supply the super-chilled fuel with demand growing in Asia and Europe, Al-Kaabi said at the forum, as carried by The National.
“If you look at the expectation of having 1.5 to 2 billion more people in the next 30 years or so, that means we will need more energy, more power, and even more petrochemicals for materials we use every day. We also need to be fair to that population and make sure they have access to reasonably priced power,” Al-Kaabi said.
LNG will be needed for a very long time, the minister said.
“LNG is not going away any anytime soon, as was recently made clear by the G7 as well as by many countries around the world, who have changed their position of moving away from fossil fuels.”
In discussions about the energy transition, Al-Kaabi told the forum,
“Many promises were made by politicians, who do not really understand the details of how to achieve this transition. And it was driven to a point where it became in vogue, if you will, for everybody to say ‘net zero, environmental, and green’, which got them elected.”
“But now, as reality sets in five or six years later, they say we cannot achieve what we have promised. The problem is that targets were overstretched and could not have been reached anyway,” he added.