Abu Dhabi’s national oil company announced Tuesday a $6 billion investment in crude oil drilling as it ramps up production capacity.
The announcement comes a day after the United Arab Emirates (UAE) said a recent UN climate summit in Glasgow was a “success” but that the world needs to keep investing billions in oil and gas.
The UAE is one of the world’s top crude exporters, with an average of 4.2 million barrels per day.
The Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) said the $6 billion investment would “enable drilling growth as it boosts its crude oil production capacity to 5 million barrels per day by 2030”.
The ADNOC investments include contracts with multiple companies, some lasting for a decade, according to a statement released on the second day of the Abu Dhabi International Petroleum Exhibition and Conference.
Both the UAE and neighboring Saudi Arabia, the world’s number one oil exporter, have announced net-zero carbon goals, despite efforts to ramp up oil production.
The UAE has said it hopes to be carbon neutral by 2050.
Nearly 200 countries at the COP26 summit pledged Saturday to speed up the fight against rising temperatures, after two weeks of negotiations.
However, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres warned that “climate catastrophe” is still knocking at the door.
But Sultan al-Jaber, the UAE’s minister of industry and advanced technology, said the COP26 summit “a success”, speaking at the opening session of the Abu Dhabi conference on Monday.
He forecast that the oil and gas industry would have to invest “over $600 billion every year until 2030” just to keep up with the expected demand.
“Yes, renewable energy is the fastest-growing segment of the energy mix, but oil and gas is still the biggest and will be for decades to come,” he said.
“While the world has agreed to accelerate the energy transition, it is still heavily reliant on oil and gas.”
UAE Energy Minister Suhail Mohamed Al-Mazrouei said indications point to an oil supply surplus in the first quarter of 2022.
“2022 will be a year of balance between supply and demand,” he said on Monday.