Secretary General of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), Haitham Al-Ghais, called for increased investment in oil exploitation to meet global needs. At the same time, he said that climate policy should be more balanced and fair.
Speaking at an energy conference in Cairo, Al-Ghaiz said all parties involved in today’s climate negotiations must pause for a moment and look at the bigger picture.
According to him, everyone should work on an energy transition that is orderly and inclusive and helps provide energy security for everyone.
The war in Ukraine has led to an energy crisis over the past year, which has driven up oil and natural gas prices. While European countries are rapidly trying to find other sources to replace Russia’s energy sources, environmentalists fear that the crisis will revert to the exploitation of fossil fuels and abandon commitments to fight climate change.
Thus, US President Joe Biden said last week during his annual speech on the country’s state that we will need oil for at least another decade.
According to Bloomberg, oil giant Shell has warned that it will stop accelerating investments in renewable energy sources. At the same time, BP will slow down planned shutdowns of oil and gas production.
Al-Ghaiz told the energy conference that the oil industry has been suffering from chronic underinvestment for several years and will need $500 billion in annual investment by 2045.
The global increase in the cost of marine fuel transportation
The cost of transporting oil, gasoline, and other fuels by ocean tankers is increasing daily after the sanctions aimed at selling Russian oil and its derivatives. Daily earnings for relatively small tankers that deliver refined fuels to countries on the Atlantic Ocean rose by more than 400 percent in the past week.
According to data from the Baltic Stock Exchange in London, the cost of transportation reached an average price of $55,857 per delivery. According to Bloomberg, the cost of overseas transportation rose by 58 percent on Thursday, which is the largest daily increase since the end of 2021. Earnings from ship transport were the highest since the pandemic’s beginning in 2020, when ships were massively used for oil storage.
