VIDEO: Aramco’s Ahmad O. Al-Khowaiter highlights importance of innovation

Ahmad O. Al-Khowaiter, executive vice president of Technology and Innovation

Energy Intelligence Forum 2023

On the energy transition, we need to be realistic.

We still need conventional energy for many of our applications and uses. Our challenge is to offset the emissions.

I look at this from a technology lens, and we have never had so many good solutions out there to reduce emissions as we have today.

We’ve really seen breakthrough technologies that are addressing emissions from the energy sector. The challenge is scaling that up.

For conventional energy, carbon capture is a great solution. It’s a much more capital-efficient approach, and it’s also very competitive. 

You can leverage existing industry, add carbon capture and sequestration, and therefore, have a much lower cost to decarbonize.

Hydrogen is, in my view, for the hard-to-decarbonize sectors, is really your only option.

Why hydrogen It’s the only drop-in solution for hydrocarbons in heat, in industry, and in petrochemicals. 

For example, for the production of iron, hydrogen can pretty much replace methane. If you take those practices and apply them across the industry, there’s huge low-hanging fruit there.

We will have the infrastructure in place to be able to decarbonize our traditional industries, petrochemicals, steel, and the oil and gas industry itself.