The gas industry will be both resilient and critical in the journey to a net zero carbon position by mid-century, according to experts speaking at the Gastech Virtual Summit, which took place digitally from 7-11 September
The strategic and technical conference programmes featured more than 200 speakers, in 89 conference sessions and presentations. More than 1,500 delegates participated in the global gas, LNG and energy industry’s premier knowledge exchange platform. Issues impacting the future of the industry, energy security of supply, affordability and sustainability, the prospects for demand and investment recovery and changes to supply in a post-COVID-19 world are top of the agenda.
Joseph McMonigle, secretary general of International Energy Forum, opened Day 2 of the conference with a keynote address saying, “The pandemic increases the stakes by pushing the demand gap out further over the next decade. This opens a new window of opportunity that enables the gas industry to play a larger role in achieving climate, clean air, and energy access goals.”
Faisel Khan, chief financial officer of Sempra LNG, added, “We're quite optimistic on the growth and need of natural gas and LNG across the world for some time to come, especially in Asia. We see it eventually as competing with coal on a long-term basis both from a social cost perspective in terms of GHG emissions and even potentially on a price basis for a long time.”
Thomas Siebal, author, chairman and CEO at C3.ai, spoke at a Gastech Tech Talk on the digital transformation of the oil and gas industry and the importance of digital technologies in surviving the impact of COVID-19. He commented, “When we get to this issue of corporate mass extinction and digital transformation, predictions are that 70% of the existing companies today will go digital and 21% will succeed. The rest will go out of business. They'll be acquired, they'll be merged and they'll cease to exist. This is accelerated by what's been going on. This digital transformation process has clearly been accelerated in the post-COVID economy.”
Keisuke Sadamori, director, energy markets and aecurity of International Energy Agency, remarked, “There’s a lot of opportunity now for hydrogen probably more than ever before, so wemust start now. What we do between now and 2030 is critical, the challenge is to turn the momentum into investment decisions.”
