BAKU, Azerbaijan, May 24. US can provide ample resources to the rest of the world, but it is becoming more and more difficult, Vicki Hollub, president and CEO of Occidental Petroleum, said at the World Economic Forum, Trend reports.
“We have a lot of oil and gas resources remaining in the US and we can provide it to the rest of the world. However, it is becoming more and more difficult to do that because we’re getting a lot of headwinds in the US. And one is the believe that we can end the use of oil and gas sooner rather than later. You create that environment when people believe that’s possible. That makes investors and others less willing to invest in the industry, makes us a weaker industry and likely unable to continue help with this transition,” she added.
Hollub pointed out that the climate change is real and it is happening faster.
“And I believe in all of the above approach to climate mitigation and that is the use of renewables - we use solar in our operations – the use of wind power and electric vehicles (EVs). We have got to do everything we can to mitigate climate change. I feel that the conversation really should be more about emissions and how do we mitigate emissions. What goes into the atmosphere is causing the problem. When you look at solar, wind power or EVs, all of those have carbon footprint too. We have to mitigate the carbon footprint of every other alternative energy that we’re going to develop,” said the CEO of Occidental Petroleum.
She believes that the best way to do that is to use the strategy of where one can actually produce carbon neutral oil.
“Producing carbon neutral oil comes from the use of carbon dioxide injected into a reservoir. Carbon neutral oil happens, because it gets more carbon dioxide injected into the reservoir to produce the oil. That’s critically important for transition, because nobody has talked about the cost of transition. The cost of transition is going to be enormous. If we can’t find ways to fund that and find ways to develop our oil and gas less expensively, we’re going to be in a tough situation worldwide. We shouldn’t need to develop as many reservoirs, as what we have traditionally believed. I don’t think that we can eliminate the need for oil in the coming decades. But if we make this transition, if we try to push it so fast that we’re not prepared to eliminate the use of oil and gas, then we’re going to be in a worse situation,” added Hollub.
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