Abu Dhabi is to invest 448 billion dirhams (US$122 billion) in oil and natural gas over the next five years as it seeks to raise production capacity, even while OPEC restricts its output.
The Persian Gulf emirate’s top body for energy policy, the Supreme Petroleum Council (SPC), approved the budget for Abu Dhabi National Oil Co (ADNOC), the state-run WAM news agency reported on Sunday.
The investment plan is to contribute to growth and expansion “in all business areas,” including production, refining and trading, the statement said.
Abu Dhabi, which holds most of the crude oil in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), has discovered an additional 2 billion barrels at conventional fields, WAM reported.
That brings the country’s total reserves of recoverable oil to 107 billion barrels. The emirate has also found an extra 22 billion barrels of unconventional oil, which is harder to extract and might not all be recoverable.
ADNOC, the country’s biggest energy producer, wants “to achieve the maximum possible value from every barrel of oil produced, refined and sold,” the statement said.
The state-owned company plans to raise daily production capacity to 5 million barrels by 2030 from about 4 million barrels. OPEC has capped the UAE’s output at roughly 2.6 million barrels a day until the end of the year as part of the cartel’s plans to restrict supply and bolster prices in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Officials in Abu Dhabi, the UAE’s capital, last week privately floated the idea that the nation could leave OPEC, a highly unusual step that would probably destabilize oil markets.
UAE Minister of Energy Suhail Al Mazrouei later said the UAE “has always been a committed member,” although he did not address the country’s future in the cartel.
“The increase in the UAE’s conventional oil reserves sends a strong signal that ADNOC is leaving no stone unturned in unlocking value from our abundant hydrocarbon resources,” chief executive officer Sultan Al Jaber said.
The SPC increased ADNOC’s budget for the five years through 2025, the statement said.
In 2018, ADNOC said the SPC had earmarked 486 billion dirhams for investments from last year to 2023, the last period for which the company provided such information.
The Abu Dhabi government also gave approval for ADNOC to develop hydrogen as a low-carbon source of energy, and to award contracts for companies to explore onshore and offshore oil and gas blocks.
OPEC and allied producers, such as Russia, are set to meet next week to decide whether to increase output in January, easing the cuts that started in May at the height of the pandemic.
They might be forced to delay the hike as the virus continues to sap demand for energy.
Elon Musk’s lieutenants have reached out to chip industry suppliers, including Applied Materials Inc, Tokyo Electron Ltd and Lam Research Corp, for his envisioned Terafab, early steps in an audacious and likely arduous attempt to break into the production of cutting-edge chips. Staff working for the joint venture between Tesla Inc and Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX) have sought price quotes and delivery times for an array of chipmaking gear, people familiar with the matter said. In past weeks, they’ve contacted makers of photomasks, substrates, etchers, depositors, cleaning devices, testers and other tools, according to the people, who asked not to
JET JUICE: The war on Iran’s secondary effects have seen fuel prices skyrocket, knocking flight schedules down to earth in return as airlines struggle with costs Airline passengers should brace for more irritation in the next few months as carriers worldwide cancel flights and ground planes to cope with stratospheric increases in jet-fuel prices. Dutch flag carrier KLM is the latest company to cut its schedule, saying on Thursday that it would scrap 80 return flights at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport in the coming month. That puts it in the same league as United Airlines Holdings Inc, Deutsche Lufthansa AG and Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd, which have all pruned itineraries to mitigate costs. Global capacity for next month has been reduced by about 3 percentage points, with all
Taiwan is attracting a growing number of foreign jobseekers as companies increasingly recruit overseas talent to ease labor shortages and expand global reach, recruitment platform 104 Job Bank (104人力銀行) said yesterday. More than 40,000 foreign nationals searched for jobs in Taiwan through the platform last year, a 28 percent increase from a year earlier, the company said. Malaysians accounted for the largest share of overseas jobseekers at 12.2 percent, followed by Indonesians at 11.9 percent and Vietnamese at 10.8 percent. Indonesian applicants surged more than 50 percent year-on-year, while Vietnamese jobseekers rose by more than 30 percent. Applicants from the
NO SHORTCUTS: Asked about Elon Musk’s Terafab initiative, TSMC CEO C.C. Wei said it takes two to three years to build a fab and another one to two to ramp it up Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday raised its revenue growth forecast for this year to above 30 percent, up from the 25 percent it estimated three months earlier, citing extremely robust artificial intelligence (AI)-related chip demand. “Our customers and customers’ customers, who are mainly cloud service providers, continue to send us very positive signals and outlook,” TSMC chairman and CEO C.C. Wei (魏哲家) said at an earnings conference. The company also hiked its capital expenditure for this year toward the higher end of its forecast, or US$56 billion, as it aims to step up advanced chip capacity expansions, such as
RSS