Global Energy Forum 2026 | Day 1 - Energy stage, Alaska Governor segment 5:51:34-6:18:12

Good morning and welcome to the Atlantic Council's 10th Global Energy Forum. Please welcome President and Chief Executive Officer for the Atlantic Council, Fredrik Kemp.

How about a round of applause for the Atlantic Council's new film production arm?

If any of you would like to back a feature-length movie, we're in business. I don't know about all of you, but just wandering around this morning, I've talked to people from a dozen different countries, four different continents. You know, and people in jobs that make a difference and people who are moving the needle at a crucial time in energy and geopolitics. And so it's really wonderful to have you all here. And please enjoy the richness of the expertise, brainpower, experience that's around you at this time.

And I think it's a historic time where what we're calling the demand era, demand for energy, as we've never seen it before in our histories, speed of technology as we've never seen it before in our lifetimes, and geopolitical risk maybe as great as it's ever been in my lifetime colliding. And this could turn out extremely well. It could turn out badly. It could turn out somewhere in between. We all have agency in shaping this.

So, Your Excellencies, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, Our virtual audience from around the world, welcome to the 10th Annual Atlantic Council Global Energy Forum. Some of you have helped build this forum since its earliest days. Others of you are joining us for the first time. Together, you represent the global community that will help shape the future of energy, and we're grateful to have you with us as we begin this important conversation. For a decade, The Global Energy Forum has served as a gathering place for the energy community grounded in the recognition that the global energy system and geopolitics are inextricably linked, each shaping and influencing the other.

More importantly, this forum has provided a platform to translate that understanding into action. Those who know me well know that I hate the term think tank. Action tank sometimes sounds a little too trite, but that's much closer to what we are. We really want to improve the state of whatever it is we're taking on as an issue. More importantly, this forum has helped to build a future founded on shared values and enduring partnerships that both benefit from and contribute to secure, reliable energy access.

Over these 10 years, we've explored the opportunities and challenges of creating a more secure, prosperous, and sustainable energy system while confronting the reality that energy remains central to economic growth, national security, and geopolitical competition. So as we open this year's forum, those realities have never been more apparent. A year ago, during our last Atlantic Council Global Energy Forum, the first that we had hosted in the United States, the US military struck Iran's nuclear facilities in Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan as part of Operation Midnight Hammer. Who would have thought that we'd be in an even more dramatic situation this year? Today, the crisis in the Middle East and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz have brought a long-feared disruption into sharp focus.

Many of you, of you in the audience are with us from the region. We thank you for joining us and we're with you in the very difficult periods, period of time that you're passing through during the war. And as we hopefully get closer to its resolution, one of the world's most critical energy arteries has been effectively removed from the market, reshaping trade flows, supply chains, and strategic calculations across every region represented in this room. While the full consequences continue to unfold, the broader lesson is clear. It's a lesson we've discussed at this forum for a decade, but today it's impossible to ignore.

Energy security is national security, and resilient energy systems are the foundation of economic strength, strategic influence, and global stability. Yet the challenges facing the energy system extend beyond any single crisis. Across the world, energy demand continues to grow rapidly while the infrastructure needed to deliver affordable, reliable, and secure energy struggles to keep pace. New technologies, particularly artificial intelligence, are transforming industries and creating enormous opportunities for growth. They're also increasing pressure on supply chains, electricity systems, and access to strategic resources and critical minerals.

We do things in an integrated manner at the Atlantic Council. Last week, our Atlantic Council technology programs issued our AI Commission Commission report laying out the roadmap for more secure and collaborative AI future, and that also informs what we'll be doing this week. The rise of artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing, and digital infrastructure has reinforced a reality that many in this room have long understood: every major economic ambition ultimately rests on a foundation of energy abundance. The demand era. Even as the global energy system evolves, geopolitics continues its trajectory.

The demand era meets geopolitical crisis from great power competition between the United States and China to ongoing conflict in Europe. And let's not forget, in Europe, it's been tit-for-tat hits on energy infrastructure, Ukraine and Russia, and instability in key producing regions— the energy future is being shaped as much by strategic realities as technological ones. The questions before us this week are therefore both urgent and consequential, geopolitical and technological. Can we build the infrastructure necessary to meet the growing demand at the speed and scale required? It's a big question.

Can we strengthen resilience through diversification, investment, and deeper cooperation among trusted partners? Can we harness technological innovation to improve affordability, reliability, and security? This sounded like rhetoric at different energy conferences in the past, but it just feels so real today because of the situation we're in, so urgent. And perhaps most importantly, can we move beyond reacting to today's disruptions, as real as they are, and instead build the durable foundations for long-term prosperity? These aren't questions any one government, company, or institution can answer alone.

That's why this week we have 1,900 people from more than 85 countries—from governments, from industry, from civil society—to help sort out these questions. These questions require that kind of collaboration and exchange of ideas that is going to define this forum this year and has every year. We gather for the 10th Global Energy Forum. It's also the Atlantic Council's 65th anniversary and it's the United States' 250th birthday. So I'm reminded the most significant achievements are rarely the product of short-term thinking.

They are built through strategic vision, sustained investment, and the willingness to look beyond immediate challenges toward long-term opportunity. That's why this year the common thread running through our agenda, our dialogue, and our community is simple: defining the legacy of the global energy era. I keep adding the word demand— defining the legacy of the global energy Demand demand. Era. Our task for these two days is not only to think about how we respond, but how we build, invest, and partner in ways that we— that endure.

I finally want to take a moment to recognize the incredible team of the Atlantic Council Global Energy Center. Pulling off a gathering like this, especially during such a complex and rapidly changing global moment, takes a A lot of hard work, dedication, and creativity. So Landon Derrance and his team, please, a big round of applause.

Some would argue, Landon, that we should have withheld that applause till the end to see how this all turns out, but thanks to you and your team. So to close, I welcome you to the 10th The Atlantic Council Global Energy Forum comes at a moment of disruption, but also a moment of incredible possibility. I look forward to joining each of you over the next two days. I've already seen a lot of people, friends, people I've got to know well over the years. I look forward to joining each of you over the next two days to not only shape the next decade of energy development, but the broader trajectory of economic growth, security, and prosperity around the world.

Now it's time to go to work. I'm excited to kick off the forum with a brief— we're going to kick off the forum with a brief reflection of where we're at, a moment characterized by the pressures on the energy system reverberating from the Middle East. To that end, I'm pleased to welcome His Excellency Dr. Sheikh Al Nawaf Al-Sabah, Deputy Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Kuwait Petroleum Corporation, and Halima Croft, Atlantic Council board member and managing director, head of global commodity and Middle East and North Africa research at RBC Capital Markets. I also saw my friend in the back, Brian Sullivan from CNBC. I look forward to his conversation with Chris Wright a little bit later on.

So, Your Excellency Sheikh Nawaf, the stage is yours. Halima Croft, the stage is yours.

Thank you, Brad. Thank you. Thanks, Brad.

Well, good morning. We are so thrilled to be here for the 10th Global Energy Forum. And Sheikh Nawaf, I think we should give you a pin because you were at the original Global Energy Forum in November— oh no, it was in January in Abu Dhabi. Yes, it was. Yes, I was.

I mean, so you are the, the all-star of the Global Energy Forum. So we have so little time. We have 24 minutes on the shot clock. I want to start the conversation with sort of where are we now? I mean, where are we in terms of the supply disruption?

How is the situation in Kuwait? We've all been following the stories about what's been happening in Kuwait. Like, can you just scene set for us like where we are? Thank you, Halima. I'll start off with two words.

We in Kuwait have always been both defiant and resilient. We have faced adversity like very few countries have in the past, as recently as 1990 with a full-scale invasion occupation We have faced attacks by Iran in the 1980s on our shipping, on— with terrorist attacks in Kuwait. We continue to face now attacks from Iran and its proxies, not only on military assets, US military assets that are based in Kuwait, but on civilian infrastructure in Kuwait, the oil industry in Kuwait. Office buildings in Kuwait. And throughout all of that, we remain defiant in who we are.

We will not cower before any of that, and also at the same time resilient. And we have adapted how we do business, adapted how we work with our partners around the world. We've— from KPC's perspective, for example, being lodged all the way up into the northwest part of the Gulf with no access direct access outside the Strait of Hormuz. We have had to react differently in how we do our business. We've leaned on our trading arm to ensure that our customers around the world remain as well-supplied as we can make them.

We've relied on our storage that we have— that we have planned for before the war even started. One of the things we did as we saw that this war was about to commence was bring all of our tanker fleet back to Kuwait, deplete all of our storage in Kuwait, and push as much product out through the Strait before the war commenced. Now we are in a position where it's This is a longer war than we or anybody really anticipated at first. So all of those steps that we took to begin are now sort of reaching the end and we need to plan for the future. Speaking of the future, the question I have and a lot of people have is sort of how does this end and how should it end?

There's only one way for it to end. And the end has to be that, from our perspective, that there is a recognition and a respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of every state in the Gulf, and that there is a free, open transit passage through the strait. We've heard what, 3, 4, 5 times now already pronouncements that the strait is open again, only to understand that a definition of open means with tolls, with restrictions, and a bunch of things that are in clear violation of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. And that cannot happen. I think we are in complete alignment.

I know Secretary Wright is going to be here just after us. I met with him yesterday and we were in complete alignment that the strait must be open for free, safe navigation for all in accordance with international law. Now, how does that end and when you— how do you get there? Right. And I think there has to be an understanding understanding that any outcome, any deal that is done has to include these two pillars.

And I think that is now becoming more and more clear now as the international community starts— feels the pressure of the continued interdiction of free free navigation through the Gulf, you have, especially in Asia, something like 73 or so percent— 77% of Asia's oil comes through the strait. More alarmingly is more than 80% of its natural gas flows through the strait. All of that has been interdicted. Obviously, from oil there's been offsets offsets that have come from Saudi and Emirati pipelines, various systems, but not complete offsets. They're only partial.

But from the natural gas perspective, natural gas coming from Qatar, it's been zero. The U.S. has tried to make up for some portion of that, but obviously it's not enough. The entire system has two pillars. That we all have to understand within the system, and that is we are all codependent and coreliant. There's no such thing as energy independence.

As much as you will hear, even here in the United States, that the US is now, and has been for some period of time, a net exporter of oil, that does not mean that the United States is isolated from the rest of the world or from the international market. You still actually import physically the oil that you consume and export quite a bit of the shale production just because refineries aren't equipped to handle it. The physical attributes of the barrel dominate how we address the situation and that means that we have to continue to work together. We and the Atlantic Council and Fred very artfully hosted a Europe-Gulf Forum just a few weeks ago in Greece, and themes coming out of that were that they picked up really on the codependent, coreliant aspects to really understand that Europe, as much as it— as much as European countries are saying that they are not a party to this war and don't want anything to do with it, still are recognizing that they are very much affected by the reactions, especially from Iran, against safe passage through the Gulf and through the Strait. So action has to be on a multilateral basis, on an international basis,.

And I think we're starting to see some of that happening. And you're seeing that with movements, especially of European assets into the region, with the aim of ensuring safe passage through the Strait. One of the questions we have is so many people in the market look up at the price of oil and say it's not such a big deal. We're managing through. Do you have a concern that there's sort of complacency in the system, that people think the status quo is sort of sustainable?

It's absolutely not sustainable. What is happening right now is the markets have been buffered with SPR releases, with some demand destruction that's happened. But this is— and I hesitate, I don't even want to use the word destruction on this. It is not actually destruction. A demand.

It is a pause in demand because just like in COVID, when you had a collapse almost in worldwide demand, none of that was really destroyed because as soon as everything opened up, demand went back immediately to pre-COVID levels— immediately within a few months to pre-COVID levels— and then continued value to rise. So it was almost a pause. Now, this is what we're seeing right now as well, that all of this— and in the markets, if you look at $100 oil right now, it is comparatively not that high. Lots of you here will recognize that it was $100 in 2008, 2009, which with inflation now would be somewhere around $160, $162. So it is actually comparatively not as high as it— as one would expect it.

But when you draw down your safety buffers on the SPR, not only the United States' Strategic Petroleum Reserve but also Europe's, China's as well, when you're drawing— you're drawing down the buffer as well. So every barrel you're actually pulling out of the SPR is one less barrel you're going to have available to you if this drags on for much longer. Another thing to keep in mind is how much oil is actually extractable from the SPR, and we all recognize that every Every storage tank has dead volume at the bottom of it, and that can be sediment, it can be water, it could be various other things. So our storage facilities, for example, in Kuwait, I know that even though they may be full at a certain level, not all of that is extractable and sellable. And that is one of the things— and I've seen numbers on USSPR— when you start reaching sort of that dead zone.

We need to keep in mind all of that and at the same time understand that with 20 million barrels that used to flow through the Strait on a daily basis, we have offsets from Saudi Arabia, the Emirates of— call it what? 6, 7 Million, call it 8 million, let's— and some leakage here and there. So you still have, let's say, about 10 million still not being replaced. The Chinese being able to— and all SPR releases, by the way, they only account for about, what, 3, 3.5 million barrels a day of production. So don't look at the headline number of saying that the release is 400-something million barrels coming out of SPR.

It's not coming at a rate faster than 3, 3.5 million barrels a day. So again, against the backdrop of trying to replace that remaining 10 or 12 million barrels, it's not going to make that big of a dent. There is no substitute whatsoever to free, safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz. And Sheikh Nawaf, the question that follows from that is Obviously, the Iranians continue to say that they will exercise operational control. So does that mean there has to be a more stepped-up effort led to basically end that situation?

I will defer to my military colleagues to be able to describe what they can and can't do in that process. But I do hearken back to the 1980s when Iran had attacked Kuwaiti shipping, brought Kuwaiti oil sales almost down to zero because they were hitting Kuwaiti tankers plying the Gulf, and we reflagged those tankers to US, Italian, French, Dutch, and British flags, along with the Soviet at that time, and all of those navies escorted the tankers up and down the Gulf, and the passage was reopened. And it was reopened when— it took one or two skirmishes at first for Iran to recognize that this is an international waterway. There is, as I said, more consensus building in the world that We can't sit and wait for this to resolve. I think there is a greater consensus, a very likelihood that we'll have to take active steps to resolve it.

And the other sort of theme that we keep hearing is, is that when this ends, we're going to have a new focus on energy security, new pipelines, more emphasis on storage next to customers. Like, how do we come back better from this? We come back better by recognizing that, as I said, energy independence is a meaningless concept and we can't plan for that. You can't achieve that. When you recognize that you are codependent and coreliant, you recognize then you have to work together and that's what we're starting to— and that's what we're doing within the Gulf right now.

One of the things, by the way, I thought quite interesting is that when we took our production levels down at the beginning of the war carefully and methodically down to what is only required for local consumption in Kuwait because we couldn't export anything, we realized we were still refining some products and we still had product available and that there was actually a pretty good market for it within the Gulf, whether it was Saudi Arabia, or Qatar, the Emirates, even Bahrain, we were happy to have transactions and we were selling product within the Gulf. Obviously, none of it we could export out of the Gulf, but we were selling product within the Gulf. And at the same time, we were importing LNG from Qatar. So there was this mini economy, if you will, of sales sales of energy going on in the Gulf. And then we're building from that and a recognition now that we are in discussions with our brothers in Saudi Arabia and in the Emirates to look at how to expand the pipeline system that they have to accommodate Kuwaiti barrels coming out.

So as you know, we all hear the statement, 'Facts are stubborn things.' Well, geography is pretty stubborn as as well. It's tough for us to change our geography, so we are doing it through a collective vision through the Gulf Cooperation Council. So the GCC states are working together better than we have in quite some time and really looking at how to address these situations collectively.

There is, for example, a mechanism within the GCC that says, well, if one country can't export, another has capacity, then they'll export on their behalf and sort of tally it up afterwards. Obviously, now nobody has that capacity. So instead, we're working, as I said, with our brethren to look at pipeline capacity to grow that out. But of course, when you look at pipelines, they are only as safe as safe as the export facility at the end of it. Right.

And you've seen how Iran has targeted both the Saudi and the Emirati pipelines and how that's been effective to certain degrees. A long pipeline needs compression, so hit one node of that compression, you've got to rebuild that. The easiest thing to rebuild is— or to replace is a pipe itself. You hit the pipe, I'd have it working tomorrow. But you hit a compression facility, that takes more time.

And then the worst is if you hit the export facility, because then the pipeline essentially is useless. And we've got to work together with our partners. And this is where we have a strong relationship with, with the United States, with, with European countries to improve the air defense network to cover critical infrastructure that has been targeted. And that's the collective vision that we all have to have. And how long will the restarts take?

I know they're going to be varying restarts across the Gulf, but we had one journalist come out in the last couple of days and saying it's going to be just weeks. There's going to be a flood of crude on the market in a couple of weeks. Well, within Kuwait, we can get back very quickly. In fact, within Kuwait, We can get to 80% of our shut-in production in less than a month, probably about 3 weeks. That's because we have resilient reservoirs.

We have reservoirs that, that in fact have benefited to a certain extent now from the shut-in because it's allowed them to settle and recharge essentially the the underground pressure. But at the same time, the last bit is always the hardest and that's still about 20%. That's going to be for us, that's going to be for almost every country in the region. That last bit of 20% probably will take us 3 to 4 months. Right.

So 20% of, let's say, the 20 million that was flowing out is still about 4 million barrels, that's 4% of worldwide demand. That is still significant. So that is going to take some time. I want to bring it back in our closing minutes about Kuwait. I had such a great opportunity to visit Kuwait end of January, beginning of February for your great Kuwait Oil and Gas Show, where you really talked about like all of the new initiatives on the investment side that are taking place in Kuwait.

Can you sort of walk us through like where you stand on that? We are Part of our defiance is that we are continuing to move very quickly, seriously, and methodically on our two major projects that we announced in that conference. The first being a project called Peregrine, which takes on after the falcon in the Coit Oil Company logo. But also it's a project by which we will lease and lease back our export pipelines to international investors. So it'll be the largest international investment in Kuwait thus far.

We launched that project on February 27th. Timing was not exactly the— we didn't get the timing exactly right on that one. But a few weeks after that, somewhere sometime in mid-March, I talked to our financial advisors on this project who said, "You may consider pausing this project given current circumstances." Obviously, the project relies on our production and export. And they said, "Well, you're not producing, you're not exporting, so it's probably not a good idea to ask companies to bid aggressively for this project." Instead, I talked to the CEOs of the major investors looking at this project, and they said, "Look, if we have a problem with this, we'll give you a call. It's the relationship that we have with Kuwait.

It's the decades-long relationship that we have. We'll give you a call if there's an issue." I got a call 4 days before the initial bids were due, non-binding bids still, from one of the CEOs who— and I said, "Oh, thank you." This is going to be tough. And he said, "I know I promised you I'd call you. I'm calling you right now. But I'm calling you to tell you the following: that we looked at this, we are bidding more aggressively than we have in previous transactions that were done before the war.

We are bidding on the assumption that this war never happened and that production has never been interdicted. This is our conviction in the ability of KPC to recover, and it's our conviction and the resilience of Kuwait itself. So that was a fantastic vote of confidence and we're moving forward on that project and we'll get to final bids within the next few weeks. The other project that we announced is Project Seaif, seaif, Arabic word for coastline, and that is a project by which we are inviting international oil companies, the majors, to Kuwait to invest with us in the development of our offshore fields. We've been producing oil onshore Kuwait for over 8 decades.

Every drop of oil that we've produced in Kuwait has been onshore. And we went recently to the offshore. The offshore in Kuwait is about a third of the landmass of Kuwait and it's just as prolific from— hydrocarbons perspective. We drilled 4 wells offshore. All 4 of them were major discoveries.

That is batting 1,000 like you'd never see in any exploration company around the world. And that has been a driving force now for us as we continue in that project. It's very early in its nascent stages right now. We're not nowhere near concluding that project, but the reaction that we've received from the international oil companies is identical to the one that we received from the financial investors on Peregrine. And it's been that we have confidence in what Kuwait is doing, we have confidence in the reforms that Kuwait has built out, and in the leadership that we want to invest and we want to be part of this growth story.

Well, we are now at zero on the shot clock. One last thought, and we can, you know, make it quick, but you've been with us for so many of these events. It's such seminal moments. You're sitting on the stage at the 11th Global Energy Forum. What do you hope we're talking about, and what would concern you if we are— what conversation do you not want to be having a year from now?

The conversation I hope I— or the messages I hope I'd be giving if I were fortunate enough to be here next year is that a thank you to the world community, the international community for ensuring the respect for international law. As I said it right at the beginning of my remarks, Kuwait is especially almost as much as any other country and more so, is beholden to the protections and effects of international law. And we will continue to do that into the future. So a year from now, I would hope to say that international law is respected and enforced and implemented throughout the Gulf and that we are looking and partnering seriously with countries around the world. And I do recognize two ministers, His Excellency the Minister from Syria and His Excellency the Minister from Egypt, who are both looking to be part of the solution as well to have access for hydrocarbons out of the Gulf to offer resilience in that, even in that supply network.

Well, Sheikh Nawaf, we are very excited to have you back next year. I'm already taking Fred's job, making the invites already. And so with that, I will bring this opening session to a close. Thank you.

For a keynote address, please welcome United States Secretary of Energy, the Honorable Chris Wright.

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for being here at this fabulous Atlantic Council event. Energy is the most important industry in the world, and I can say that without qualification and without any reservation, because every other industry, whether it's artificial intelligence or manufacturing or your Little League baseball team, baseball team, every other activity is enabled by energy. Without energy, all the other industries are impossible. So the quality of the energy system, the affordability of the energy system in your country, in your state, in your region, it's what enables or sets limits on the economic activity and the quality of life possible.

So energy is just central. The previous administration, the Biden administration, didn't get this. They thought energy was some necessary evil that they wanted to constrain and shrink and hopefully eventually shrink globally. Um, that to me is just to totally miss the boat. A billion people live fulsomely energized lives like all of us in this room.

It's awesome. We love the modern world. 7 Billion people, they want to live the lives we live. Fly around the world to conferences and events and wear fancy clothes and always be in climate-controlled rooms. That's pretty awesome.

7 Billion other people want what we have, and God bless them, they should and they will achieve that. But the only road from here to there is massively more energy. We need to take energy for what it is. It is life. It is the enabler of our lifestyles, of our businesses, of our futures.

The Trump administration was all in on that, and in the campaign, all in on what is the answer. The answer is more energy, more abundant energy. And what does energy dominance mean in President Trump's terms? Energy dominance means that we grow our energy production of all forms that make economic sense in the United States so we can better energize our country, reshore manufacturing here, and have so much energy we can also export energy to our friends and allies abroad and contribute to a larger, more robust global energy system. Fortunately, that's gone strikingly well.

United States oil production, natural gas production, all-time highs by a fair margin. If we look at the oil export data in May— now obviously May, last month, that's a different month. We're in the middle of a, we're in the middle of a conflict right now that I'm sure we'll talk about more. But last month, the number one oil exporter in the world at 5.4 million barrels a day was the United States. Russia and Saudi Arabia at at 4 and a little under 4 million barrels a day.

Imagine a world today where the US was still a big oil importer. Like, it would— the world would be just unrecognizably different than it is today. This is important because I've yet to meet anyone in my travels abroad, in the United States. I was just in Cap— I was just at the Capitol Building meeting with representatives and senators. I've never met anyone who's comfortable with this Iranian regime with nuclear weapons.

No one thinks that's a good idea. In fact, we all know that's a horrific idea. 47 Years they've terrorized that region and caused trouble. They've threatened global energy supplies, they've threatened peace and stability, and certainly economic prosperity, not just in the Middle East, but globally. So this is an essential issue that we are addressing right now, and we will continue to address that issue.

But fortunately, the United States is in a position to do that. And, and, and despite some of the news we hear, I think things are actually trending in a very positive direction, a very positive direction. Last two things I'll say. United States today, by far and away the world's largest exporter of liquefied natural gas and growing rapidly, growing rapidly. Natural gas, by the way, if you look at the last 16, 17 years, fastest growing energy source on the planet.

If you look in absolute terms, not percentage growth terms, those don't, those don't, those don't really mean much. What means much is growing new energy, new net, net new energy to the world to lift economies, people, lives, and opportunities up. Last thing I'll say before we bring Brian Sullivan onto the stage, is 5 days ago, I think, if I can do— yeah, June 4th, we had the first non-light water nuclear reactor go critical in the United States in over 40 years. So our efforts on the nuclear renaissance, they— some people think they're overambitious or they're not really going to happen. They are happening.

5 Days ago, we had next generation nuclear reactor go critical. We believe we'll have a couple more go before July 4th of this year, and we have 10 in progress likely in the next 12 months. That's— we are going to launch next-generation nuclear technology in the United States, and we're also going to stand back up the capacity to build large nuclear reactors. And all of this is part of an energy abundance, energy addition agenda. So we'll bring Brian Sullivan on.

We'll talk more about energy. We can talk about the crisis going on in the world today. But to make progress for ourselves, for our families, and for next generations, we need to continue to grow our energy system in the United States and around the world. Brian, come on up. Please welcome co-anchor and senior national correspondent for CNBC, Brian Sullivan.

Normally I do the introducing, so I'm honored. I didn't realize we're in the blame the media part of the introduction. I'm part of the media. Mr. Secretary, it's a real pleasure to see you again. Thank you.

Tough to follow up on the amazing discussion between Sheikh Nawaf and my good friend Halima Croft. That was really important and timely. So awesome as always, Halima. Thank you. Thanks for everybody for coming.

Let's give her a big hand.

And it was so timely because the headlines today, the top story on CNBC right now is obviously about the president, hopeful, speaking last night about oil flows, Iran, a deal. The entire world, and not everybody's been negative, I want to be clear, there have been some people that have been a little more optimistic about ship oil oil flows. I know there's things you can't talk about, Mr. Secretary, but can you give us an indication of where ship traffic through the strait, not just kind of around in the Gulf, through the strait is today relative to, say, a week ago or 2 weeks ago? Rising. Well, thanks for coming.

Rising a lot. Yeah, I would say rising very meaningfully. Okay, very meaningfully. It's sensitive, I understand that. But the entire world is watching these flows, and the questions that we get on CNBC, that I get personally often, by the way, from people in this audience, people that are working at major oil and gas companies, is why isn't oil at $125 a barrel when we had the greatest supply— in 50 years, if not ever.

What's the answer to that? I, I think there's multiple parts to it. One, there's been offsetting factors. You know, right at the beginning, the United States coordinated with 30 other nations to release oil into the marketplace. That's what a Strategic Petroleum Reserve is for.

It's not for managing prices or helping election results. If you have interruptions of flow of crude, then we release flows of crude and we announce what we're going to do. And by the way, in our releases, we've not sold a single barrel. We swap barrels. We deliver oil today in exchange for more— in exchange for more barrels later than we're swapping.

We've already added 35 million barrels to the United States Strategic Petroleum Reserve in these transactions, meaning we'll have well more oil after this than we had going into this crisis. So there's been releases globally from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. We've seen increases in production in United States and everywhere else that could raise oil production. We've seen, and maybe dramatically recently, China's oil imports last month were 4 million barrels a day, roughly a third of the global, of the whole from this crisis. Lower than they were before the crisis.

Do you think that's permanent demand destruction for China, or is it relative to their inventory levels, over a billion barrels in storage? Oh, choice B. There's no such thing as 4 million barrels a day of permanent demand destruction for oil. No oil, no modern world. So no, no, that, that's not demand destruction in China.

That's, that's stopping the— they were building a strategic petroleum reserve, now they've stopped building They're releasing some from their reserves. They have turned down their refineries, so they are producing less products and they are crimping economic activity, but that's in response to a crisis. That's not a permanent change in what's going on. There has been— there has been price-driven demand destruction, particularly in lower-income and lower-middle-income countries that have reduced economic activity or reduced the use of oil in response response to the price signal. But I agree with your assessment that you would— we would have guessed that oil prices would be higher today than they are given the magnitude of destruction.

But an abundance agenda, and not just in the United States, I would say with a lot of our partners in the Middle East, as we re-embrace them as not your pariahs that you've got to stop this addictive habit you're doing, but that we want to work with you, we want your capacity to grow, we want to work as partners to energize the world. I think we've had great success there. So the world had a lot of extra oil inventory in the system—. More than we thought? More than we thought.

Because I think it's fair to say that many in the oil market, not everybody, but many in the oil market have been a little bit surprised by what appears to be kind of a— sanguine reaction. I mean, we're at 90. I'm not saying 90 is nothing. 90 Is a lot higher than it was a year ago, Mr. Secretary, as you know, but it's not 125. It's not 150.

And those arguments can be very easily made about why we should be at 125. I think there was also a belief or an understanding that we had a plan for this crisis. This crisis is about— really about one thing. I mean, it's about a Iranian regime cannot have, cannot have a nuclear weapon. And of course, we've also degraded their ability to build missiles, to build drones, to build other weapons.

This is a regime that has just invested all of its earnings, not in its people, not in prosperity, not in diversifying its economy, but in making a massive armament system so it can threaten its neighbors and threaten global energy supplies. You could see uniformity in the region and around the world about who's the greatest threat to global peace and security, who's the biggest killer of Americans in the last 20 years. It's Iran. I think the oil markets— and again, I don't want to— everybody in this room probably is the oil market or energy market, so I should just defer to all of you, but we don't have that time. The entire oil market is kind of watching what Halima asked Sheikh Nawaf, which is what are your estimates for the ramping up once— let's root for peace— we get some lasting peace?

I know ship traffic, according to the Secretary of Energy, is rising. I could take that away. Yes, it is. How fast can this ramp back up to some semblance of normalcy? That is now the question the markets, I think, are paying attention to.

Well, to get to normalcy, to use your term, that takes some time. I don't know what that means. Ships have been redirected. You know, some supply chains have shifted and been disrupted. So I think it's, it's, it's many months to get back to normal flows of energy.

And of course, out of the Gulf, it's not just oil and natural gas. You know, there's meaningful exports of sulfur, of helium, of lubricants, of other critical products. So we've seen how robust a modern economy is, that it's absorbed these blows not with no impact, but with much more modest impact than was expected. I think the price will be wildly worth paying because think on the other side of this. If you have an Iran that is not a constant threat to its neighbors, to peace and stability, to investment in the region and to the flow of energy.

Think of where we're going to go beyond this to a world— and look at the expansions in the United States. Alaskan production is growing now. Gulf of America production is growing. Venezuela production is growing. Guyana production is growing.

In the Middle East, all of our friends and allies there, including Kuwait, they have meaningful expansion plans going on, we see a very bright, well-supplied energy future in the years and decades to come. I wrote last week— I have a new energy intelligence piece every week, by the way, check it out if you can— um, and I wrote about I could see $50 oil in the next year, and here's, here's why. And tell me if I'm right or wrong, okay? When you look at— because one thing I like about, and one thing I learned from my good friend Halima, is it's all about barrel counting. A lot of oil is math, right?

You're an MIT guy, so this is right up your alley. When I look at OPEC+, just raised output. I understand the supply disruptions, but, but in, in print, they're raising production. UAE is probably going to go higher. Kuwait with pipelines, once they get back to normal, probably going to go higher.

Ghana is going to go higher. I know Venezuela is already higher. In fact, as of last week, Venezuela was the number one importer of— or the US was the number one destination for Venezuelan oil. Brazil's on the rise. Canada can go up.

The US is at 13.7 million barrels per day. Demand around the world is going up a little bit, but not as much. Can you make an argument for $50 oil in a year? Well, I'm careful about price, price predictions, so I'm not going to go there. But I am going to agree with you that there's abundant resource being resources being developed, and we're going to have a well-supplied market in the coming years.

But there's a, there's a flip side to that too, a very positive flip side. You have a well-supplied, moderately priced oil prices that led— that leads to faster economic growth around the world. That is certainly the goal of this administration: abundance, economic growth, new opportunity. The late great Boone Pickens would often— he would never give price. I would always try to pin him on where is oil going to— Brian, I can't do that.

But he would say it's more likely to go $50 than $150. Is that fair to say? I think that's fair to say. But they're both very low likelihood. I'm not predicting where oil prices are going.

Brian does. That's his business. No, I'm trying to pin it down. What I say, and one of the things you look at is the percent of the wallet— that people spend for energy in their life, you know, gasoline, for example. Yes.

Even today, that's actually not that high in the United States. Oil was meaningfully higher 4 years ago when, uh, Russia invaded Ukraine. There was not any meaning— meaningful disturbance in the flow of energy, but there was a belief in the United States we were trying to strangle an industry, and now it had another challenge with a major Russia, producer at war, without an interruption of flows, we had oil in nominal terms and gasoline much higher than it is today in nominal terms. In inflation-adjusted terms, just dramatically higher. So it's the attitude towards energy, the message the United States sends about how we view energy.

Do we want it to grow or do we want to strangle it? That impacts prices, that impacts investments, that impacts affordability. Listen, I'm the nerd that tracks all my gas. I drive to Midwest every summer and I paid $5.75 a gallon in, in June of 2022 in Ohio and Indiana. I know because I write it down because I'm that guy.

Um, can you give us an update on where we stand with Venezuela? Yeah, so look, Venezuela, everything you got to look at, a baseline, 25 years of, of bad rule, um, bad governance in Venezuela, destruction of the rule of law, destruction of the energy industry, destruction of people's life's opportunities. 8 Million people left Venezuela. And for the first time maybe in history, millions of people left, fled a country, and fled to poorer countries elsewhere in South America. That's the base setting of Venezuela.

Because, you know, is it, is it Norway today? No. Is it massively improved in a few months? Massively, massively improved. What does that mean?

Massively improved. There's infrastructure investments starting. Well, yes, there's money now going into building the electricity grid up. There's, uh, oil exports have roughly tripled from December to where we are today. So the biggest industry in the country is growing.

There's investment coming from, from different countries around the world. Production is growing. But I think a hint of freedom and liberation in this society. The goal of the operation in Venezuela was to remove a major destabilizing force in the Western Hemisphere that impacted us right here in the United States. Almost a million people displaced into our country, and not all of them law-abiding.

So we want to— and we want to reduce the drug trade. We want to reduce the barriers to investment, not just in Venezuela but in its neighbors in Central America and South America and the Western Hemisphere. Now the talk is about Venezuelans returning to Venezuela, economic growth again and prosperity then. And yes, massively increased energy supplies for the world. And of course, most of the US refineries were built in the '60s and '70s.

The largest exporter of oil in the '60s and '70s globally was Venezuela. So we built our refineries in mind that this is what a major crude slate is going to look like as far as the eye can see. So that Venezuelan crude is perfectly suited for American refineries, which is why more and more of it's going into them. So you said that oil exports have tripled since December from Venezuela. Correct.

And the investment— I— Listen, I know— I guess I'll break some news to the audience— I know private equity funds that are down there now that are either investing money or looking to invest money in Venezuela. Can you confirm that there are American capital in country, in Venezuela, looking to invest on the energy story? Absolutely. Happening today. Yes.

Many people are looking that are new incumbents that were there already, have grown their investment. Investments in Venezuela and are growing their production quite rapidly. That's to the benefit of Americans, to the global energy system, and to the benefit of Venezuelans. So we were both just in California, my original home state, and I love California. California now relies more on imported oil than any time in its history.

It's hard to believe, but if it wasn't for Iraqi oil, Algerian oil, Libyan oil, California might have shortages. There are giant ships sitting off the coast of LA and San Francisco filled with Middle Eastern oil that came around Argentina because they're too big to go through the Panama Canal. The suspension of the Jones Act has been a big deal. And the Jones Act, for those of you that may not be familiar, was a 100-year-old law to protect shipbuilding in America where basically a US ship— you have to— if you're going to ship from Houston to LA, you've got to use a US ship, but we know now there's almost no US ships, so you got to literally take a ship from Houston to like Barbados, switch the oil, and then bring it back to Los Angeles. I think we can all agree the technical term for that is stupid.

Um, is the Jones Act going to be repealed permanently? Would you do it if you could? Well, let me, let me say, I don't want to get in front of the— any politicians there. There's a few, but, uh, yeah, there's a few around. But, but of course it has been enormously helpful to to remove, to suspend the Jones Act temporarily.

There's been gigantic ship traffic, as you just said, from the US Gulf Coast where we have products to California, the West Coast, up the East Coast as well. Enormously helpful in a time of shortages. And California's a greater, broader story that you and I have spoken about before. It's sort of the previous administration energy policy. We don't like the energy industry, we wanna strangle it, we wanna demonize it.

In fact, Gavin Newsom has called me, as I've celebrated the growth of our oil and gas production, I'm bringing us back to the Stone Age. You know, and he's modern and cutting edge. The United States gets almost 74% of our energy just from two things: oil and gas. They just dominate the American energy system. In California, it's even greater.

Over 75% of all the energy consumed in California comes from two things: oil and natural gas. Yet they've done everything possible. They used to produce 40% of American oil. 40%! Today they produce less than 2% of American oil.

But yet their economy, their state runs on oil and gas to a larger percent than ever before. So all they've done is said, "Well, we're not going to use our own oil and gas, and we're not going to use that stuff from Texas or Louisiana." either, 'cause we don't wanna build pipelines or infrastructure. Well, they're gonna have— our pipeline's gonna be built because there's people actively looking into building pipelines from Houston and St. Louis to California right now. Absolutely, absolutely. The largest supplier of crude to California before this conflict was Iraq.

Now, I love Iraq and they got a great energy system, but does that make any sense with the United States, a massive net exporter of oil? Yeah, California, almost two-thirds of the oil they consume comes in from overseas, right? And what's the benefit they get? Well, they get to pay $1.50 a gallon more than everybody else on average in the United States does. They did the same thing with their electricity grid.

They pay massively higher electricity prices than Americans as a whole. And what's the biggest source of electricity in California? Natural gas. What's the second biggest source of electricity in California imported from other states, which means coal, gas, and hydro. I think the previous governor's father was a natural gas importer, to be honest with you.

Jerry Brown, I believe. I believe, if my history— somebody can correct my history. So my point there is, to be honest and to be pro-energy and pro-humans is to be the opposite of the governance in California. That's what this administration is about. I don't know why that's— thank you.

I don't—. All the Arizonans and the, uh, Nevadans in the crowd are—. To impoverish your citizens and strangle the most important industry in the world, like, where's the— where's the virtue? Where's the win in that? Where's the win?

Many college degrees, one of them I believe is from Berkeley. You're— you're sort of an honorary Californian. I was born there. The first house my parents bought in Torrance was like 3 blocks from a refinery. My dad owned a gas station in Los Angeles when I was a kid.

I remember 1979, 1980, for some reason I was working at 9 years old. Child labor laws, what happened? And we— and there was no gas. And there was— this is a true story— there were men who would get into fistfights because their cars were empty but they didn't have the right license plate. Yeah, right.

And I— and my dad would like have like a bat and be like, stop fighting, because these guys would get into fistfights like, I'm next. They would cut the line. And, um, we're running out of time. I want to ask you about— you said the the electricity grid. There's this thing called AI.

Has anybody heard of this? AI, artificial— it's kind of a big deal. It's actually powering the entire stock market, from what I'm told. Um, is there an argument, and I think the president has said this, that the U.S. should take investments in data center companies or hyperscalers like Google? Should the United States actively take a stake in some of these companies?

Well, look, I'm not— I'm not going to go there either. I'm a capitalist, as you know. But our focus is how do we help the energy system catch up, the electricity system, so we don't slow the progress of AI. In the last 20 years, the United States has tripled our oil production and doubled our natural gas production and barely grown our electricity production. In China, it's the opposite.

But like, why is that? We can't grow electricity production in the United States? That's this bad governance at federal levels and state levels that's made it so hard to develop new electricity generation. So my focus is fixing that problem so we can grow our electricity production as fast as we can grow our primary energy production, so we can reshore American industry here, and we can make sure the United States, not China, leads in AI. This is important for national security.

On the security side, it's important for economic security. And it's going to bring, of course, enormous innovation. We're all going to live longer lives. Diseases that would have killed us if we got diagnosed with them 2 years ago, if you get diagnosed with them 5 years from now, we're going to have treatments for those. It is going to change our lives massively.

It's unsettling to some, and I get that. There's going to be disruption, but the benefits are going to be massively larger than the downsides. Let me ask it a different way, and I understand you're not an elected official from Virginia or Indiana or Texas. That said, all the data center fights, right? Like, well, the grid's going to be overtaxed, water usage, which is interesting because most have a closed loop on water, but that's a different issue.

Should— would you, would you support, if you had the just sort of the power, should the hyperscalers, should the data center builders Data center users, should they pay their own way? Should— yes. Should they invest in local grids? Of course. Of course.

And they are. That's the Trump administration ratepayer protection pledge. And the hyperscalers embraced it. We didn't twist arms. They embraced it.

They get that they need electricity. They need it fast. They understand the public has fears and concerns about them. They are today and they will even more in the future lean in. If you look at the states where there's data center development or demand development of any kind, those are the states that have not had rapidly rising electricity prices.

The states with the fastest rise in electricity prices are also the most expensive states, the New Yorks, the Massachusetts, the Maryland, California, Delaware. Those are all states that produce less electricity today than they did 5 or 10 years ago. Demand growth is the mechanism to bring prices down. The states that have gone the wrong direction on electricity are not where data centers are being—. Where do they get the demand?

Natural gas, nuclear, small modular. Where do we stand with— I heard you mention nuclear in your opening remarks. Where do we stand with that? Well, nuclear is the second biggest source of electricity in the United States after natural gas. It's not growing yet.

Yet, but it will be growing in the next few years. The, the, the fuel that will drive data centers and us leading in AI is natural gas. We want everything. We're for next generation geothermal. We are bringing back on retired nuclear plants.

We are expanding capacity of existing nuclear plants. We have stopped the silly closing of coal plants, the world's largest source of global electricity for 125 years and will be for decades more. We're just bringing common sense back. But the thing we can grow rapidly for 24/7 reliable, firm electricity today is natural gas. That will be the biggest new source of electricity to power AI and reindustrialization.

But the rate protection pledge, which I know you guys talked about, we talked about it a couple of months ago, these hyperscalers, because there's a huge local pushback, state pushbacks to some federal pushbacks, some There's a building called the Capitol. It's about a mile that way. And there's some pretty important people in that building that are pretty active saying no more data center construction. End the data center construction because of water use and electricity use. If the Googles, the Amazons, the Microsofts— I'm not mentioning one company.

They're all of them. If they were to say, we're going to pay to fix the grid up. Don't worry. We got it. We're going to bring in the water.

We're not going to take anything from the people. Is that how it should be? That's what's happening. Absolutely, that's what's happening. This is very parallel to the start of the shale revolution.

If you looked back technically, I would say it started 25, 28 years ago. Everyone learned about it maybe 15 years ago. And the same people were out there saying it was going to pollute the water, it was going to cause earthquakes, it was going to ruin the planet for climate change. It's easy to scare people. It's hard to rationally educate people about positive trade-offs.

But yes, the movement to scare people about AI and data centers is in the lead right now. It will lose, as it did in scaring people about nuclear, as it did in the climate alarmism, as it did in saying we should never open our schools again with COVID Look, there is a professional scare people class. They are well-funded. They do get overseas money, but there's a huge domestic constituency for that as well. And they have an easier sell.

But, but they're wrong. They're wrong. I'm going to wrap it up with this, kind of going back to how we started, because it is, again, our— I think it's the oil price movement is moving the stock market. So that's what I do for a living on CNBC. We talk about the economy and equities and money.

Leave us with a reason to be optimistic about Iran and what's going to happen.

Iran has essentially zero people on their side. Who believes in economic terrorism? We built up a massive arms complex, we've attacked all of our neighbors and allies, and that isn't enough, so we're gonna stop the flow of energy to everyone in the world. That's not gonna prevail. And they're gonna get to play that card once, and they've played it.

This will not happen again. Again. Both will see infrastructure away from that. And you're going to see defense advances, right? There's new— Iran has a bunch of new cheap weapons that we will have before long ways to easily defeat them.

But today it's been more of a struggle than we would like. But that solution will end with an Iran without nuclear weapons and with free flow of energy. That's where we're ending for sure. As I've said that from the start, The question is the route and the pathway there. But that's not just a short-term, that's a long-term— Iran's threat and problem to the world will be massively reduced.

The world is going to be well energized. We have awesome technology advancements going on right now, and we're going to reindustrialize the United States of America and bring back energy and pro-human common sense to the planet. I am massively optimistic for the US economy in the next couple of years and for the global economy in the coming decades. I want to end it there, but I got to say, just because this part of this will air on my— on CNBC Today, on my 2:00 Eastern Time show, the headline can be that US— that oil exports from the Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz are rising. That's a fair statement.

That is a fair statement and will continue to rise. Secretary of Energy Christopher Wright, really appreciate your time, sir. Thank you, Brian. Thank you all. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you again. That was awesome. Thank you.

To chair the opening panel, the making of an energy legacy and the decisions that will power the future, please welcome Vice President, Energy and Infrastructure, and Morningstar Chair for Global Energy Security, Atlantic Council, Landon Derrance.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is great to be with you and welcome to the Atlantic Council's 10th Global Energy Forum. Yes, we're just getting started. Look, we've covered a lot of ground. We've come from Iran to AI, from affordability to Venezuela. And, you know, recognizing that we're in the United States Capitol and it's the 250-year anniversary, we really came into this year thinking, how do you make generational policy?

It's not just about the tactical, it's not just about the near-term reactions to current events, which are important, I think we'll cover in this next panel, but it's also about how you take the decisions that world leaders are making, the government visions, and turn that into industry execution. And so I'm really excited to have a panel joining me for a discussion on making an energy legacy, and to do that Let me invite our panelists to the stage, beginning with Lorenzo Simonelli. He's the chairman and chief executive officer of Baker Hughes.

Bringing—. Imran Bonner, who's the chief financial officer of Chevron. Philip Haddad, chief executive officer of XRG USA and president and chief executive officer of Mazda Americas. And John O'Brien, chief executive officer of of JERA America's team. Please have a seat.

Let's get comfortable.

Well, I'm going to start off, Emir, with you because I think, like I said, we've covered a lot of ground. And when we entered this calendar year, coming to the Global Energy Forum, what we thought we were going to do was have a conversation about affordability. The exact same panel a year ago was about AI. It was about this demand surge and, you know, It's an election year, so we're thinking, okay, we're gonna have some affordability discussions. What's the politics of this?

And of course, January 3rd, Venezuela, and then even more so February, we have the war in Iran. And I don't want to go there yet, but I do want to focus on this. Companies like Chevron, Chevron in particular, you have roots that stretch back nearly 150 years, and that takes a little bit more foresight and a little bit of long-term planning planning. And so from Chevron's perspective, what does it mean to make decisions with those multi-decade time horizons, particularly when you have an environment in the world around you that's clearly anxious, that's fractured, that's tense? So how are we making these decisions for the long term?

Well, over 150 years, we've, we've seen a lot. We've seen wars, we've seen technological medical breakthroughs. We've seen a lot of policy changes and we've lived through a lot. And I think the simple lesson from 150 years is that decision-making that is made with the long term in mind, decision-making that can weather all of the events, normally wins. And so that's what we stay disciplined around when we're making decisions.

We don't try and predict every cycle, every turn, every event, but we do try and be disciplined around making decisions that protect us in light of those events. And that comes down to the decisions really that we make around where we allocate our capital. And we've got choices on where we allocate our capital. And so we allocate capital to a range of assets, both here at home in the United States, but also around the world. And we take a view of the long term because those asset investments are decade investments.

And so while it's tempting to get wind up in the here and the now and the weeks and the months, it's really important for us to stay pragmatic and keep that long term in mind because that's what we know wins. And that's been the success of our company. Lorenzo, let me bring you into this too, because Baker Hughes has an equally rich history, and, you know, through oil shocks, through technological revolutions, market transformations, current periods of conflict, you know, you've, as a company, have dealt with this in the entire value chain. So when we're thinking about these strategic investments and capital allocations, how is a company like Baker Hughes separating energy investments investments that endure versus something that might, might get stagnant or fall off the radar quickly? Like, how are we making enduring investments in technology and in the energy space?

Well, Landon, it's great to be here, and congratulations to the Atlantic Council for a superb event so far. And I think, as was already mentioned with regards to capital allocation, it's critical to look at things from a long-term perspective. Baker Hughes is an industrialized energy solutions company. Now, what does that mean? We provide equipment and services that enable all of the energy sources to be provided to the world.

And so as we think about being fit for the time, we have to make decisions that have 15 to 20 years forward-looking and that comes to the technology side of picking where do we think energy expansion is going to happen? When is there going to be an aspect of natural gas going to LNG? What is the equipment that's required? How do you liquefy it? When do you see geothermal and enhanced geothermal coming into the play?

And so much of what we're doing is anticipating where we think will be the future innovation and the technology that will enable the molecules to provide the electrons. And at the end of the day, we know a couple of fundamental truths. With growing population, energy demand is going up. That's been a constant, by the way. Uh, it's very rare that over the long term energy demand is not increasing.

The other macro trend is there is a view towards needing more different types of energy because not one molecule can provide everything that's needed. And so you need to have the diversification of that sources of energy. And that's where we play and we make those decisions and we look at it from a long-term standpoint. So, you know, we are very much present today in LNG. And if you go back to the 1960s, 1970s, when we started investing in LNG, a lot of people said LNG is not going to be cost competitive.

If you think about where solar is today and the aspect of competitiveness of solar in the right geographic conditions, likewise, if you think about where we're going in the future with enhanced geothermal. So I think it's really picking those macro trends with the foundation of technology, and then you're going to have to be agile to manage the conflicts, the geopolitics that are going to be there. But there's very little that we do day in, day out that impacts the current. But let's make it—. Let's make a technological choice here.

Is geothermal the LNG of 2040? It is one of the LNGs of 2050, 2040. And in fact, you see the increasing trend because when you look at enhanced geothermal from conventional geothermal, you're now able to get the electrons produced at a much lower temperature requirement. You've got the recycling of the consistent water that's actually there through the rock surface. So you look at companies that have already proven it.

We're producing 5 wells with fervor. It's going to be providing 5 wells enough to power 180,000 homes. That is very competitive from a standpoint of increasing energy expansion with new energy sources. Philip, building an energy legacy is, of course, not just a feature of US energy dominance. It's a global international story, and I'm thinking about you know, XRG as a significant new entrant to the global energy side out of ADNOC, thinking about decisions on how to dedicate investments in both renewables and clean tech, but the value chain of energy.

What does, what does it tell us when we look at the United Arab Emirates and you have a major hydrocarbon producer? We talked about earlier today, there was discussion about UAE leaving OPEC, so it's an oil and gas producer, but also a major investor and developer of renewable and clean energy sources, nuclear as well. What does it mean to build an energy legacy that is so diverse where you have such a broad mandate and how do they fit together? Well, firstly, thank you for having me on this panel and congratulations on the 10th anniversary of the Global Energy Forum. It's good to be with friends and long-term partners.

I think the world needs more energy and needs more forms of energy. We are an investment company that's owned by the National Oil Company in Abu Dhabi. We are about a $150 billion company. We're focusing on three main verticals, the gas vertical, the chemicals vertical, which is energy adjacent, and what we call energy solutions. And we see growth in all of these different energy sectors across the world and especially in the United States where the US market is a very critical part of our strategy globally given the resource abundance, given the growth in demand that we're seeing, in energy demand, given the, the investment environment that's very friendly to what we do.

And, you know, we are here in the US across the chemicals sector, across, you know, LNG. And as you mentioned as well, through Masdar, we have about 5 gigawatts in operation and about a 12-gigawatt pipeline with a 25-gigawatt target by 2030. So we believe in an and-and approach to energy given what we're seeing in demand and we see additionality across all forms of energy and that's where we're really focusing our attention. The world needs more energy. It doesn't matter really which part of energy generation we're looking at.

As our chairman, Dr. Sultan Al Jaber, said, there's not one one source of energy that's going to be able to fulfill the requirements of this very complex and growing energy system. We need all forms of energy and that's how we really think about a resilient and dynamic energy system and that's really where we're focusing our attention. You know, one area of the world that really needs energy is East Asia and John, I know, Your career spans the domestic market, the power market, but of course you represent General America's here. And when I think of countries that had foresight about energy security, you can look at countries like Poland that built LNG terminals, but you can also look at countries like Japan who procured and had a very sophisticated procurement strategy for both supply of gas but also of power and how to to hedge some of those investments. And so, you know, I just kind of want you to elaborate on JERA's decision to make, you know, major bets in the United States.

Why is that happening? But what does the current moment mean for Japan and for companies like JERA Americas as they're making long-term investments in energy security, really? Well, first of all, thank you, Landon. Great to have dinner with you last night. That was a good dinner.

But thank you for this this great forum today, which is off to a great start. The answers before me, I think, speak to Japan's foresight in terms of thinking through how you provide energy to an island nation, and I'm also reminded of— there's a great piece that has just been recently aired, Frontline Japan, which centers a lot on JERA, but it talks about the precision within which we have work to make sure we keep the lights on in Japan. Um, and so these decisions and how you make decisions for the long term is vital. Uh, JERA is the largest power generator in Japan, which makes us probably one of the largest buyers of LNG in the world. We have 11 regasification, um, uh, facilities in Japan, uh, to supply our power plants.

We also, after Fukushima, did have to build some supercritical coal because of bringing down the nuclear units in Japan, so we are very experienced at operating and maintaining, keeping the lights on, our obligation in Japan. But that also leads us to think about where we should invest throughout the globe to make sure not just that we are answering our obligation Japan, but also to bring some of our know-how to other parts of the world. So here in JERA Americas, we're very excited. We began— our two shareholders are Chubu Electric and Tokyo Electric, and I think the beginnings in the US really were around Chubu Electric learning about US electricity markets and buying into some of the generation plants, primarily in the Northeast, and that has enabled us to to build a power generation side of our business. We are minority owners in the Freeport export facility, which is a tremendous story of turning an import facility to an export facility.

And we also toll gas out of that Freeport facility. So we are very excited about the opportunities here in America, both to expand to expand our investment in LNG, to broaden our portfolio of LNG. So we have announced some investments going forward between now and 2030 to expand how much LNG we export out of the US. We're building a blue ammonia facility in partnership with CF Industries near Donaldsonville, Louisiana, and we will use that ammonia to fire our coal plant, Hekinan Power Station in Japan. So, and we've just recently purchased from GeoSouthern an upstream facility in the Haynesville, which is a brand new side of the business for us here in the US.

So we're very excited about the US, the investment opportunities in the US, remembering always our obligation to keep the lights on in Japan, but also knowing that we can bring some know-how to not only grow JERA but expand throughout the world. There's some long-term thinking there, but I mean, we already heard from Sheikh Nawaf this morning. Chris Wright was talking about Iran policy with Brian on stage, and so I don't want to miss having such an esteemed group of executives on stage and not talk about the crisis because it has to shape something. So we can think long-term,, but there's a consequence. And, and, you know, Philip, maybe it's appropriate to go back to you because ultimately the Middle East is the epicenter of what's going on right now.

And when I think about UAE and, and in particular XRG or ADNOC, a lot of conversations about deploying resilient capital across the, the global value chain, not just the UAE value chain. Um, you know, the urgency of the moment, how is this going to pull investments? Is it going to change into a near-term energy security imperative is going to have long-term repercussions on how a company like yours reevaluates what the 20-year outlook looks like. Are they really in tension? Are those just very natural aspects of the business, the business process?

I think, you know, XRG is a long-term thoughtful investor. I think what makes us different is we have the investment discipline but also deep technical expertise and we invest as owners, so by definition we have to think about the long term and the short term at the same time. And I think what you just mentioned and what we heard earlier today only emphasizes the fact that these two speeds operate at the same time. They have to be complementary. You know, we have to think about resilience, you know, across the entire energy value chain.

And these two concepts are not mutually exclusive. The short term and the long term are only being put to the test right now. And I think building resiliency, being diversified is very important. And that's what we're doing at XRG. I mean, XRG is looking— is investing globally.

The US, as I said, is a very important part of what we're doing globally in the energy sector. And we have to think in terms of resiliency and diversification, and you have to think about these two dynamics at the same time. I don't think they're mutually exclusive, but I really think they're complementary. Emir, we had a conversation last night about scenarios and the variety of outcomes of what can happen in the world, and so I want to kind of bring this similar question to you about how the near-term events are impacting Chevron's outlook on investment priorities, and I want to do it from two angles. One is, of of course, how are we changing how we deploy capital, but two is geography.

When this happened, look, there's a lot of hope for a very strong future in the Middle East, but there's also a very broad perspective that places like Venezuela or Canada or some Western Hemisphere, West Africa become more investible. Certainly, this is having an impact on the future of Chevron. Yes. Well, I think when a a fifth of the world energy supply is disrupted, I think it really reinforces that energy security and energy resilience, whether short, medium, or long term, that they're the same conversation, and you can't really have one without the other. I think when you look at the energy system today and the buffers that were mentioned earlier in, in Secretary Wright's session, I mean, we're only able to weather today because of the long-term decision-making behind the building of all of those buffers.

And the same goes for our portfolio in Chevron, the resilience that we have today and also what we need to consider as we move forward. And so today reinforces resilience really matters. And Chevron, we don't have a lot of disruption because of the Middle Eastern conflict, only 5% or less than 5% of production is in fact impacted. But we've still had to optimize the portfolio we've had to deliver the energy the world needs. We've had to take crudes that never went to Asia.

We've had to send them to Asia to help keep our joint venture refineries full and working at high reliability because that's where the pinch was felt first. We've had to take some of our crudes from the US and send more of that to Europe because that was where the constraints were felt as well. In the US, we're much more insulated because of that long-term thinking and because of the resilience in the portfolio. So what we have is a resilient portfolio. We have a balance of short and long term.

We've got a balance of geographical assets. So we're not only in the US. North America. We're in South America and growing there. We're— and we can feed Europe through our Kazakhstan and Eastern Mediterranean assets.

And we're positioned with legacy assets in, in Australia and, and in Asia as well. So I think this resilience of the portfolio, the high intentional we are as we build the portfolio is really important. And our own portfolio is being tested today with what we're experiencing. As we go forward, geography is always going to matter because we're never going to get the price right, we're never going to time the cycles right, we're never going to know exactly what technological breakthrough is going to enable. We have to know that whatever world we find ourselves in, whatever the themes are, whatever the trends are, that we'll be competitive and that we will be successful in all of those.

And that's why the scenario planning is so important, and that's why diversification of the portfolio is absolutely core to our strategy, and, and that's, that's what we focus on. But you know, if I was to drill down a little bit further on this, if you're only a fraction of global supply, right, no single company is 25%. You look at a— Ramco would be what, maybe 10% of the market, 8% of the market? Not everybody is making decisions decisions as sophisticated and as intentional as a company like Chevron is. And so sometimes you still have to react to a market where there's actors that are not optimizing, and they're going to have a direct impact on, on the future of your company.

Yeah, and the agility of your portfolio. Um, so making long-term decisions, but in the here and now, having the levers in your portfolio that allow you to adjust. So when I mentioned Having long cycle and short cycle, having accrued production different parts of the world, they're the result of long-term decision-making, but in the here and now, there are levers that you can pull. And so it's that agility that you want to be able to have as you take those long-term decisions so that you know in any environment you're going to be okay. Lorenzo, bringing in maybe another variable is supply chains.

And just thinking about, even if we know the outcomes of where the scenarios are headed, do we have the capacity? Are we able to actually deliver in terms of infrastructure and equipment? You know, when we hear stories of bottlenecks and we hear, you know, gas turbines are delayed or can't be booked for years to come, what's the real outlook here? So just to touch on what's already been said, because I think It's important you've had diversification, you've had resilience, and you've had the aspect of security. And unfortunately, sometimes we become complacent.

And we've seen these cycles before where we become too used to the norm and a shock happens, which then drives an incremental need for a build cycle. And that's what we're going through now. Build cycle of energy security being a focus with incremental pipelines being needed. We know there's a lot of resource in the Middle East. We know that there's areas of the world that now are coming into the fray.

Argentina, for example. We know the Vaca Muerta and their opportunity to produce LNG. We know Guyana. And so you're seeing the aspect of what happens when there's a shock in the system. And we as an equipment and service provider have to be able to provide that supply chain.

We're only a small portion of it though. And I think actually from a supply chain perspective, you're going to have some constraints as you're seeing today, as is commonplace with large turbines and the aspect —of actual utility-scale power that takes time. And so you're moving towards distributed power generation. And you've got smaller turbines, such as the industrial gas turbines that we produce, that can be provided to the hyperscalers. Now, there's also an ecosystem that you need across the supply chain, though.

It's not just the providing the equipment and the service. It's the labor that's required. Acquired, it's the engineering procurement company that's involved, it's also the permitting. And that ecosystem needs to come together. And I'd say it is mixed because not everything is as smooth as it could be.

And I think you heard Secretary Wright say also some decisions that are made by one stakeholder don't necessarily align with what the ecosystem needs and can actually deliver some negative results. And that's what we need to drive consistency in, is the discussion to have the ecosystem aligned with where we need to go. At this stage, we need to build infrastructure. The infrastructure can be built. At the same time, we need permitting reform.

We need also the investment to be there. And I think, you know, there is a backward I think it's pressure now from what's occurred that people are looking at this and actually focused on it. It will take some time. There'll be some bumps along the way. I can speak from an equipment and service perspective of what we do as Baker Hughes.

We think that given the innovation and the technology, we'll be there and able to provide that. We need everybody else to be at the party as well, and that's bringing the stakeholders together. You know, ultimately this conference is about the geopolitics of energy, both of how energy affects geopolitics and how geopolitics affect the energy outlook. And I think that one aspect of that dialogue is always about the US-China relationship. You know, are we competing fast enough to unlock some of these opportunities domestically in the United States, or frankly in Europe or the Middle East and other geographies, to compete against what really looks like a monolithic and powerful effort by the Chinese to have, you know, the energy system of the future in their grasps?

I think you've heard it before, and also Secretary Wright mentioned it. If you look at the US versus China, China focused on the electrification and the infrastructure from an electrification standpoint. If you look at what they've done in the last 20 years, it is meaningfully —growth versus what they had, and the US hasn't. The resource is available in the US, so there is the opportunity for that to be corrected as we go forward with the right policies and also the right ecosystem being created, which comes down to permitting reform. It comes down to enabling the technologies to be adopted quickly and actually taking away some of these long-cycle procedures.

You know, we used to do things in 2 years that now take 7 years. Why? And how do we go back to really reducing some of that bureaucracy and some of that red tape, and also between the federal and the state level? And I think this administration, we very much complementary with what they're trying to do to do. And also, that is the way in which we can continue to increase the electrification that's required within the United States to continue to stay ahead of the hyperscale.

So a build cycle, but a build cycle that's maybe more lethargic than it needs to be. Uh, let's get it moving. Yeah, exactly. It's gonna be, uh, going through phases. And, uh, right now there's, um, a lot of infrastructure build being talked about globally.

And the discussions we're in is not just in the Middle East where we're talking about pipelines and we're talking about additional sites. It's also in South America, it's North America, and there's a lot of acceleration of final investment decisions that are being made because it's not demand destruction. The demand's still going to be there. And as this gets resolved, there's a consumption that's there at the end. John, let's build on this.

I know, uh, General America is thinking about permitting reform as well. You're thinking about what the investment needs or what the policy frameworks need to be to match the investment and business decisions that a company like yours is making. What needs it? Let's move to action. What are we doing?

Yeah, I think that the, um, I mean, when you think about this here in the US, of course, we have the federal government, we have 50 states, uh, we have power markets in part of the state and and regulated markets elsewhere. So it really, you know, at all levels, there has to be a thinking around how we deal with permitting reform, and I'll come to cost in a minute. But on— I really— Secretary Wright in this administration has been noted, and he said it today, you know, Secretary Wright and the administration are really working hard on this notion on permitting reform and really thinking through through and pushing ways in which we can narrow down, give people their rights to make sure that people, you know, are intervening, but also how can we think through hastening some of this infrastructure build that we need. I do think it is incumbent on not just those of us in the power industry, and I think we've dealt with community affairs in our industry and how you build strategy, I think AI companies also have to do that. I think what Secretary Wright spoke about, about the benefits of AI, the national security needs of AI, I think AI companies do have to put more into community information, community building, how you build support, and how you take on the fear caucus or the fear industry, as Secretary Wright spoke about it.

Because I think there is a bit of a vacuum around information. Just the comment this morning, the comment alone about where prices are higher versus where they're lower, and correlating that to where data centers are trying to site, I think is a very interesting point. So I think there is the need to— and there's permitting reform legislation, I know, a mile away, as someone said. But I think I think that this has to happen at the state and the federal level. The other thing is hyperscalers, I do think, are willing— because of speed, are willing to pay to get that power online, even if it's behind the meter.

We do, however, obviously need power to meet demand in the markets we're in. And one of the problems there, of course, is market design and what is the cost of new entry and how you incent that demand, which is very difficult. And I— in ancient times, I was a state senator in Massachusetts and worked on our electric utility restructuring law. And I think if I had known now— if I knew then what I know now, I think we would have thought about markets differently, because basically we're in these regional markets where it's an hourly price and a capacity market price. And both of those prices together with some of the other products you can deliver as a generator are not really matching what it costs to build the power that's needed.

So it really is incumbent upon a lot of people in this room and, and those in the AI industry to really build on how we educate our, our neighbors about what is it so important about beating China, about the importance of this, um, in our country. It's about the permitting reform that's needed in the federal level but also throughout the states. And then it's thinking through how we think about cost and how actually the hyperscalers probably can help a bit on that. We're getting close on time here, and Imer, I, I, before I shift to, to global partnerships, I want to come back to you on one aspect that I don't feel has been talked about. We covered permitting perform well.

We covered supply chains well, but also people, an investment in people. And a lot of times when I'm talking to global executives, I'm hearing that we need to invest in the workforce of the future as well. And I'd be interested in how Chevron's doing that and how important that is to this story as well. Yeah, well, um, we're the human energy company, and so people are at the heart of everything we do. Um, it's critical that we have not only professionals to run the company today, but also that we're attracting professionals for the future.

And so we are very active, obviously, in promoting our industry as best we can, because it's an exciting industry to be a part of. It's a noble industry to be a part of. It's, it's very technical. And so what we try and do is attract the best and the brightest because we need problem solvers not only for today but for the future. We're also very active in trying to bring into the organization more digitally savvy and AI-first of a workforce.

And so we various ways to do that. But we are seeing AI accelerate in the company. We are applying it across every value chain. And we know that we will be successful when we integrate AI into everything we do. We're on on a mission to do that.

We need to have the right professionals that can do that as well. So the combination of just promoting the industry because of how great it is, but also evolving with the times as well and ensuring that we're fully leveraging the full technological toolkit that is available today. Well, we need the right professionals. We also need the right partnerships. And when I look around the room and I see the Atlantic Council Global Energy Center.

For many of you, you know that that started in the UAE with us. We've been there for a long time in Abu Dhabi. And Philip, maybe you can— final question here is really about the US-UAE energy partnership and how it's evolving, because this is such a core aspect of what the Global Energy Center is and what the Global Energy Forum is, is about building those enduring partnerships, and certainly between the Atlantic Council and UAE. Adnoc and XRG, that's in a legacy relationship, and love to hear your thoughts on that. Sure.

Look, this, this year marks the one-year anniversary of President Trump's visit to the UAE and the commitments that our chairman, Dr. Sultan Al Jaber, has made to energy investments in the US. Today, Adnoc, MAFDAR, and XRG have invested around $85 billion in the energy sector in the US, between our investment in the Rio Grande LNG facility, which is one of the largest in the world, between the footprint that our chemicals businesses have in the US in about 11 sites in 19 states together with what we're doing with Mustard, over 3,000 employees in the chemical sector only through Covestro and Nova Chemicals and Borussia International. As I said earlier, the US is a very important part of XRG's investment strategy globally because of the three key components that we see. Number one, the abundant resource in the energy sector. Number two, the ability to do business.

Number three, demand. I mean, we're all witnessing this incredible energy demand in the US, so for us, that's is core to the partnership, but also building a resilient dynamic energy system and being a good energy partner to the world, and that's really how, you know, we continue to advance this very important partnership. With our fleeting seconds, final question to each of you. We're about a month away from the United States celebrating its 250-year anniversary, and so if we're sitting here— well, maybe not us, but somebody else is sitting here in the tricentennial in 276. What do you want to be able to say your organization did 50 years from now?

This is a legacy play, legacy conversation. Lorenzo? I think with the adoption of AI, the speed at which we can develop the equipment and the services and the productivity on an operational aspect of delivering electrons through molecules to the world and satisfying the appetite we have for energy that I think has been said is foundational to life. I'd want somebody to say that Chevron was a company that figured out in the 1800s how to get oil out of rock and is still doing that with excellence and powering the intelligence age. I think being a good partner, a globally responsible and committed partner to supplying energy responsibly, all forms of energy to the world, to continue to meet the growing demand that's really driven by everything we said around economic development, AI, and all of the above.

I think that would be a legacy worth you know, being remembered for. John closes out. I think that we would hope that the cherry blossoms that are a gift of Japan are still always blossoming here in the spring in Washington, D.C., and that that is an example of decades down the road that the Japan-U.S. alliance is foundational to interdependence throughout the world, and that that alliance only continues us to strengthen, and that from a JERA perspective, we demonstrate elsewhere how you keep the lights on in a very challenging way on an island nation. Well, as a D.C. resident, I hope the lights are on and the cherry blossoms are blooming as well, and I really appreciate each of your time on this panel, and thank you for the audience, and thank our panelists for our first panel of the 10th Global Energy Forum. Thank you.

So, we're all losing her.

To chair a fireside chat, America at 250: The Making of an Energy Nation, please welcome partner at Torridon Group, Tala Gurdazi.

Well, hello everyone, and welcome to our America's 250 panel. Thank you all for being here, and special thanks to Landon and the Atlantic Council team for having us here today. This is our 250th anniversary panel, and energy has powered the American story from the start. Wood and water gave way to the coal industry that built American industry. Pennsylvania crude lit the lamps of the world.

Texas oil fueled World Wars and put the nation on wheels. And in the gas pump lines of the 1970s, we learned what it cost to depend on others. Then barely a decade ago, the script flipped. The shale revolution made America the world's largest producer of oil and natural gas, reshaping how we power our economy, how we stand with our allies, and how we leverage our adversaries— and what leverage our adversaries can wield against against us. This year proved the point.

When the Strait of Hormuz closure led to disruptive flows, America's supply helped keep markets somewhat calm. Energy is no longer just an economic story, it's an instrument of American power. I'm honored to be joined by two very special guests: Kyle Hospite, my predecessor at Fossil, also the hydrocarbon geothermal office, and now the Undersecretary of Energy, and a man who needs no introduction, Mike Sommers, the President and CEO of API, the American Petroleum Institute. Please join me in welcoming them.

So I'd like to first start with, as I mentioned, America became the world's top oil and gas producer barely a decade ago. How much has that single fact reshaped how the US operates both at home and abroad? Mike, let's start with you. Talia, thanks so much. It's great to be here with the Atlantic Council for this great event.

Such an honor to be on stage with the Undersecretary as well. Congratulations on your recent confirmation. Talia, you really went through the history here. I mean, the truth is, is that we are on the cusp of America's 250th birthday. At the same time, the oil industry in the United States is about to celebrate its 170th birthday.

You know, this industry started in Titusville, Pennsylvania in 1859, and, and events have punctuated the history of this industry over the course of the last 170 years. You think about the World War I era where the federal government came to the oil industry to ask us to to cooperate, to produce more oil. That led actually to the founding of API in 1919. Fast forward to World War II, when the industry was again— the government came to us to make sure that we were able to produce the energy that our allies needed to fund the war effort. That led to, at the Yalta Conference, Joseph Stalin of all people toasting the American oil and gas industry because this was a war of quote, "Engines and octane." Every president from Truman to Donald J. Trump has been requesting that this industry step up and make sure that we are energy secure and energy independent.

Of course, we had the terrible crisis in the 1970s that led to the creation of the IEA. What stands in the way today for us to continue this path towards energy security and geopolitical security. I would argue it's not the geology, it's not the technology. It is actually policymakers right now, policymakers who have to have a vision for what the energy future looks like. We need to think anew about what the future looks like.

We need to have another IEA moment for the world to start thinking about how do we secure energy for decades and decades to come. That, I think, is the challenge for policymakers right now, and it is truly the challenge for our industry also. Fortunately, we are blessed with an administration now that understands how important energy dominance is. If we can get Congress to start doing the right things and set the stage for the future, I think this— the future is very bright for the United States and global energy security. Thank you.

Kyle, what about you? What do you think? Yeah, Tola, thanks for having me. Mike, it's great to be sitting alongside you. I appreciate all you do through API for our industry.

Yeah, I think it's important. Mike talked about 170 years. If we go back 25 years and think about the position our country was in, we were actively building import facilities for oil and natural gas. And because of a handful of people who refused to give up on a tight rock that nobody believed could produce at commercial rates, The Barnett Shale was cracked in North Texas. George Mitchell would not give up, even though a majority of his board and his senior leadership said, "There's no way.

You're going to sink the company. The money you're spending is not going to generate a return that competes with our conventional wells." And most Americans had just accepted the fact that we're going to be importers, we'll lean on ethanol, we'll gasify coal, and we'll put up with high costs. But thank God for for President Trump's leadership, for Secretary Wright's leadership. Secretary Wright was out there solving those problems in the field 25 years ago. And even after we cracked the nut with shale gas, still most people said, "Well, you did it with gas, but you'll never do it with oil." See, think back 25 years ago, we were on a terminal decline as a country for oil production at 5 million barrels a day.

And today we're over 13 million barrels a day of oil production. Over 20 million barrels per day of total liquids production. We take into account natural gas liquids, refinery expansion, and ethanol. So our country not only responded to provide our own energy needs, like Tala said, in 2018 we became a net energy exporter. That's not that long ago.

8 Years ago is when we finally crossed the threshold of when you look at all the energy consumed and exported, we finally hit neutrality. And today, as we all know, in the last few months, we've been the largest exporter of not only LNG, but also oil. We produce more natural gas and export 2 times more LNG than the next largest exporter in the world. So don't lose sight to what's taken place in the last 2 decades. When you're thinking about what the next 2 decades or the next 250 years of energy will look like in America, never bet against American ingenuity.

Capital risked in the right hands, powered by capitalism, will always solve problems and always deliver what the world needs. Mike, you talked about energy security. I think geopolitically, everything that's going on, you know, the, the topic and, and everything points towards how important energy security is to our national security. I know that's something that API really hits home and is really an anthem for you all. What distinguishes a true energy superpower from simply being a large producer, and what does the country need to do to keep that status?

You know, I really think that this is something that is truly unique about the American energy story. You know, one of the reasons why the United States has been so successful over time is because the uniqueness of one, private property rights. You know, the United States, you know, oil producers, we own everything from that surface all the way to the core of the earth. That is something that is not true in other parts of the world. I'd also say a key factor is that these are private companies, that they're able to take risks.

There's not a national oil company in the United States. This has all been, as Kyle mentioned, really the private sector, free enterprise, that has allowed this country to be such a leader. The sanctity of contracts has been another key factor in the development of this industry. And then I think the American spirit, the true American spirit, of ingenuity, of what George Mitchell did over decades to figure out how to get more resource out of the ground. I mean, that's truly an American story.

And I think our challenge now is how we continue to export that technology, that knowledge to the rest of the world. The resource base is incredible. This is about using the technology that's been developed in the United States to continue to ensure global energy security. We have the knowledge base here. We should take it to the rest of the world as well.

Mm-hmm. And speaking about energy security, and you mentioned permits, Kyle, we were both former regulators of LNG. You know, now in the Strait, Ras Laffan's been down for a little bit, and this is a perfect opportunity for US LNG. What is the department doing to ensure that we get enough US LNG out to our allies abroad and can really fill the void that we're experiencing right now. Yeah.

Again, thank God for President Trump, not only in his first term for the increase in LNG exports that came to the rescue of Europe when Russia invaded Ukraine, but yet again, he, he came in and he saved the day, you know, day one, lifting the harmful ban from the Biden era. Can you imagine our counterparts across the world negotiating LNG deals and then a president comes in and says, no longer will we allow you to export LNG. No new builds, right? That is going to chill any commercial deal. So the president stepped in and did the right thing right away.

And since then, just in this term, we've approved 20 BCF per day of new LNG export authorizations. 20 BCF, that's double of what Qatar, the second leading country, was exporting prior to the Strait of Hormuz conflict. 2X. And 10 of that has already gone to FID. So these are not just headlines, these are real contracts, real investments that will provide generational jobs that support everything from upstream to drilling the wells, the midstream pipeline capacity that we continue to see get built out, and the LNG export facilities that again invest billions of dollars and provide thousands of jobs and then provide the valuable LNG to our friends and allies across the world.

So again, without President Trump stepping into this role, I'm worried about where the US would be, and I'm very worried for our friends and allies across the world who would be without the energy they so desperately need. Thanks. Well, there's a, there's a price story there too, right? As the world has demanded more American LNG, particularly during this time of geopolitical volatility, prices for natural gas in the United States have stayed relatively stable, whereas there's surging all over the world. We have tremendous resources here in the United States, and we can continue to produce them to ensure that our allies can make it through this terrible situation we've seen from the dawn of the, the, uh, war in Ukraine onward to the situation that we see in the Strait.

The sky is the limit. And on that, and on that point, um, you know, does American production genuinely blunt, you know, an OPEC+ or Russia or do they still set the price? Who sets the price in that dynamic? Well, it's the free market that sets the price, right? It's supply and demand, which is the way that it should be.

You know, one— the last thing that, you know, we should be asking for is for, you know, a new cartel or someone to set the ceiling or the floor. This is an industry that has benefited from supply and demand and free enterprise, and we should never get away from that. And it's And speaking about that, the way that the world looks now, as Dan Ureghen called it, looks like sort of the new map in terms of the Strait. We've seen what that looks like. It's been blocked for 100 days now, and we see countries try to circumnavigate the Strait.

Saudi obviously is trying to use their pipeline. UAE is building a new one. What do you think about the need for infrastructure abroad, but more specifically, the need for infrastructure here at home? And either of you guys can answer. I'll start.

Infrastructure is our superpower. Without infrastructure, our natural gas fields would be nearly useless. Because we have access to markets, because we can get our pipelines built to the water and build these LNG facilities and fill these long-term contracts, it's the combination of the resource and the ability to get it to the customer that makes the US differentiated. Internationally, what we're going to see, I believe, is more announcements, more bypass routes. We're going to look— the companies that are making these investments are going to look to decrease their risk to increase their profitability.

I think we'll see more strategic petroleum reserve sites built across the globe. So we're going to see changes, and those changes are going to help to address the current challenges that those companies who have reserves and production that may be held back, that they're feeling due to that strait being closed. I do think that this situation going on in the strait emphasizes the importance of a new global energy security vision, which is to say, we're at this point, we're 170 years into the hydrocarbon age where the world is still dependent on a 10-mile choke point in the Middle East. That has to stop. We cannot be— continue to be subject to a terrorist regime in Iran stopping flows through the Strait of Hormuz.

What does that mean? That means we absolutely need to build more infrastructure in the Middle East. But we as an industry and as a country, I think, need to focus on energy security in the Western Hemisphere as well, so that we're no longer dependent so much on what's going on in the Middle East. So our focus needs to be on other countries that have tremendous resources, like Brazil and Argentina and Guyana and Canada and Mexico. We need to rebuild that secure energy corridor throughout the Americas.

And that I know is a focus of both the Trump administration and is a focus of our industry as well. And I'll add to that Venezuela, right? 300 Billion barrels. That's 6 times more proven reserves than the United States. So 6 times more reserves, they're producing 1/10 the production.

There's tremendous opportunity, to Mike's point, in the Western Hemisphere. We can control our own destiny. Company. In Alaska, we've seen record lease sales. It's one of the few places in the world that has world-class resource in the ground with a pipeline that has 1.5 million barrels per day of spare capacity with an 8-day shipping route to Japan.

We are going to see the Western Hemisphere build its oil production capabilities. We're going to see it shift back. We've already seen it start shifting back to the Western Hemisphere. And to Mike's We've got tremendous resource through South America, through the United States. You know, a term that Secretary Rubio made a few weeks ago when he was filling in at the White House briefing was, we're a nation of perpetual improvement.

And I think it describes our industry perfectly. We've seen it over and over again. Low recovery rates, we try something else, waterfloods or enhanced oil recovery, and we increase the recovery. And we're entering that age for shale, right? The shale that we've talked about that transformed not only domestic energy markets but global energy markets is only recovering 10% of the oil in place.

We have 90% of the oil in the ground that our horizontal wells drill through and hydraulically stimulate. 90% Is still in the ground. There's no way that our industry is going to give up with 90% in the ground. So imagine doubling that from 10% to 20% recovery rate. Still leaving 80% in the ground, but we would repeat the shale revolution.

So there's gonna be a perpetual improvement opportunity in the existing oil and gas industry to continue to provide the energy that the world needs. And I think that's really the promise of artificial intelligence in this industry. You know, I would predict that AI is really going to be the next fracking revolution in this industry because it is going to allow us to explore the subsurface in ways that we've never been able to before, and recover more of that resource that we've left in the ground. What's, again, standing in our way, though, is smart government policy. If we could just get Congress to finally meet the promise of comprehensive permitting reform on a bipartisan basis, it could unlock tremendous resources.

We just need the above-ground people to really focus on what's below ground. Below the ground and get the policies right. And very quickly, you mentioned SPR. I'm changing topics a little bit, but I know it's something that we wanted to talk about. Can you walk us through the decision?

What's going on at the department? How are you guys releasing the barrels of oil? Yes, absolutely. So just another example of the President thinking outside the box. He ran on filling the SPR.

Clearly, the headlines are saying we are releasing, which we are. But as the President does, he challenges us and gives us the direction to go accomplish the goals. We're meeting the near-term supply disruption. That's a real disruption, the largest global supply disruption in the history of the world. That is when the SPR should be used, right?

Not 2 weeks before midterms, but when there's a true global supply disruption. What we're doing differently than in the past is we are not selling the barrels, we are exchanging them. We're borrowing a barrel out, and on average we're getting more than 1.25 barrels back in the future. So when there's a short-term disruption, the price of a barrel of oil is higher today than it is a year from now. So what companies can do is they'll bid on our barrels, not in terms of dollars, but they'll say, we'll take that barrel today, and then 6, 9, 12 months from now, we're going to bring that barrel back.

So you get what you borrowed us, but we're also going to bring back premium barrels. So to date, we've already locked in 35 million barrels of incremental premium barrels at no cost to the US taxpayer. North of $3 billion of value to date, and there's still more to capture. That's innovation. That's meeting the near-term need while protecting the strategic resource that the SPR is.

It's not an ATM machine to win midterms. It should be an asset to protect global energy supplies, and that's what we're using it for. Very quickly for both of you, 10 years out, what has to be true for American energy to still be a source of strength abroad rather than a vulnerability? Mike, go. I'd say, first of all, we have to get the policies right.

And the Undersecretary just made a point about the SPR. The SPR needs to be completely modernized. We're at a point now where this— we're dealing with aging infrastructure, aging age— aging pipelines. For goodness sakes, we don't even have a pipeline that feeds the SPR from the Permian Basin. That is a— an example of just how anachronistic the current SPR is.

So once we get through this crisis, there has to be a real focus on modernizing the SPR in a way so that we can— we can have an infrastructure in place for the future, not for something that was built 40 years ago. That has to be a focus of the the federal government. I do think a lot is dependent, again, on getting comprehensive permitting for reform done through Congress. The administration has done everything they could at an administration level to get permitting done, everything they can. But the courts, by the way, through 3 key court decisions, have done everything they can to unlock permitting reform.

The only missing link is that only missing branch, Congress, to to get this done. So that has to be part of our energy future as well. I think the future is very bright for the American oil and gas industry because of the dawn of new technology, because of AI, and I think because we're on the cusp of what we call the demand decade, where demand in this country is only going up. And policymakers ultimately are going to view permitting reform as a political imperative, the only thing they can do to to combat rising prices. So I'm optimistic that 10 years from now, we're going to be talking about the United States continuing to be a dominant energy superpower.

Thanks, Mike. I'll start with one direction. I may pivot to the other one, but I want to start by highlighting some of the things that are being done, like Mike mentioned, and zoom out globally. Because I came from oil and gas, upstream oil and gas. I was very focused on the subsurface.

And the technologies around energy creation, and I didn't have a deep enough respect for the impacts that policies have globally. More specifically, how these policies come to be. So the Secretary was speaking to the IEA a few months ago, and one of the statements that he made that I hope you all heard, and I hope you listened to the whole discussion and dialogue, is the only thing true about net-zero emissions by 2050 is it has a 0.0% chance of ever happening. And those are the types of dialogues that we need to have because the net-zero energy scenario policy that they're modeling is consumed by banks, by countries to drive their policies. Same with RCP 8.5 from the IPCC.

That doomsday scenario influenced policy. So we need to understand that these forecasts, these scenarios are consumed. Those are the ingredients, right, to the, the policy product that comes out. And we need to make sure that we're engaging and we're having dialogue at that level. If we're only going right for the policy component, sometimes it's too late and the battle is, is long and drawn out.

But if we understand what ingredients went into making that, that policy recipe, we can start doing more work like the Secretary's been doing, being honest with data, prioritizing humans and prosperity over some climate ideology. So it's so important that we engage at those levels. The other thing I just want to highlight— leave on a high note— it's rare that you get to live during a revolution, right? We had the Agricultural Revolution. Decades later, we had the Industrial Revolution.

We got to live through the shale revolution. But today we're living in the nuclear renaissance, the geothermal revolution, and the AI revolution at the same time. We're in the greatest country in the world at the greatest time in history. To benefit humanity with energy and technology. So I hope you're all as excited as we are to continue to unlock American energy.

So I'll meet you guys back here at the 275th anniversary panel. Um, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Mike. Thank you, Kyle. Let's give them a round of applause.

Thank you.

To chair the panel on energy leadership in a new era of competition, please welcome Vice Chairs, Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, and member Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center Advisory Council, Atlantic Council, and former Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs, Ambassador Paula Dobriansky. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome. Thank you. Welcome to the panel, Energy Leadership in a New Era of Competition. Let me introduce our panel in the order in which they're sitting, although we're going to skip around here.

So right here to my left is Jared Egan, assistant to the president and executive director of the National Energy Dominance Council. Next to him is Hunter Hunt, who is the chairman and CEO of Hunt Energy. And then we have Maxim Galupayev, who is with Glencore. He's the global head of energy at Glencore. And then Toby Rice, CEO of EQ2.

So let's get underway here. We are focused on energy leadership. And I do want to say this. The panel is going to be focused on how energy is shaping and impacting, by the way, the strategic choices of governments, of companies and as they deal with managing, as you know, volatility, protecting strategic interests, and also seizing new opportunities. So let's go first to you, Jared.

I think the important question really is, could you define for us energy dominance and what are your priorities today in achieving that? Well, I would say the priority— and you've seen this play out The Western Hemisphere, from Alaska down to Venezuela, is now the center of the universe for energy. The world is looking to America as the dominant force in energy. So what that means is we are the top producer of oil and gas. We are the top exporter of oil and gas.

That is all thanks to President Trump. Look at what has happened, the global shift of coming to America, unleashing Alaska, unleashing the Gulf of America, unleashing the Permian, the Marsalis, putting the infrastructure, getting rid of these crazy permitting regulations that are slowing everything down, streamlining things from multiple years down to just days to get permitting done. We had export controls on getting export of LNG out of the Gulf of America. The moves the President made in Venezuela earlier this year and now unleashing Venezuela so that Venezuela crude is now coming up into the Gulf and being refined in America. Looking at the supply chains across the world, you talk about critical minerals, everybody saw over the last year of China putting a stranglehold on critical minerals.

We cannot have any one country that is, that is controlling the supply chain. And now look at the headlines here. Everybody's aware of what's happening in the Middle East. Everybody knows we have to diversify the supply chain. Guess who's calling me every day?

All the countries around the world that want to, that want American energy. The Asian markets want energy out of Alaska. The Asian markets want energy out of Venezuela. Venezuela. The European markets want it from the Gulf of America.

We have now completely changed the scope of energy across the world. The president has done that, where everyone is now looking to U.S. companies and U.S. energy to, to, to, to power the world. And we're going to talk about all of it. The, the need of power is just, is just skyrocketing. And this, this war that has been on in the past of base load power, a war against oil and gas.

That is now gone here in America. I'm a Sherpa of the G20. One of my top priorities of all the G20 countries is we need to embrace base load power. We need to embrace oil and gas. Guess what?

People want to build data centers. They want to build AI. Well, what are you going to need for all that? You're going to need oil and gas. You're going to need coal.

You're ultimately going to need nuclear. So It's talking practically to the world about what energy actually is and how we're actually going to win the global war on energy dominance between the United States and our allies of— against those adversaries that are out there. We cannot have these crazy regulations and crazy permitting rules. We need to embrace companies like the ones you see on this stage. These are the heroes in the energy world.

These are the people that are trying to get stuff done. And have done it under the worst possible circumstances. I've been dealing with a bunch of companies that have dealt with Venezuela for 20 years under bad circumstances, and now they're like, "Hey, we're in. We're all in. We're getting down there because we have to win this global war when it comes to energy dominance, and the US and our allies are going to win it." Great, great, robust opening.

Toby. How about you? Let's hear your perspective on this very topic, because I know you've spoken to it many times in terms of energy dominance and your definition. Yeah. So something truly remarkable happened in this country 20 years ago where America found itself being energy dependent.

And then we cracked the code on shale and transformed America from being energy dependent to being an energy powerhouse on the world stage. We were incredibly proud of our independence. But it was very— as Jared mentioned, it was very difficult to preserve that independence. And we've got an administration now that not only is cherishing Americans' energy independence, they're challenging us to go further and translate our energy independence into energy dominance. And what does that mean to me?

Energy dominance means that Americans continue to pay the lowest energy prices in the world. They continue to benefit from the most reliable energy supply on the planet. And right now you're seeing that play out where global energy prices are north of $10, in the United States they're paying less than $3. We need to continue to preserve and protect America's energy advantage. It's going to be incredibly important when we think about building big things that require a lot of energy.

Build them in the US because of our energy advantage. Second thing energy dominance means to me is that we need to win the AI race in the West. And energy is going to be a key factor in making that happen. Third thing, we need to continue to provide energy security to our allies. What we're doing with LNG has been a savior for our allies.

We— it's an incredibly important role that we're playing, exporting from 0 BCF a day back in 2016, essentially, to over 20 BCF a day. Just think about the pace and scale at which this industry can move. And now we have visibility to having that grow another 50% over 30 BCF a day. Fourth attribute of energy dominance means that that for the people in this world, the petro dictators that weaponize energy like what Russia did with Europe, or they translate their energy sales into bombs, terror, and tyranny, we are going to replace that energy and that influence. We're going to replace that with American influence with the help of our allies.

And note, the UAE is one of those allies that said they're stepping away from OPEC so they can unleash their full So we're not in this alone. But that's incredibly important, and I think the biggest prize out there— all of these are incredibly important— the biggest prize, I believe, is ending— energy dominance means we end poverty. And knowing that energy creates wealth, more energy, more wealth, less poverty. To achieve this, we need to triple the amount of energy that's produced and consumed in this world. All forms: oil, gas, coal, nuclear, renewables.

We need all forms. To make this happen, and if we can do this, the impact to the world is going to be incredible. We will increase— the amount of wealth we'll create will increase the GDP, global GDP, fivefold over. We'll end poverty. So whether you care about energy, you care about business, or you care about making the world a better place, you should care about energy dominance.

And we're incredibly excited to have an administration that truly understands the vital role that energy will play in shaping this world's future. Jared, The—. I know we just heard from you. Yes. But I'm just coming back to you before I go to Maxim.

Anything you want to add, or was that detailed? I mean, I was listening to Toby. I was like, damn, I should have said what Toby said. He's exactly right. You look at the energy costs.

Look, the president always looks at energy costs. He wants the price at the pump down as much as possible. He wants electrical costs down as much as possible. And the key to that— but Toby hit on it— in America, we have the lowest costs all around the world, and that's because of the companies that are sitting on this stage and some of you that are in the audience. It's because you guys did the hard work and the innovation, and you stuck through to get it done.

And now our job in the Energy Dominance Council is to make sure the government's not getting in your way, that you're continuing to do it. You can continue to do it at Trump speed so that we can continue to lower energy costs as as much as possible. Thank you, Maxim. Let's go to this whole question of what the state of affairs that we're in, in the sense of geopolitical shocks, sanctions, supply disruptions, market volatility, something that you very much track and really follow. How are these reshaping trade flows and the movement of energy?

What's the impact? Thank you for the question, Ambassador. I think maybe stating the obvious first, just kind of defining the fundamental baseline. Energy is a non-discretionary necessity commodity, right? Every single of us as a global citizen requires it for basic mobility, for heating, for cooking, and for all sorts of other aspects of our everyday life, right?

The last two conflicts, the current one and the 2022, we obviously have a supply issue around the world, right? So the volatility, to your question, is on the upward move. It's volatile, but it's obviously extremely high cost of energy around the world. So combining that with, uh, with the necessity, obviously the bigger problem we have around the world is that the only way the market can solve itself at the moment is through demand destruction, right? As we have less supply as we used to do.

Meanwhile, the world is still growing, the population is still increasing, there is still increase in GDP around the world. So, and obviously there is a big efforts on electrification and digitalization and all sorts of other aspects. Just as a market representative, I would say that a lot of people, people present here, everyone is doing their job, you know, either the upstream companies moving with integrated gas models, absorbing some of those risks, and the volatility cost in the markets. Our business is designed to be the sort of between the suppliers and the end users, but that's just not enough, uh, in order to reduce the prices overall. So thinking about the energy dominance agenda, um, I would probably characterize it as a provider of liquidity, right?

You say increase in the production over the last decade has been incredibly significant towards the global balances of energy, right? There can be a long debate whether it comes from what type of energy, whether there is emissions, the cost of production. But long story short, just to add the point from my colleagues, is we do require short energy due to the current geopolitical situation. So, okay, well, good. Thank you.

Thank you for that, that overview. We have to go to Texas. We have Hunter Hunt here. And so Hunter, there are many here, companies that have a base in Texas. There are many Texans here.

So let's, let's get a window. Let's take it from this geostrategic and bring it down to a place where there can be maybe some lessons learned and also opportunities. So What are the lessons from Texas that shape this question of our national conversation on energy dominance, reliability, infrastructure, demand? Sure. Over to you.

Texas brings you names like Hunter Hunt as well. So it's a— no, I mean, Texas, I tell people all the time, if you want to see the energy ecosystem of the future, if you want to see the dominance that we're talking about, come to Texas today. Because most people know of Texas from oil and gas, and it's a storied history for decades. And today, I think 5.8 to 6 million barrels of oil produced every day. It'd be the second largest OPEC producer if we were in OPEC.

About 30%, a little less than 30% of US natural gas and 30% of LNG exports, all from Texas. It's a very, very rich tradition, a very dominant role that we've played over the history of the state. But when you move to the electric grid, were also the vision into the future. Texas is a grid right now, ERCOT, which is the system that supplies most of Texas, peaks about 85 gigawatts, 85.5. Nobody knows what a gigawatt is, so just remember 85.

So we have about 70 gigawatts of gas, both combined cycle and peakers, and old plants on the system. We have 41 gigawatts of wind, and 39 gigawatts of solar on the electric grid today in Texas. We have over 20 gigawatts of batteries on the grid in Texas. And so they are coexisting, both this, this hydrocarbon ecosystem that is out there combined with the new technologies that are, are rationally thought out and injected into our energy mix. It is working.

We do not have state subsidies to support wind, solar, or batteries. Those are market forces that are there. We're blessed with a lot of sunshine. We're blessed with a lot of wind. But this mix and ecosystem is working in Texas.

And candidly, as the demands of our country are increasing, whether it be more LNG export, whether it be the AI data centers that are showing up, or even just the reshoring of manufacturing from around the world, come back to the United States to appreciate the security supply of natural gas. It is all happening in the state, and we're open for business. All right, fantastic. Let's, let's consider a bit now about the international opportunities. And Jared, I want to go back to you and thinking about how the council is thinking about international engagement, energy diplomacy, and how American energy abundance is in fact strengthening our relationship with our allies and partners?

And also, would you define what do you see as the greatest opportunities at this time for the United States? It'd be good to hear, get your perspective. Well, I touched on one of it. The greatest opportunity is Venezuela. This has been a game changer.

I was part of the team that pulled together some of the top oil and gas people, top oil and gas CEOs from all around the world came to the White House in early January and had a meeting with the President. And you had, you know, had some of the big companies there. You had some more independents and wildcatters. And overall, the perspective was, hey, we're interested. We want to invest.

A couple people were a little skeptical. The press obviously ran with it and just Oh, nobody wants to invest in Venezuela. Well, guess what? Here we are a few weeks later, a few months later. Every one of those companies that were in the room with the president has sent teams down there.

Some of them sent multiple teams down there. Some of them already signed MOUs. Hunt came down with us. They signed an MOU in Venezuela. So all of this has happened again at rapid speed.

You've had 20 years of it heading in the wrong direction. We've had a few months of it heading in the right direction, and it has moved very fast. The early stages of that were, hey, we wanted to make sure there wasn't shut-ins. We want to make sure the oil was flowing. That happened.

We wanted to make sure the incumbents that were down there were operating and running. That happened. Now we wanted to make sure that new companies that wanted to come in could get to the MOU phase. That has all happened. And now we're trying to transition from the MOU phase to the contract phase.

And we're right in the middle of that, and that is happening. We've had a Venezuelan delegation is here. We were meeting with them yesterday. We're on the phone with them regularly. I talk to the Venezuelan delegation every day, almost multiple times a day.

I've done 2 trips down there myself. The opportunities are massive, but it's not just oil and gas. It's, it's critical minerals, it's mining. We have teams down there talking about their electrical grid. We talked about the electrical grid here.

They need big help on the electrical grid. And we've got teams down there working on that as well. But I was on the first flight from Miami back to Venezuela. It was a big deal. There's a big party down in Miami for it.

Well, guess what? The day I did the trip, American Airlines came out and said, we're going to do 2 flights a day now. And then a few weeks after that, United said, we're going to do flights down there. So my point is, all these industries are falling into place Everybody is seeing the opportunity. So, so from transportation, obviously oil and gas and energy, but now you're going to see the same on banking and finance and telecom.

And so there are massive opportunities happening in Venezuela. If you want to get in on it, you got to come and see us at the NEDC because it's moving fast, and we would love to help as many people come and invest in Venezuela as possible. But that's just one piece. I talked about Alaska. I was also just up in Alaska.

There's huge opportunity opportunities in Alaska. But to your point, I mean, this— the dynamic has shifted. Toby talked about it earlier. We are now— everybody's coming to us. We're not going to other countries.

The countries are coming to us and they're asking how US companies can go and help them overseas on some of the infrastructure. Toby's company comes up almost regularly when we're meeting. People need what we have here in the US. They need the infrastructure. They need to have, you know, the pipelines that they can get the system flowing.

And they need our energy resources as well. So it's not just exporting. It's U.S. companies coming over and building the infrastructure so the energy that we're sending over there can go into all areas. And that's Europe. That's Asia.

That's in Africa as well. I mean, so we're hearing from all this all around the world are coming to the National Energy Dominance Council. It's actually been one of the great surprises of— when we started, we thought we'd be really fixed on domestic and fixing the permitting issue. And now it's really branched out over the last year or so where it's now a global resource for people. May I just add, we have a number of representatives here from the Caribbean also.

Same in this case? I'm just adding to your list. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, 100%. So it's very global.

Yes. Yes. All right, Toby, since your name has been invoked again in this case, let's go to LNG. I mean, something that, of course, you do focus on. How do you see U.S. LNG exports shaping relationships with allies and partners?

I think it's important just to start with, you know, why this is so important. And I think what we're realizing, again, being reminded We find it again with the events that are unfolding in the Middle East. Global energy security is America's energy security. These are integrated markets, so we need to care about providing energy security to the world. We're incredibly excited about how the administration is opening up new opportunities outside of our borders to bring our strengths and help other countries capture more opportunities, but domestically, what we can do is to provide energy security for our allies.

It comes on the export export side of things. Uh, what we've done on the LNG front, as I mentioned earlier, has been absolutely legendary, and I think we're just getting started. When we ask a question on how big could we make our U.S. LNG exports, question really starts with how much surplus could we create here in the United States, with two conditions: the energy that we produce has got to be cheap and it's got to be reliable. And with a $4 gas price, we ask a question: how much inventory of inventory do we have that could allow us to grow our production and that we could hold that peak flat for over 30 years? And we put those two constraints, thanks to the shale revolution of the inventory that we've discovered but not yet drilled, we have the potential in this country to create 60 BCF a day of natural gas surplus.

That is the energy equivalent of adding over 10 million barrels a day of clean energy to the world stage. That's like adding a Saudi Arabia. What a secure dirty blanket for the world. Now we've got a big AI demand that's coming. Maybe that's 8— by some estimates, 18 to 20 BCF a day of that.

But a tremendous opportunity. Oh, and by the way, that 60 BCF a day is not even in count— is only including the gassy regions of this country, the Appalachia region, the Haynesville scoop stack, then the dry gas Eagle Ford. It doesn't include the Permian. It doesn't include the resource base we have in Alaska. So we have a tremendous amount of surplus.

It's one of the biggest opportunities that we have in front of us, and it's one of the biggest energy security blankets we can provide for the world. Are there steps that the United States needs to take to remain the most reliable in this market? Yeah, and I think coming back to— I mean, for me, exports mean surplus, and surplus means security and reliability. And hopefully, you know, lower volatility and lower prices for Americans. When we think about protecting America's energy advantage, you know, it's one thing for us to have energy that is half the cost of what other people can get around the world, but what good is energy that's affordable when it costs us twice as much to construct an LNG facility or a power plant than it does in other parts of the world?

If we truly want to take advantage of America's energy advantage, manage. We've got to fix the entire system and the permitting regulatory bottlenecks that Jared mentioned. Those are stifling the true value creation that we can create here in the United States because it's artificially increasing the cost to get energy systems built and it's completely unnecessary and other countries have figured out how to do it. We need to learn from that so we can truly benefit from America's energy Useful advice there. Maxim, coming back to you again, what are the signals that you are looking at in this regard and watching closely in terms of LNG, power, critical minerals, industrial demand?

And basically, how do these signals impact long-term agreements? Yeah, I mean, I think for the type of business we are, I mean, we We move about 5 million barrels a day of energy equivalent through the trading, energy trading operations, right? At the same time, we are a very large industrial consumer of power around the world. So for us, it's not just about trading, it's about the strategic corporate needs as well spread around the world. But maybe to continue on Tobias' point on LNG, economics matter a lot.

So the signals at the moment on the price-wise, Thinking about, just to continue the LNG growth story, we're clearly getting more LNG coming out of United States. There is Argentina and a few other countries around the world. The potential signal or the bottleneck that we're going to be experiencing for further growth is on the demand side, right? Demand side, I mean, up for a debate, but we estimate it needs to be somewhere in a sort of $8 to $10 per MBTU view for the next couple of decades for the countries with the fastest growth, with the most need for the energy, with the sort of energy import nations which require that energy at the moment. And the issue with that is, is that if you take all these numbers for plus transportation, plus shipping, you know, it works.

In general, it should work for the benefit of the global energy mix. The issues coming back to geopolitics for a minute, right? And in terms of signals, the current elevated prices, significantly elevated prices, it slows down the build-out of infrastructure outside of the wealthy nations, right? Liquified gas still needs to be regasified, it still needs to be converted to power, and therefore at the current prices, effectively, the future demand for LNG or energy in general requires support in terms of building that infrastructure, right? Part of our business where we come in as solvers, obviously we, for example, sign long-term contracts from US Commonwealth recently with 3 million tons, and then we break it down to the demand centers in whether spot or 3, 5, 10 years, whatever they think they can deal with in terms of proximity of the views.

But we do see this growing issue of that the LNG build-out and liquefaction needs to be also complemented with the support for the nations or the demand centers in terms of building the other side of the infrastructure of the development. So, great, great. Hunter, you know, there's this question about strategic competition and how does the United States— how should we be thinking about energy infrastructure as part of strategic competition? So if you would comment on that and And why do American companies, capital, technology, need to be present in the markets in order to ensure that we are placed where energy is growing fastest? Yeah, so you'll hear a lot of what Jared said in my response to that.

You know, as a private oil and gas company, we've been international since the '70s. The North Sea. We went into North Yemen back in 1981. We were in Kurdistan. We went into Peru in '99.

I kind of joke we don't purposely seek out the US State Department travel advisory list, but it looks an awful lot like where our operations are around the globe. This has never been— there's never been a better time to be a US operator abroad than today, and I can say that across all administrations that we've seen over decades. And there are a couple of factors that are driving it. One is clearly there was a messaging that went on globally that we don't need oil and gas anymore. It started back in the late 2000s, early 2010s, but that was a deafening monologue effectively because there was no dialogue going on with the energy industry about how can we meet the the world's needs.

And just to double down on what Toby said earlier, I think there are over 4 billion people on the face of the planet that live on $10 a day or less per capita. Our activities in Peru, we have a pipeline that's in the— we start in the rainforest, goes up and over the Andes, down to the LNG export facility that we operate. There are no Tesla charging stations in the highlands of Peru. There are so many pockets of poverty out in the world that need a hydrocarbon system today to help them get the mobility they need to improve their hand economically. It can coexist with renewables, but you have to have the hydrocarbon systems in place.

And we have an administration that is our full ally in that today as we go out and talk to different countries. So there are countries that have unloved assets. They've been underinvested in either for ESG reasons or above-ground political political strife— so think Syria from that perspective— that are producing a fraction of where they were just a decade or decades ago. Venezuela is a classic case in point on this. Um, and so, uh, they're looking for U.S. partners to come in and help them resuscitate their mature assets and kick that off.

We've created a partnership with Baker Hughes— Lorenzo, who was just speaking up here— to identify those countries and figure out how can we quickly go in and start that flywheel of investment to get going. And the US government has been an incredible ally, be it DFC, EXIM, Department of Energy, the Dominance Council. It— we have a lot of friends showing up at the table for this. That is especially true in countries where our geopolitical competitors are out there. And so we see Chinese companies as we travel abroad, we see Russian companies as we who travel abroad, if you care about the environment, you want US companies to be winning in these countries because we operate at world-class scale.

We have a lot of friends looking over our shoulder to make sure we're doing things right. But candidly, it's just the way we've done things for decades. And so this is very much playing out right now. When we are going abroad or when, as Jared said, countries are calling us today, saying, how quickly can you come in and start to resuscitate what we're doing? And, and we're trying really hard to be good partners in that, in jurisdictions where it matters most to the US government and in our competition with China and others.

AI. So let's put AI immediately in the mix and let's stick with you, Hunter, because this is also, I think, a favorite topic of yours. You, as we know, AI is driving new demand and competition. So, you know, explain to us how this can fit together and actually be mutually reinforcing. Yeah, so I apologize in advance, I'll get off my soapbox at the end of my— but it, again, Texas is where it is happening today.

And part of it is, as Toby was talking about earlier, we have a constructive regulatory environment. Senator McCormick is a great talk about we won World War II in half the time that it takes to permit some of the pipelines up in the Northeast. In Texas, it's clear set of rules and you can, you can build. That's why so many of the, the AI data centers in, in the, the LLMs, these large language models, that's why they're looking at Texas, because you can still build and there's predictability. But again, go back to our grid.

Our peak in Texas is 85 85.5 gigawatts. Our queue of large loads, of basically, um, of large customers or these, these data centers that are raising their hands saying they want to come into Texas, that totals out to about 368 gigawatts in 2032. That, that's the request. A lot of double counting in that. There are a lot of the hyperscalers that have turned loose multiple different developers to say, go see if you can pull this together.

But the growth is explosive in what is coming, and we are— we're struggling to keep up with that. Now go to China, right? So China in 2025 added 543 gigawatts of capacity, right? Texas's peak is 85. They added 543.

They added over 320 gigawatts of solar alone. They added 80 gigawatts of coal. They basically built a Texas of coal. They have 40 nuclear plants under construction right now. They are adding— they added an entire US grid in less than 5 years.

That is how much they have built as part of this AI competition. We have all the closed models and we have the advanced chips. They are crushing us on on building new capacity, and they have 9 or 10 out of the top 10 AI models that are out there. If we are truly in a race, in a geopolitical competition with China to win AI, we have to rethink our policy here in the country because, because we need to be slop— we need to be putting up every electron you can possibly get your hands on right now. We need the permitting reform.

We need the ability to move far quicker than what we are. And this is a critical, critical dialogue. My grandmother— and I'll shut up on this— my grandmother kept a foil ball and a rubber band ball. This is— she's married to a federal judge in Kansas City, Missouri— till the day she died above her oven, because that's what she did. She grew up with a war— a World War II mentality of we sacrifice for the greater good and we need to push forward.

We are spending so much time talking about ratepayer of rights, which we need. But we are in a competition in the next 5 to 7 years that we have to win, and it takes an entirely different way of thinking about energy dominance to do so. I'm going to take what Hunter said and just see, are all of you in agreement with what he said? Jared, in particular, you seem to be nodding your head as he was speaking. Yes, you want to add to that about this strategic competition, what China's doing, and then relative to AI and us.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, what Hunter's saying is 100% right. I mean, this is what I open with of this global battle over energy. I mean, think of what Hunter just said and think of the fact that we cannot build a pipeline to go from Pennsylvania into Massachusetts to lower people's energy prices in New England. The stats that Hunter just said, the fact that we have pipelines flowing all through Europe And you cannot get a pipeline from Pennsylvania into Massachusetts just to lower people's prices in the state of Massachusetts and the rest of New England.

That is the shift of mentality he's talking about. And it's not groundbreaking. It's— frankly, it's common sense. This is not a political thing. We've had Democratic governors come in to see us, Republican governors come in to see us.

They all want this. It's just— it gets— caught up in this nonsense of politics. And that's where President Trump is. He's been great because he's above that and he's like, we need to think practically about energy from now on. And so Hunter's absolutely right.

But I just want everyone to leave here with that example and please call the governor of New York. But that's how simple it is and how easy it is to fix it. It's a pipeline. It's not even going to touch water. And there's a a 401 water regulation that's holding it up.

Do you know what I mean? I mean, that's how crazy this stuff is. I'm sorry. No, and I really wanted that reaction and that emotion because I think that Hunter stated very specifically, and it builds upon, yes, definitely, you're opening—. By the way, 50 gigawatts the US added as a country last year to 543 because of the issues of permitting and getting things built.

Maxim, let me, let me— and I'm going to come to you, Toby. Maxim, let me get you in on this. And in terms of, again, the issue of signals, AI-related infrastructure showing up in market signals, how is it showing up at this time and what are the ramifications? Yeah, I think it's, it's quite a US-centric question given the, you know, sort of the being the leaders in the tech industry in general. Right.

So obviously within the US we've seen multiple or enormous increase in the PPAs, and therefore the capacity behind that would be coming predominantly through the renewables and from the gas-to-power conversion. Back to the Anders point, right, renewable, as much as the solution it is, it's not a full one, right? It's, you know, for the data and the AI initiatives, it requires 24/7 baseload. Therefore, it definitely, with the current technological advancements needs to be complemented between fossils and the renewables. The way we like to think about that, you know, we are trading business, we trade on the back of signals, we try to position ourselves.

So while there is this large increase or chase towards securing the PPAs, reasonably so, the next will be is what goes into that power, right? So we need the feed and hence the discussion here, obviously, obviously, how does that develop going forward, right? Again, looking at the potential numbers on the demand, even kind of putting down US growth in terms of its power needs even before the AI story, right? There is the natural kind of— it's a very developed economy, it has a very large industrial presence, and sort of the signals we're trying to bid more, it's more of a regional bottlenecks, right? Effectively, we have the biggest development scenarios are already highly developed and have huge amount of demand as is, would that be residential or industrial, right?

So the interest To chair the fireside chat on energy diplomacy and regional stability in the Middle East, please welcome back Frederick Kemp.

Good afternoon, everybody. If you could please take your seats, we'll get started. Good afternoon. Thanks so much.

We have an enormous treat. I get to engage in conversation with His Excellency Karim Badawi, the Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources of Egypt, and he's got a unique perspective from Cairo as the global community responds to this conflict but builds back in enduring fashion. The wonderful thing about the minister who's been in his job now 2 years— Almost, yeah, almost. —Is 27 years before that was Schlumberger and all over the world. And so we're going to talk about that unique perspective.

Deputy Secretary Danly of the U.S. Department of Energy has given us his regrets. As these things happen, office emergency has come up and he's very sorry that he's unable to join this conversation. So, no one in this audience has to be convinced that energy diplomacy and regional stability are inseparable. We all know that. The Iran crisis, the Strait of Hormuz disruption brought back into focus one of the classic disruption scenarios for global energy security, that a confrontation in a narrow maritime corridor can quickly send global ripple effects through shipping routes, insurance markets, LNG flows, fuel prices, industrial supply chains, and the cost of doing business everywhere in the world.

Um, but what this conversation is about is not just crisis response. It's about what moments like this reveal: the need for resilient infrastructure, trusted partners, regional integration, reliable energy systems, energy diplomacy to reduce risk before it escalates. So let me turn to Minister Badawi, and maybe you can just do a scene setter for us. You're not as— you're very close to the action, you're very close to where everything is happening, but you're not right on top of it as some of the others here. Have been.

How are you— how does this crisis look different from Cairo than it does, say, from Washington and the Gulf, and how is Egypt assessing this moment? So thank you very much. It's a great pleasure to be here. First of all, I would like to maybe highlight that molecules of gas of gas or of oil, they play a very important role in improving people's lives and they play a critical role in terms of impact on the economies and the developments across the world. And when we look at Egypt, Egypt today is between three different continents.

At the same time, Egypt had gone through periods where it was a net exporter and then currently Egypt is a net importer. And this is why when we look at this crisis, it reemphasizes the importance of having a long-term strategic focus to ensure the resilience of the energy energy security for 120 million people who are living in Egypt. And to be able to do that, this is why we have really kind of set 6 key pillars for the Ministry of Petroleum and Mineral Resources over the last 2 years to really kind of set the foundations of priorities for the sector and that as well aligning areas of collaboration with partners because, you know, we see very strongly that success can only come through partnership, through collaboration, and through win-win, you know, with whether, you know, the various countries in the region, whether with the private sector, which is, you know, fundamental to development of this industry. So those 6 pillars is essentially start with the first pillar is how do we provide these petroleum products for 120 million people who are in Egypt? And to be able to do that in the most cost-effective way and in the most sustained way, the focus is on really on increasing production from our existing fields and I always say with proper reservoir management and at the same time in terms of focusing creating an environment which is conducive for increased exploration activity, because exploration activity unlocks further, you know, resources that can be brought into production, right?

And this is something which is very, very important. And around that, maybe we'll be able to expand a bit later on, is how we foster an environment which is conducive for our partners, you know, to be able to invest reliably safely and securely for the long term and to make sure that Egypt is highly competitive and provides return to shareholders of the investors and at the same time provides value for the country in terms of unlocking those molecules. The second pillar for us which is very important is Egypt is blessed with an infrastructure which is very rich in the oil and gas. We are having an infrastructure in terms of of the petrochemical sector, you know, with several, you know, mega petrochemical infrastructure which exist in Egypt which play a very important role to be able to unlock value from molecules whether in terms of gas molecules or oil molecules and provide value-added derivatives which are important for the local industry growth in Egypt or for exports to other markets in the in the world. The second also part of our infrastructure is the existence actually also of refinery capabilities.

We have 9 refineries across Egypt which also play an important role in terms of providing value-added derivatives and petroleum products that can be used for the local market or essentially for exports. At the same time, we're having as well a unique infrastructure in the East Mediterranean Union in terms of liquefying and export terminals for gas, and we have two major terminals which are unique in the region, which also enable essentially not only the ability to monetize gas molecules coming from Egypt for export into the global market, but as well to be able to enable those facilities to enable enable molecules from the Eastern Mediterranean to, you know, from other countries in the Eastern Mediterranean to be able to make their way to be able to export it to other markets, you know, such as Europe and other in the world. At the same time, we've also over the last, you know, 1 year and a half, we've also built an infrastructure in terms of FSRUs, you know, for essentially regasification units to enable the flow of additional molecules of gas to come into the network from Egypt and in terms for us to be able to provide all the requirements that we need for the local market but as well to make sure that we have all the gas requirements to sustain continued growth for the petrochemical sector and also the fertilizer sector which is very important and the fertilizer industry in Egypt is very rich. And obviously it uses 60% of feedstock from natural gas and hence the importance for us to create that environment where we can deliver those molecules to grow those industries. At the same time, we also have a unique infrastructure in terms of ports and storage facilities and pipeline network, right, to move crude across, across the country and enabling allows us to have, you know, the leveraging ports such as Suez Port on the Red Sea to be able to have, you know, carriers of crude offload for storage or to be able to transfer crude essentially across, you know, the pipelines within Egypt and then export, you know, from the Mediterranean ports to other markets or to be able to deliver crude to the refineries to be able to be leveraged.

And on top of that, we're also having a gas network, right, for delivery of gas to all the different sectors, for households, for industries all across Egypt. So essentially we have this infrastructure which for us has been very important in terms of how we can enable the full utilization of this infrastructure, not only based on the molecules which are coming actually from Egypt. And this is something again which is very important for us of how we can avail, you know, this infrastructure. And in addition as well to infrastructure of storage of crude that we do have to avail it for the different countries within the region. The third pillar, which is also very important for us, and this is something which actually comes hand in hand really with the energy sector, is the mining sector.

This is why also mining is very important. It's our third pillar of focus essentially. Today, mining in Egypt accounts for less than 1% of our GDP and we're focusing to increase that to 6%. And this is something which is very important because the mining sector will have—. And what are you mining?

So here are various different categories. So, you know, Egypt, you know, we have gold, we have phosphate, we have silica sands, we have kaolin, we have many different types of minerals, you know, some also rare earth minerals, some critical minerals, and this is why we've decided to be able to make that transformation in terms on the mining front, which is not only in terms of extracting raw minerals but as well in terms on processing and in terms of value-added, you know, industry. We have just actually— we have just initialized the contract to be able to have the first aerial survey, which will be done nationwide. And this is the first aerial survey nationwide since 40 years, and this will use the latest technology to be able to again unlock the full potential, you know, of our, you know, mineral resources and to be able to set the foundations for, you know, enabling investment opportunities to unlock the potential of the mining sector and also further collaboration, right, with various, with various countries. The fourth pillar, you know, for us is really focused in terms on how do we work to deliver the optimum energy mix for the country.

And I say the optimum energy mix for the country because different countries have different natural resources and what we've looked to together with my dear friend and dear colleague, Minister of Electricity and Renewable Resources, Dr. Mahmoud Esmat, we have worked in terms on how do we best leverage those natural resources so that we can— Egypt has lots of land, lots of sun, lots of wind, and today we have 60% of gas molecules are going towards power generation and hence really we have revised our energy strategy to have actually our energy mix to have 42% to be from renewable energy by 2030. And we're doing this also with a lot of acceleration. Going back to your point around also the geopolitical crisis and so forth, the more we can minimize the need in terms of gas molecules for power generation, leverage, you know, the natural resources in terms of land, you know, sun and wind, and hence—. And 42% is the goal. Where are you now?

So today we are talking roughly around maybe the 12%, you know, 12% You know, from a— that's a big growth. Yeah, but essentially we are targeting in terms of having, you know, renewable resources so that we have a total of 42%. And at the same time, there's also nuclear, also power generation, also projects, right, which will also kind of unlock around also 4, you know, 4.5 to 5 gigawatts as well of nuclear, of nuclear power. And when you look in terms of this energy mix, for us it's important because it unlocks really— it frees up gas molecules. That then can be used either for exports to wherever those molecules can bring, you know, the needs, you know, outside of Egypt or essentially those molecules we can actually channel them to the petrochemical sector or we can channel them to growing the fertilizer, you know, industry which is very important for food security not only in Egypt but as well for the rest of the world.

And again, when you look in terms on this, let's say, renewable focus, it will enable us to also provide the foundations for, let's say, the green derivatives as and when they become economically viable and where offtake would become. Then the fifth pillar for us is really focused around the human element, right? Because again, you can have the best of the resources, but without the human element, you cannot really unlock it. And this is why our fifth pillar revolves around the health and safety of everyone working in the industry across the value chain, how we can ensure that they come safely to work and how we can ensure that they can go back home to their families and loved ones safely. And combined with that, the environment, right?

And we believe it's not really an either-or. It's also important for us to be able to unlock the potential both from the oil and gas and as well from the mining sector and with a way to leave also also, you know, the climate, you know, for future generations and to be able to do that in a sustainable way. And along with this, we've also added the energy efficiency because we talk a lot about unlocking more molecules and investments and how— and again, crisis like this, you know, happening around the world also highlight that every molecule, you know, involved a lot of work, a lot of effort. So we have also to make sure that we integrate, you know, reliable systems for energy efficiency across the value chain, whether we're talking in terms on the operations, on the production, and in terms on the consumption front in terms of energy efficiency. Last but not least, our sixth pillar is collaboration, you know, and collaboration for us is very, very important because again, you know, Egypt today, you know, does not have, let's say, the resources in terms of gas, for example, that exist in Qatar, or for example, oil that exists, you know, in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and so forth.

However, Egypt possesses a unique actually location, right, in terms of, you know, between the Middle East, you know, Africa, and, you know, Europe. It connects, you know, the East Eastern Mediterranean region and all of the gas molecules right in the Eastern Mediterranean. Egypt has a unique actually infrastructure in terms on the oil and gas front, you know, that I mentioned, whether on the petrochemical front, on the fertilizer industry front, on export terminal fronts and so forth. And hence we have an ability to enable other partners to monetize their molecules and to make those molecules available, you know, where they can bring value. At the same time, Egypt has a growing local market.

We have 120 million people. We have a lot of development in terms of infrastructure, in terms of roads, in terms of ports, in terms of storage capacity, in terms of railways, in terms of airports, and hence essentially we have the foundations which can help actually all our partners to monetize and unlock value from their molecules, whether through a growing local market, whether through a growing local industry where they can deliver value-added derivatives from those molecules, you know, and then provide either offtake within the country or offtake, you know, through exports. And at the same time, provide the infrastructure which can help our partners, you know, in the, in the East Mediterranean to have their molecules molecules come to Egypt through the export terminals and then essentially, you know, have them go to wherever they might be required. So to answer your question, it's, you know, Egypt has really focused in terms of how we can really foster collaboration to provide value for molecules, you know, whether for oil or gas, not only for the benefit of the 120 million people living in Egypt, but actually in a lot of collaboration for other countries in the Eastern Mediterranean and as well for investors who are invested, you know, in the Eastern Mediterranean, you know, for future resources. So I think that's rich insight, those 6 pillars into how Egypt is approaching things sort of irrespective of crisis.

Now on top of this, you have this crisis and Last year when we were here, we experienced Operation Midnight Hammer. I think back to the conversations at that time, and I don't remember anyone saying, "Oh, next year this time Iran will have shut the Strait of Hormuz." Did you anticipate anything like this? Then beyond that, how has this crisis affected what you're doing, your pillars? What has proved terrific about that that has made you stronger? And where are your vulnerabilities in this kind of crisis?

So I will start with the opportunities, right? And really, the opportunities has been in terms of when, you know, when I talked about the 6 pillars, essentially is how do we accelerate and how they lay really the foundations for ensuring that we have an investment and, you know, we have an environment which is attractive for investment into the country. And this has been very important because, again, when you look at this crisis, what does this crisis demand from all of us? Again, and there's no one country which can do it all, but the whole spirit is that every country have to do whatever it can to have more molecules to be made available so that actually, you know, molecules availability to the global market, you know, mitigates actually the impact, right, of this crisis. And for us, one way in terms of being able to do that is to really kind of collaborate closer really with our partners.

And we have a lot of partners from many of the, you know, from many countries, right? I mean, we have many, you know, American companies working in the upstream. We have Chevron, we have Exxon, we have other companies such as BP, Shell, we have companies operating from the Middle East such as ADNOC, we have Arcus, we have Dragon Oil, we have— so essentially a lot of the different players, global players of all different sizes, and ENI, which also plays a vital role as well, in terms of Egypt, how we can really help to have an environment where they are incentivized to be able to accelerate production from existing fields. And we've looked at this in terms of making sure that we recognize the financial terms, right, to make sure that actually every dollar is actually spent to unlock more molecules and faster and how we can also accelerate exploration in a way which has both, let's say, the breadth of exploration. You have, let's say, complex deepwater exploration activities in the Western Mediterranean right on the Egyptian side, but also of how we can work with our partners to look for, let's say, near-field explorations, which is explorations which are near existing infrastructure, which essentially can accelerate the time between between, you know, discovery and essentially in terms of first gas, you know, or first barrel of oil.

So essentially how we can leverage the mature infrastructure to accelerate that. The other area which again, you know, this also, let's say, environment enabled us is also to realize that collaboration and partnerships, existing ones, are very actually important and they actually, they play a key role. I mean, again, we are very blessed In the Middle East as well, in Egypt, we have, for example, our Samed facility on the Red Sea. The Samed essentially port facility that we have essentially is a close partnership between Egypt and all the Gulf countries, right? And essentially together, this facility has capability of storage, has capability of pipeline distribution to another facility in the Mediterranean to be able to have oil flow from the from the Mediterranean to other markets.

And at the same time, we have actually in this facility of Samed as well now terminals to be able to have petroleum products, right, to be able to be entered whether for the local market or for again export by the Mediterranean. And also we have FSRUs, two of our existing FSRUs are as well in the Samed facility. Facility. So this collaboration, existing collaboration, has been something that we, you know, we feel has brought in a lot of value and to be able to bring, you know, return to all the different parties and as well vehicles of delivering molecules through different pathways, but as well an opportunity for also new partners that we're also very proud to be working with, such as, for example, with Cypress. So with the collaboration with Cypress, This is where again, there we have worked together in terms of looking at, for example, Cyprus had discoveries which were not developed.

You know, we have, for example, Aphrodite Field, you know, the discovery from 2011 and was not, you know, yet developed. You know, the Kronos discovery from 2022, not, you know, not developed. And again, you know, we look together with our friends,, you know, in Cyprus and again here the very strong also, you know, relationship and collaboration and partnership between His Excellency President Al-Fattah Sisi from Egypt and also His Excellency President Nikos Christodoulides, you know, from Cyprus and how the collaboration between both countries could have a win-win, right, for all parties in terms of enabling Cyprus molecules and discoveries to be able to actually make their way to Egyptian infrastructure to be able to be exported back to, you know, to markets, you know, in Europe, or to be able to be monetized through the local market. And again, because Cyprus does not have its existing infrastructure and how we can work together on essentially availability of infrastructure which exists in Egypt. And this also helps investors because then our partners such as ENI and Total, you know, who are, let's say, partners for the Kronos field or, you know, Chevron, Shell, for example, for the— in the Aphrodite field, how they can unlock those molecules with the lowest cost per SCUF.

Because, you know, leveraging existing infrastructure essentially minimizes additional investment required and hence provides actually the quickest pathway to enable those molecules. So again, when we look at this crisis, it just kind of set the foundation that actually We just need to increase work, you know, in these partnerships and build in terms on what each of the respective partners can bring in to be able to unlock molecules which then will have an impact to improve the quality of lives, whether the people of Egypt, the people, you know, of the other countries and of our partners, and as well to the shareholders of the companies, right, to be able to unlock So we've run out of time, but let me ask you a final question, uh, for a short question and short answer. Uh, the two themes that are emerging today are, um, the demand era, that artificial intelligence, among many other factors— uh, you look to your south to Africa and what's going to happen there, there's so much latent demand there. So the demand era, how are you seeing demand growing in Egypt? And particularly, where do you see AI going, data centers, that sort of thing in Egypt?

So that's question number one. And number two, if there was one important impact of this crisis on Egypt, we sort of know what the impact was on UAE, Saudi, you know, other places. One impact on Egypt. So those two questions to end this round. So in terms of data centers, data centers require power.

And again, so this is why the focus that I discussed on our, you know, fourth pillar around the energy mix. Yeah, this actually plays right into this in terms of how Egypt, you know, we have availability of land, we have availability of sun, wind, you know, and as well, you know, nuclear, you know, by 2028, 2029, and '30. So hence, essentially having the renewables to be able to power data centers is something actually that Egypt actually is— actually will play a key role to be able to unlock this not only for the benefit of Egypt but as well for the other— for the other region. Because as when there's also an interconnectivity project which is called GREKI, which links actually renewable energy from Egypt to Greece and then into Europe. So when you look at the data center front, data center, a lot of projects are also kind of being looked at actually to be set actually in Egypt.

Renewable is there. There's also, you know, the availability as well of gas which will also still be required to balance actually that, you know, that energy ecosystem and so forth. As far as how now the how the crisis really affected Egypt specifically and so forth. I can tell you that it impacted Egypt obviously in terms of the price of the commodity in terms of the import because as I mentioned, you know, when you look at the prior to the crisis, you know, the price of a barrel of oil, you know, we're talking around the $61, you know, back in October 2025 it was $61, you know, it was then hovering around the $70, so obviously the crisis has created a higher import bill for the components, right, that we're importing. The same thing in terms of import of cargoes, in terms of pricing, you know, which has also gone from, you know, $11 per MBTU to around, you know, they shot all the way to $20 per MBTU, and now it's a bit kind of, you know, in between.

But here the essential part is that this crisis also kind of had obviously a higher impact on the financial cost for our import bill, but it's also kind of re-energized the acceleration of increasing our local production of our local, of our local field, because then that brings down the overall prices down, net, our net price to be lower. And at the same time, also the interconnectivity in terms of pipeline gas is also cheaper compared to LNG cargoes and so forth. So when you look at this crisis, I think it, it, it created a little bit of obviously a huge financial burden from the import side. But at the same time, it re-emphasized the importance of the six pillars and it re-emphasized the importance of, you know, accelerating partnership and also enabling, you know, how we can work with our partners in the region to unlock molecules not only from the existing fields but also as well across the Eastern Mediterranean and how together we can really play a key role to avail Egypt as an energy hub and to be able to help our partners, whether for storage for their molecules, such as what was mentioned a bit earlier this morning by Sheikh Nawaf in terms of having Egypt to be able to play a role to help for molecules from the Gulf to be able to be be monetized, leverage made available for the market. And at the same time, Egypt is in the middle as well of the three continents, and the Suez Canal provides as well another avenue in terms for cargo ships to be able to make their way from the Gulf into the Red Sea and then into the Mediterranean for global markets or for monetization.

Mr. Minister, what a fascinating conversation on what you had already been doing that you now changed, doubled down on, grow, adjust, the importance of partnerships, the importance of having these pillars in place before any crisis comes along. Very clearly seeing your experience, not just in government, but also these many years as Chambéger in Egypt, Eastern Med, Middle East, North Africa, Russia, Central Asia, and the United States. So please join me in thanking Minister Badawi. Thank you very much. Thank you.

Thank you very much. It was a pleasure. Thank you.

To chair the leadership conversation Beyond the Crisis: Energy Systems, Resilience, and Strategic Vision. Please welcome back Frederick Kemp.

I'll give you a bit more legroom.

Greetings everybody. Now that Ross Perot is here, we can start.

I'm going to make an exception here and just turn over the moderation to you, sir. Anyway, it's great to see you here. So this is a real treat because I'm going to be In conversation, my highest compliment to somebody is I've been stealing his ideas for years, and I've been stealing Mohsen Jafar's ideas for years, and I've been looking forward to this conversation. So it's now an understatement we're meeting in an extraordinary moment. Strait of Hormuz effectively closed, Qatar's LNG under force majeure.

The US has in turn tried running naval escorts, aerial campaign, intensive diplomacy to reopen one of the most critical choke points in the global energy system. We all know these things. The energy security implications are severe. The outcome is uncertain. Majid has joined us from the region.

He's just flown in. There's nobody better positioned to help us understand what this means for the Gulf for global supply and for the long-term future of the region's energy role than Majid Jaffar, Chief Executive Officer of Crescent Petroleum, Vice Chairman of Crescent Group, Managing Director of the Board of Danagas, operated across UAE, Iraq, broader Middle East for nearly half a century, and Majid has been at the centre of some of the most consequential energy developments in the region. Also been a friend of the Atlantic Council for many years, personal friend and a member of our International Advisory Board. So let's start there. Back in February, we spoke in Dubai about resilience and fragmentation.

Since then, the Strait of Hormuz has reminded us how interconnected energy security and growth remain. I said in the last panel that last year at this time we had Operation Midnight Hammer. But I don't remember anyone talking at that time, even after Iran got hit, that we might be facing this kind of weaponization of geography, if you want to call it that. Were you surprised? How do you think the conversation has been changed?

How do you think people are looking at energy security differently in your region today? Thank you. Thank you, Fred. Great to be with you. So before I start, I want to give credit to Egypt since many of you heard what the Minister said.

So Dana Gas, one of our group companies, we've invested over $2 billion in the country. We have over 1,000 people there and we've had challenges over the years and one of the big ones has been receivables, delayed receivables, which is obviously key for investor confidence. This month, actually, we've completely closed out all receivables, and that's been a policy priority. All the oil and gas companies in Egypt should be fully paid out 100%, and that's huge for, for investor confidence. So I wanted to give credit there.

So Fred and I have a conversation on video at least once a quarter, and it's a true conversation, and I learn a lot, probably more than he does from me. So we thought we'd have that in front of you, and hopefully you'll find it enjoyable and learn too. If not, we'll just take it private again.

So I only accepted to do this on condition I can ask him questions too. I will do. I was told belatedly and reluctantly about—. Because he has a great perspective. Any of you are not on his newsletter, you should get on it.

I think you'll— it really helps —put world events in perspective. We've been a proud partner, as you said, of the Global Energy Forum, I think since inception, all 10 of them, as a platinum co-chair back in Abu Dhabi when they started. Also the Iraq initiative that we started together, and Victoria Taylor is here, and more recently the CEO Dialogue in Dubai. And when we met in February, it was a different Middle East. It was a different world.

Congratulations for this Global Energy Forum, and congratulations to all of you for helping to break, I think, a record. You said this is the largest ever Atlantic Council hosted event in our 65-year history. So 1,900 people, 85 countries and counting. And that's really quite something. Testament to you, testament to the council, and also that we are in the capital of the global energy leader.

As we heard through multiple sessions today. And I'm not from the United States, but we can say that clearly, whether it's the shale revolution and so many other things that have just changed the world for good. So it has been a shock to the region. I certainly didn't expect this. We live in a turbulent region.

We've seen a lot of turbulence, and it had been— something had been building up. But I think the, the impact of it and the scale of it, the fact that every single country in the Middle East was attacked at the same time, not necessarily from the same direction, some from multiple directions like Iraq where, where we have a big operation, and then the global impact. Like if you had said that because of a war between Iran, Israel, US, and the Gulf, that farmers in the Midwest would be choosing different crops now in planting season. I don't think I could have projected that or anybody else, and how important the Gulf region is beyond just oil and not just natural gas, but whether it's fertilizer or helium for semiconductors, you know. But at the same time, it heightens the importance of the things we were already discussing in February at the CEO Dialogue and elsewhere.

The importance of energy security, the fact that the AI, the digital revolution, rests upon very physical infrastructure, especially energy, fundamentally energy. And friends in the AI space, techies, pure techies who are not even in our energy industry say to me that the AI race is an energy race. And that was before the war. I think this isn't the first shock we've had. You know, COVID was a wake-up call.

Ukraine, and, you know, an area that you've been speaking about and the council's done a lot of work on. And this is perhaps the biggest one because of the global impact. And at the moment, it is primarily an Asian crisis, but Asia is the economic engine of the world. But I think very soon we're going to be seeing the wider impact elsewhere. So you've operated in the region for 50 years.

I got a question now. So should I wait for yours? If you don't mind. Yeah, sure. So if we can step up, as you do so well, And the Atlantic Council was formed post-war era.

And we've since that, the end of the Second World War, we've lived in a world of, you know, global rules, freedom of navigation, international law. And we're now seeing the weaponization of energy. Obstruction to that freedom of navigation. And not only in the Middle East, we've had issues in Asia, we've had issues in Latin America.

Are these just bumps on the road, or are we now, in your view, heading towards a fundamentally different global order? Yeah, so I will answer that. This reminds me, I worked for the Wall Street Journal for many years. And we were doing a real estate conference in Cannes, and we were doing a convening around the Cannes International Real Estate Conference, and we were trying to get a very famous Texan, Harlan Crow, to interview, and he was a little bit reclusive, didn't want to be interviewed. And so I went over to his yacht, which was the biggest piece of real estate in all of Cannes, and he said, "I'm only going to go on if I get to interview you." And I said, "Well, okay." And because people there didn't know him and didn't know me, and so we came on to the stage and he said, "Hi, I'm Fred Kemp and I don't know why I'm interviewing this loser real estate person." I mean, you make your money— so anyway, we won't do it that way.

But it was very, very funny. And then we switched switched chairs at a certain point and everybody brought down the house. And it was a great interview, wonderful interview. I think things have fundamentally changed. I think this, the notion that we're going to get into another wonderful period of globalization is quite a ways in the future.

The question for me is how fragmented do things get? And if you look at the weaponization of geography, which is what Iran has done, You know, China used the weaponization of critical minerals, and that's the reason that the US, the US couldn't impose the kind of tariffs that it wanted to. And in both cases, I'd say the Trump administration underestimated what the Chinese had in terms of leverage and underestimated what the Iranians have had in terms of leverage. But I don't think we're going to be underestimating that kind of thing anymore. So I think it's fundamentally changed, and one of the reasons why I think it's so crucial that this war end with Iran not controlling the Strait, and the Strait being an open waterway again without fees of any sort, is you can't let that happen, and you can't let that change.

So yeah, I think it's changed, and we have to live with it, but we can make it less bad if we don't allow that bad behavior. And then on critical minerals, we have to just come up with them ourselves. Do I get my question now? Yeah. So here, here it is.

You've been there for 50 years. Let me ask you the same question. What has fundamentally changed in the region? So I was talking to Anwar Gargash, one of the people I respect most in the UAE, and he was saying to me, you know, there were hawks and doves toward Iran. And the doves said, no, it's much better to engage with Iran.

You know, in the end, that'll be the way to go. And the hawks said, no, no, they're going to be our adversary. We have to get ready for this. This is how we have to plan our military. You now see the UAE using Iron Drone from Israel.

Has there been a fundamental shift in the region that there's an understanding that it's a Iran, not Israel, that's the, the adversary or not. I mean, how, how big is this shift that we're going through from a geopolitical standpoint? So I think, you know, I've grown up in the region, in the UAE, and we lived through the Iraq-Iran War. We lived through the First Gulf War and lots of turbulence, lots of wars in between. This is the first time that all the Gulf countries, the GCC, have been attacked in this way.

Right from the beginning, but— Right from the beginning. Of course, the exception being Kuwait, as Sheikh Nawaf pointed out, the Iraq invasion of Kuwait. So Kuwait had that experience. —Experience. And yet what's been interesting living through it, and my arrival yesterday morning was my first travel outside the UAE since January, since I last saw you in Davos.

I'd never spent that long without traveling, but it was important for security of our operations and our own procedures and protocols. And the resilience shown by the countries during COVID we had a shock. Yeah. And many people, outside watchers, thought these are relatively new countries with undeveloped systems and actually held up extremely well, better than many much older countries in, in the West, for, uh, for example, which is what brought more people to the UAE during and after the COVID crisis, that the health infrastructure was incredible and, and very solid, and, and the government response to a crisis. And I think some lessons were learned there that were brought into this.

Obviously a very different type of shock— military attacks, different institutions— but the institutional framework for dealing with a crisis— and the defense systems. I mean, we had over 3,000 attacks in the UAE, very low casualty rate. Obviously, every casualty or death is a tragedy, but very, very low. So people in the country did not feel unsafe. Really remarkable.

Maybe a dozen—. 12, I think, from my recollection, and mostly from more than a thousand hits, falling debris from the interceptions. So people in the country felt safe and tourists left. And the way they were enabled to leave was also very important. The fact that the airports kept running so people could leave and return and there were no capital controls and significant support to the banking system to make sure liquidity.

So even though some money might have left, I'm confident that it'll come back because that's what investors remember. Could I enter and leave and could my money enter and leave? Those are, those are very important for, for confidence. So I think that the resilience shown will be built upon. So I think the region will come out stronger.

Obviously, we need the right end to the crisis. End the war. It's very important for the world economy. I mean, that's why attacks on energy infrastructure are considered war crimes under international law, because of the consequences. And the consequences today are being felt in some of the poorest countries in Asia.

And when a country like India starts putting in place, you know, energy saving schemes like work from home, you know, that, that That's staggering. We've seen that across Asia now. So I'm confident that the outcome will be positive in many ways for, for the region despite the geopolitical turmoil and heightened risk currently. So my turn or your turn now? So it's my turn.

Okay. So in addition to being a great journalist in your past and a leader of this institution. Uh, you're also a historian and you've written some great books, and I can strongly recommend the 1961 Berlin, uh, when the world faced a real crisis, a real, a dangerous point. So if we jump 20 years or 50 years into the future and look back at this era that we're living through now, not just for the Middle East, but for, for the world in terms of the great power politics rivalries, the rise of technology, the geoeconomics, the many things that the Atlantic Council has made great specialties of. How do you think it will be assessed and, and, and described?

Um, so, uh, I've been talking about this period of time as the fourth inflection point since the end of World War I. And so I'll do this telegraphically. But the first is the period after World War I. And, you know, and let's not forget, artificial intelligence is an age that I've been comparing to the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution brought us a lot of good.

Created a lot of great jobs, got people off land into jobs that, where they earned a lot more, GDP grew, a lot of things improved. It also brought us communism. It brought us capitalism. And it brought us World War I and World War II, both mechanized warfare that was impossible before. So one of the things I'm looking at is what will artificial intelligence change?

Change in politics, change in warfare, change in the stress in the world. Anyone who says it's definitely not going to be as dramatic as the Industrial Revolution is just wrong. And it's moving faster with less time for us to adjust to it. But because we know that, so let's look out the 50 years at how bad it could be. By seeing that, you can take steps now, so it's not so bad.

So it's the first inflection point, end of World War I, and that didn't turn out so well. That, and, you know, we ended up with fascism, we ended up with the U.S. going in isolationist, a fail— failure of League of Nations, failure of the Treaty of Versailles. World War II comes. World War II, turns out, the end of World War II, the founders of the Atlantic Council had experienced two world wars, and they said, "Not again." We created international institutions. We created 80 years of the greatest peace and prosperity among major powers the world probably has ever seen.

We did something aberrational in the United States, which is we built multilateral institutions. And we stayed the course with our former adversaries, Germany and Japan. Germany and Japan. End of Cold War, mixed bag. Some things were good— enlargement of NATO, enlargement of the European Union.

Some things were bad. Russia didn't turn out the way we thought it would or hoped it would. And China, as it grew, didn't become, you know, a more responsible stakeholder in the global system. Now we're in what I'm calling the fourth great inflection point, and that has war in the Middle East, war in Europe, changes of technology as fast as we've ever seen, and again it's going to be the US with partners and allies shaping it, and it's up for grabs. And I think 40 years from now will be, and may be, the most prosperous, progressive, advanced, enlightened era the the world has ever seen, or not.

But it's going to be dependent on what we decide today. So, which brings me to the question I'd like to ask you that's sort of along the same lines. Maybe take that same view, but I'll phrase it a little bit differently. You know, those of you who don't know Majid, he's an optimistic human being. He's through crises that we've always talked about in the past, you've come into a lot of things where people are not as optimistic, and you've come to me, and I've heard you with a fundamentally optimistic outlook.

So same question, looking 40, 50 years out, but also looking at this period of time and how we— how you see the long-term trajectory of the energy system, since that's your that's your field. Do you have confidence? Are you getting worried by what you're saying? Are you keeping your fundamentally optimistic outlook? And if so, why?

So first, on the AI point, and our region had already been playing, and I think will continue to play, and even more so, a key role there. We've got the capital, We've got the low-cost energy that's fundamental to it and the agile policymaking. And on the energy, I don't think people appreciate— we've heard, we hear the high-level numbers, but you know, every search, every basic search on your AI tool is 10 times more energy than a Google search. You make a video for a minute, it's an hour's worth of energy supply for a Western household, which is a lot more than an African household or an Indian household. You train one of these models and it's what 100 houses would use in a year.

So then you take that, you multiply it by billions of people. It's a staggering amount of energy that's needed. I think the engagement we've seen from the US government, particularly this administration, has been really positive. And we thought that, you know, does America first mean America only and just prioritizing US domestic production or LNG exports? We haven't seen that at all.

We've, we've seen incredibly, whether it's, you know, Chris Wright or Doug O'Grady, the Secretary of Interior, or Jared, as we heard, it was a national dominance agenda, but very active abroad. For example, where we operate in Iraq, we've invested over $4 billion. Dollars. We're the biggest gas producer now, getting close to 1 billion cubic feet per day of gas. And we increased our production 50% last year with U.S. Development Finance Corporation support.

We just had Ben Black speaking next door. So it's a great partnership. And through thick and thin, because we've had 11 attacks on us even before the war, rockets and drones, but we continued investing, we continued producing. Because we prioritize the local needs and we find if you align yourself with what is needed locally in terms of affordable, reliable, and cleaner energy, you won't go wrong in the long term. And we take a— you know, we've been at this 55 years now, 20 years in Iraq, so we take a long-term view.

So I think this crisis, despite the negative headlines, has reminded us the importance of of our region, the importance of energy and the importance of building that resilience through the physical infrastructure for sure in terms of redundancy and alternate routes, but also the people, the systems and the institutions that are resilient, which means their ability to withstand and manage during shocks.. And then the third element, which is critical, and we've heard a lot about that this morning as well, is partnership. Having the right partners over the long term that you can rely on in a crisis, whether that's service companies, whether that's investors, you know, financial partners. If you're a country, it's international relations, suppliers, because resilience is not just going to be about who can produce, but who can actually ensure through the whole value chain, all the way through to the customer, that that supply is secure. Because ultimately, that's what it's going to be about.

So if you're just to pick out an opportunity out of this crisis, what's the greatest opportunity you think you might be able to extract out of this current crisis? So we have a lot of reserves still to develop that are not dependent on the Straits, that, that can get to markets through overland routes. Uh, one of our group companies managing, uh, port on the East Coast, which is very busy now supplying the UAE, looking at pipeline projects that are going to be required. So on the infrastructure space, we are an energy and infrastructure group, so we're going to be busy. And, and I think that's going to be the case across our region but also worldwide.

This recognition that the digital and the physical go hand in hand— this is not like the digital revolution or the dot-com revolution of 20 years ago. That was far less energy intensive than this is going to be. Of course, you've got to manage the local. I mean, we had it in headline in The Post yesterday that there is a resistance to data centers now and the speed of their growth here in the US. So those things will have to be managed.

But I think the overall trajectory is positive. Terrific. So we've run out of time, but I'm going to use this for a short commercial break. So what, what Majid said about partnerships, I think there's nothing we feel more deeply about at the Atlantic Council, and that it's true over time. We were created to promote partnerships and alliances.

That was the founding of the Atlantic Council. Our mission statement is Shaping the Global Future Together. 5 Words says everything you need to know about what we're trying to do with this forum and at the Atlantic Council. First of all, it's shaping. We're not doing 5 events and 6 papers.

We're also doing events and papers, but the point is to move the needle on issues, whether it's Victoria Taylor on Iraq or whether it's our friends trying to save Ukraine. Or whether it's our friends looking at the future of artificial intelligence. So shaping, one word. A lot of places want to observe, they want to write, they want to publish. We want to shape through what we do.

The global future, as I answered to your really interesting question, it's up for grabs. It's being competed. And so we dare not engage in that contest because we won't like the outcome. If less benevolent actors win. And then together with partners and allies, national partners, national allies, institutional partners, institutional allies, partners and allies that we work with as the Atlantic Council works with Majid and Crescent and with all of you.

So with that, thank you to Majid Jafar and thank you for provoking me in this conversation. Thank you.

Bye-bye. Thank you. Thank you. That was great. That was fun.

Thank you. Thank you for attending this morning's sessions. Please enjoy your lunch in the lobby. This room will resume at 2:45 PM. Thank you.

Really interesting because we were— as we think about how to build, if we were to just start from scratch and say, how do you want to build a modern grid today? It would be something different from what we built decades ago with the energy infrastructure. And one aspect of that where NVIDIA is trying to play a positive role is optimization side, having a smart grid where you have, in addition to dispatchable energy and variable energy, you have variable demand. And this is an area where I think there's huge opportunity when we see the utilization of the existing infrastructure and the potential to open up tens, if not 100 gigawatts of unused capacity currently by taking better advantage of demand flexibility. There's a huge opportunity for us to capture the moment in in the near term, in addition to growing kind of medium and long term, to capture the moment by introducing the concept of flexibility into things like AI data centers.

And this, this is one of the technologies I'm most excited about with NVIDIA, is we're piloting this DC Flex opportunity with partners like Emerald AI, where we're saying, okay, we've built for, yeah, peak capacity. Most of the time we're not using anywhere near that. How can data centers soak up the unused electrons when they're available in the system and then curtail their demand when everybody's running their air conditioning units. And we, we want to prioritize the, the ratepayers and the essential services and so forth. So I think there's a, a perfect opportunity for industry to help facilitate the transition to a smarter, more efficient grid and also to help pay for it.

Because honestly, the value is so high with AI that there's a lot of interest from all of NVIDIA's partners and kind of downstream customers in making the investments necessary to enable this. So we have this kind of private-funded opportunity to help expand the grid, to help make it more optimal, and ultimately to support energy affordability as well as reliability. Right. So flexible power for AI data centers on the grid is, you know, it maybe in this room a lot of people know about it, but I think across America, probably a lot of people think of AI as just being a big energy hog. But what you're saying is that really that doesn't have to happen.

We can, we can use AI to create better, more flexibility for the energy use. We absolutely need more energy. That is a near-term imperative, like wherever we can find it, optimize existing infrastructure, build more. We need both. But yeah, that's a huge opportunity, especially in the near term.

To, again, support affordability and reliability by making better use of the infrastructure that we have. Yeah. Bonnie, you're on the front line with many of these communities now having to tell the story about growing energy demand and growing energy prices. So tell us how you work with your customers and consumers in your region. Yeah, I think first and foremost, you know, it is about delivering that reliable power in an affordable manner across our service area.

Territories. That's job number one for us. And it's a balance that you have to keep because of everything you just heard about the infrastructure, needing to modernize it, handling the new demand that's coming on. Do you have the generation and the transmission and distribution for that? And I think as it relates to our customers, it— you know, that's the secret sauce to some extent.

I think the more that we can get out in front with our customers before we put a shovel in the ground is really where we're going to drive the trust and the ability to continue to deliver on this demand. I think we've had a track record over 100 years of really being out in front of the communities and talking about what is— what are we really doing and how that's going to benefit them in driving a discussion around what it's going to look like for them. And I think you have to start with that. I think if they become an afterthought, then nobody's successful, regardless of the partnership that we all do to work together. And so, you know, that feels really important to me.

We have to start with the customer and make sure that they under— we understand their demands and their needs, and then help them with what we're trying to accomplish and find something that's mutual benefit. Beneficial to both of them. And we've seen the success when we lead from the customer perspective, less about what we're trying to deliver. Great. Well, Alex, can you tell us more about your new role in the Department of Energy and how— what specific policy measures you're focused on to manage growing energy demand and bolster affordability?

Yeah, happy to do so. So yeah, under the leadership of President Trump and Secretary Wright, I'm focused on implementing the department's energy dominance strategy to build a more affordable, reliable, and secure energy system for the American people. And what that looks like in reality is, you know, the U.S. Department of Energy is now the largest energy lender in the United States. So we have about $250 billion worth of lending authority through what was the Loan Programs Office, is now now the Office of Energy Dominance Financing, and we are looking to provide low-cost capital. We have cheaper debt than anyone else can offer, um, in combination with policies that the president himself has championed to, uh, to, to, to the point that our colleague here was making, make sure that the residential ratepayers are being shielded from the cost of building out this incremental infrastructure, energy infrastructure, that's needed to meet rising demand.

So, you may have heard during the State of the Union address, President Trump unveiled the Ratepayer Protection Pledge. Never thought we'd hear the words ratepayer protection in a State of the Union, but the president said those words, and then a couple weeks later, he held this historic meeting at the White House with the major technology companies who signed the Ratepayer Protection Pledge, where they agreed to revolutionary principles that have never really been tried in the electric power industry at this scale before, to shield residential ratepayers from the incremental cost of service. So what they agreed to was to buy, bring, or bill to their own generation to meet their energy demand. They agreed to pay for all of the network upgrade costs associated with serving their load. They agreed to enter into long-term take-or-pay agreements with minimum demand charges regardless of whether they end up using that electricity.

And then they committed to increasing the investments that they're making in their local communities. In addition to the job creation, to all the tax base that they bring, that these AI companies are bringing to local communities in the form of building new hospitals and schools and rec centers, generational types of investments that are going to make a long-term difference for people on the ground. And so all the leading tech companies signed that agreement. We're focused on making sure everyone upholds their end of the bargain and actually implements it. And we have a powerful tool in our lending authority through our Energy Dominance Financing Office, where we are doing deals with major utility companies.

So just a couple of months ago, we closed a $26.5 billion $100 billion loan package with Georgia Power and Alabama Power. It's the largest single federal loan package in the history of the federal government outside the financial crisis. And it is an encapsulation of the president's energy dominance agenda. It includes 6.5 gigawatts of nuclear uprates, 5 gigawatts of new gas generation, 3.5 gigawatts of battery storage, a gigawatt of hydropower uprates. 1,300 Miles of new and existing transmission, and because of the cheaper cost of capital, the interest rate savings, $7 billion in savings that will get passed along directly to ratepayers in Georgia and Alabama.

That has enabled those utilities to file for multi-year rate freezes and rate reductions in their states. So they are accommodating increased energy demand and load growth, combining it with cheap capital, cheap debt from the US Department of Energy, and they're putting downward pressure on rates. So this is a model that we are hoping to replicate all across the country so that we can achieve affordable speed to power. Good. That's great.

I'm sure Bonnie, then, is Duke on that, riding that train as well? Obviously, when we look at the massive amount of infrastructure that we're going to develop. We have the largest capital plan of any utility in the country, $103 billion that we'll spend in the next 5 years. All of that is around the grid modernization, the upgrades of the infrastructure, upgrades, everything that you've heard the rest of the panelists talk about. And, you know, for us, we are constantly looking at how do we execute that plan with the rate— with the customer in mind to bring that, you know, downward pressure on the rates.

I mean, our rates are below the industry average and below the rate of inflation. Not everybody can say that. And it's because of our deliberate look at how we're going to execute and more importantly, what can we take advantage, which certainly the DOE, the grants and the loans that are available are something we've taken a very hard look at. And had some success that has initially come out of that. We'll continue to do that.

If you couple that with the fact that we're going to combine our Carolinas utilities, that's going to save somewhere around $2 billion plus, and we're taking advantage of the solar and the nuclear production tax credits. That's going to save another $3 billion. So you'll see $5 billion coming out of things that Duke is doing that is directly going to help our customers. That's very important to us. We have to modernize and meet the growth, but we also have to maintain the affordability and the reliability of our systems.

It's super important. Okay, Tim, I understand that Siemens Energy has opened a new AI lab in partnership with NVIDIA in Florida. Can you both talk a little bit about that? What the significance of that? Yeah.

And I mean, we heard about this great buildout and investments and how we look at it. I think there's two things we have to do. And I look at the grid, it's like a highway that has constant congestion. So there's two things you need to do: build more lanes, and we just heard about it, and the support. The second one is how do you get more cars through the existing lanes, or here, fuel for?

And that's, I think, where especially the AI lab and how we look at the grid and How do we run the grid more efficiently comes into play. And I think that's an important part that we also need to play because it feeds right into the affordability. If you can use the existing assets, the existing lines, the existing substations, but get more load through it, that's a big benefit. And secondly, what we have also seen also in other countries, the more you build, the more curtailment you also see because you cannot move the, you know, the electrons, you know, through the different regions through the grid. So it all pays into using AI, using digital tools to run the grid harder when it's need— when it's needed.

And we talked about the data center. So they're all built for, you know, the hottest day where they run 100% load. If they don't run it, How do we then redirect the electrons through the grid and do it? We do it with a great partner, NVIDIA. Always get kind of constantly challenged and said, hey, we got all this compute power, can't you do more on the grid?

And let's make sure your knowledge on the grid, how the different assets run, how do we combine it with AI and how do we really then come up with better controls? You know, we see self-driving cars more and more. So I think the vision is have a self-driving grid that basically optimizes itself. And I would just add that, yeah, when we talk about the challenges that we're facing in energy or anywhere else in the world, and, you know, I'm as head of sustainability, I'm thinking about things like climate and education and resource conservation and things like that. Any of these challenges that we have, even if we see AI's footprint growing in the near term, and it is growing, AI ends up being just a fantastic solution to kind of across the board because it does add, as the name suggests, intelligence to whatever we're pursuing, whether it's scientific discovery, whether it's optimization of existing energy infrastructure.

I think the, the smart grid aspect and the concept of virtual power plants is— that's AI-enabled is really a fantastic future to think about. How do we optimize everything, you know, at the micro scale? Batteries that are charging, EVs, again, variable generation, variable demand, fixed generation, fixed demand, orchestrating all of that in a way that increases utilization, you know, much, much closer to 100% and allows us to manage both reliability and affordability at the same time. That's the promise of AI in the energy sector. And again, that's, that's useful kind of across sectors as well as we think of, do we need more intelligence at these big problems?

And I think across the board, the answer is yes, it's beneficial. So Josh, let me ask you, as head of sustainability and with the massive energy infrastructure buildout, how are you thinking about how to ensure reliability and climate resilience with increased weather volatility or response to deliberate incidents or attacks on the grid, see, you know, cyber attacks, deliberate attacks. We have to make our infrastructure more resilient to a variety of threats. How do you incorporate that into you? So I'll admit right away, I'm not an expert on the security side of things, but the, you the kind of implications of AI to support robust infrastructure and cybersecurity is fantastic.

So AI to help defend our infrastructure is a key component of that. On the climate side and the resiliency side, AI is fantastic at climate and weather modeling, number one, to help us again make better use of existing resources to plan out where additional resources can and should be built to prepare for catastrophes. Give advance warning of that. And again, you know, the concept of flexibility is useful there as well. If you have a lightning strike or some other downtime that's created in the system, the flexibility concept for data centers means, okay, we can curtail the data centers and reallocate that energy to more urgent needs.

So I think that's clearly an opportunity where AI can help us on the on the resilience side. And then the last thing I'll mention is thinking about climate change writ large, more and more organizations, the International Energy Agency, World Economic Forum, Boston Consulting Group, the Grantham Institute, are concluding that AI is poised to lead to net emissions reductions. So long-term, if we're thinking about tackling climate change generally, AI is actually probably the best technical solution that we have available to us. And there are lots of reasons for that. You know, energy reductions in other sectors that are much larger energy consumers through AI optimization is just a dramatic opportunity that I think is underappreciated.

But that's the prospect, again, of more intelligence that helps us solve that problem as well as the others. Okay. So if I were— pretend I am a citizen living in a community around the US where a data center is about to be is going to be built, and I have some concerns about whether it might be my rates or the fact that there's going to be this giant, you know, plant in my neighborhood and my kids are going to school and all the concerns that we're hearing from citizens around the country now in various communities from Virginia to Utah and other locations. How would you— how would you want to talk to— I'll start with you, Alex. How do you want to talk to that?

That citizen. Yeah, I think, look, I think President Trump put it well in the ratepayer protection pledge meeting with the CEOs of the top tech companies where he said, you all have a PR problem. And he was right. I think it is mostly a PR problem, although not exclusively. I think that the tech sector is doing a much better job working collaboratively with communities.

I mean, data centers were not really on anybody's radar radar a couple of years ago when they were starting to build more of this infrastructure and move into these communities. And I think the industry, in partnership with the power sector, has stepped up and is taking community engagement quite seriously. I think it starts with explaining the costs and benefits of this infrastructure in ways that we don't typically talk about it inside the Beltway. And haven't until this point actually talked about it even on this panel, right? These are relatively esoteric topics that most people are not tracking on a day-to-day basis.

But there are real tangible benefits. So it's not about marketing. It's about talking about what matters to people. And people care about jobs and investment in their local communities, even more than energy prices or winning the AI race, right? That, you know, that's an esoteric concept to most people.

But they do care about revitalizing their communities, seeing jobs and workforce development in their communities, seeing larger tax base that this investment brings. I mean, there's one county in Georgia near— not far from Atlanta that is attracting data center investment to their county and is actually trying to eliminate property tax in their county. Entirely because of all the investment and all the tax base that these hyperscalers are bringing. Eliminating property tax for, for the average person on top of being able to rebuild schools and hospitals and rec centers, make real investments in the local communities, invest in workforce development because this is the industry of the future. I mean, people can be convinced on, on this issue because we have the facts on our side The industry until this point has not done a particularly good job of articulating the specific benefits to specific people in specific places.

But that is now starting to change, and that's what we need to lead with. And then, of course, people care about energy prices and, you know, which way their power bill is going. And so that's where I think at the Department of Energy we have a key role in in partnership with the electric power sector and with the technology companies to try to plainly explain how the typical supply-demand dynamics that apply to virtually every other industry do not always apply here, where you think rising demand would necessarily raise prices. Not necessarily true, because of course, we know that the way the utility business model works is the more capex gets spent across a larger rate base, if you have a fixed cost that's spread across a larger rate base, you can put downward pressure on prices. So it's about plainly explaining to people that if you implement President Trump's Ratepayer Protection Pledge, where you are ring-fencing the, the additional cost of service so that the technology companies are paying for generation and transmission infrastructure, that the rest that they pay for that the rest of the community gets to benefit from, that's a formula to lower rates.

And we see a number of places where this is working. I mentioned Georgia and Alabama, multiyear rate freezes. There are a number of other jurisdictions as well. Indiana, Michigan Power, an AEP subsidiary in Indiana, announced this year that they're going to be filing for a rate reduction due to load growth from, you know, from these AI customers. Other places as well—NV Energy in Nevada just came out with a new large load tariff.

They're calling it the Ratepayer Protection Tariff, implementing multiple provisions of the pledge. We're seeing a number of jurisdictions, companies, and utilities proposing tariffs, and then that would—that will implement the pledge that that will isolate consumer— shield consumers from the incremental cost of service of these data centers and will start to put downward pressure on rates. So that policy framework, then combined with, as I mentioned, the low cost of capital that DOE is providing to dramatically expand and rebuild our energy infrastructure at least cost, will start to pay dividends this year. You will see more companies starting to file for rate reductions. They're doing those two things in concert.

And so we look forward to seeing more of that happen. So, I mean, we're the technology provider, but I would give three data points that would support, you know, why data centers make sense. One is what we have seen in the last 18 months is more and more data centers, because of the speed and how fast they need the power, they start looking at behind the meter. Buying their own power generation to make sure they get the, you know, the capacity fast enough. That shows that they're willing to pay for their power.

So they don't mind paying extra or paying the fair share for the power they need to consume. So that's the first data point. Second, also when you operate the data center, you need to upgrade the grid. Data centers fluctuate, so you You need need grid stabilization, you need upgrades of substations. So that all is being paid by the data center to make sure the data center can operate stable, but it also helps to upgrade the grid.

And keep in mind what we spent the last 150 years on the grid, we need to spend in the next 15 years just to modernize it and get it up to the level we need it. So data centers are actually paying part of the grid update, the upgrades that we need to do anyhow over the next years. And then the last point I would make is, I said it earlier, the data centers are built capacity, what they use for hottest day, you know, full capacity. They're not using that power, and that extra power is actually being available to the rest of the, of the service region to the rest of the consumer. So I think all these three points are very beneficial for the communities and actually show there's benefit from a data center in your community.

So I think about this a lot, the community opposition that we're seeing to data centers, because I think it is— it has a potential to create a tragedy if we don't take advantage of this moment and use AI to its potential. But I think it's, again, a great opportunity for us because it's a really good conversation to have. And it's true, the industry has not done a great job of explaining this, the pros and the cons of AI data centers, to acknowledge the impacts that they have, but to also highlight the positive impacts. So making sure that we're having a very thoughtful, data-based conversation about the positive and negative impacts is how we get to to good policy and to good outcomes and transparency. And I think if you're able to have that conversation and say, okay, what are the potential impacts?

There's the energy increase, there's the potential emissions, there's the impact on ratepayers, of course, people are concerned about the water. Then we can have that conversation about, okay, but what do modern AI data centers look like? How much of that is actually How much of it isn't? And what are the benefits? And for example, on the water side, and I know we're talking about energy today, but as an example of how old data sometimes leads to misunderstandings about current impacts.

On the water side, with direct-to-chip liquid cooling, and at NVIDIA we have a 113°F intake temperature for our cooling system. So if you think about like a hot tub, how hot that is. We're cooling our chips with water that's hotter than any human would want to get into for a hot tub. And that— what that does is create a very efficient system where you can put data centers in a lot of the regions in the United States, most of the regions in the United States without having to use chillers, which leads to less noise, which leads to basically zero water consumption and leads to more energy efficient cooling. So it's having the conversation as I think where we need to be to try to acknowledge the concerns that people have, but also to talk about the benefits, to talk about the taxes that are funding real tangible benefits for communities where these data centers are being built, the jobs that are being created.

And this is always harder to do, but to draw the line between the data center that's being built, the AI data center, and the kind of AlphaFold, the health, sciences, the life sciences and the health benefits that we're poised to see. You know, a cure for diabetes, better diagnostics, in addition to all of the environmental benefits that we see from it. So it's a conversation we should be having. I think we should welcome it. We should acknowledge it.

We should show up. And then we should talk about, okay, but what makes sense? This is something— this is a solvable problem. Let's look at the data and see how we can do this in a way that supports communities but also allows us to build this essential infrastructure for the country. Yeah.

Yeah, I won't repeat much, but I think this customer-first component comes into play here. I think right in the beginning of the planning process, when we think about where is it going to go, we have to get in front of the customers and drive conversations across the companies that are involved because it is going to take everybody doing their part in order to make it reasonable thing for the customers to accept and get their head around and want within their community. And I think, you know, if you think about us, we were one of the first ones out of the gate on our first more recent data centers— not the data centers that have been in our footprint for a decade— around making sure we have contractual structures that do protect the customers. Things like, you know, upfront capital so that we're not using capital from the the ratepayers, we're using the large load customers' capital, you know, looking at penalties for termination, minimum demand so that they're using some of the demand and things of that nature. All of those were structured so that we can protect the customer.

And I think the more that we can get out and talk about those in conjunction with them, even before we even get to the point where we sign something, I think will drive some of that education that we were talking about. To make it more comfortable. I think the other thing that we don't talk a little bit about that is in a typical data center over a 15-year contract, that's $1 billion that can go back to the customers. That's that downward pressure that Alex was talking about, you know, because you now have that larger population against the fixed— the fixed costs. And the more data centers that come in, the large loads, they're covering a larger portion of those costs.

What's good for our customer, because we have to do the upgrades of some of that infrastructure anyway, right? Just from an aging grid perspective. So I do think it takes the partnership. I think it's everybody talking about what's happening within their space to bring reality to the situation. I think it's going to be really important, right?

This moment, this political moment, reminds me in some ways of, of the opposition to nuclear power some decades ago, particularly after Three Mile Island. In the United States combined with other forces which led to a generation of not building out very much nuclear power. Now we regret that we don't— that we're not leading globally on nuclear power, both for our own country and to be a reliable global supplier instead of China or Russia around the world as more and more nuclear energy is coming online. So I hope we can avoid this moment for AI. But let's get to the, the last, maybe the last question I want to touch on.

We've talked a lot about various types of capital. Let's talk about the human capital component, because we need not just technology but people. And how— I'm going to ask each of you to ask think about how you're thinking about the workforce challenge. How do we get the right skilled trades to engineers to permitting staff? We actually haven't talked about permitting yet in this session.

I think every other one— shocking, I know— every other session I heard this morning had a lot about permitting. But we need people to do a lot of these different jobs, and we need to retrain, uh, our workforce so that they don't feel that their jobs are just getting eaten by AI, that they actually see themselves and their future through the new gen— through this next generation of energy and AI opportunity? Start with me? Okay, sure. Well, yeah, first I think hopefully AI can solve a lot of permitting challenges.

Can't pass the permitting bill that Congress needs to work on, but after that maybe they can streamline permitting for especially technologies like nuclear power, which is actually something that Deep video he's working on. Um, yeah, I think on, on workforce, this might be a slightly contrarian view, but at least from my perspective at the Department of Energy, you know, we, we work on the very, very like white-collar end of the workforce typically, where we have national laboratories, we employ a lot of scientists and engineers and PhDs. Uh, you know, we do some construction too. We're typically funding other companies that that are doing work in other communities. And, you know, I think there is, there is some federal role in workforce development, certainly, and DOE has a number of workforce development programs, especially for earlier career professionals, especially in science and technology fields.

But I think the real workforce challenge is mostly a private sector challenge, and it's one that I'm particularly impressed by how the— especially the technology companies and the manufacturing companies that are investing in local communities, they need to hire the workforce that they need to build whatever it is and operate whatever it is that they're building and operating. They have the most local knowledge on the ground, and they have robust apprenticeship training programs, community college programs, and they have the capital to do it. And so I think you, you just saw Microsoft, for example, unveiled this major new workforce development initiative at the White House yesterday where they talked about creating new career paths in AI and, and in technology fields for people who may not otherwise have access to it other than the fact that Microsoft is building a data center in their community. So I think you're going to see a lot more like that. And then I would just end, but the point— I think the point you made about nuclear, this moment resembling nuclear power, is really important.

And I'd add one more point to that. It also resembles fracking, the fracking era from 10 years ago. You think about, could you imagine where the United States would be today if we had had a national ban on fracking? I think we used to be a net energy importer, and as Secretary Wright talked about this this morning. We used to be a net energy importer.

We were building LNG import terminals, and now we recently celebrated the 10-year anniversary of our first shipments, our first exports of liquefied natural gas. How dramatically that's changed the geopolitical landscape, strengthened energy security in the United States and around the globe, strengthened US manufacturing competitiveness. Just tremendous. Now we're by far the number one producer of oil and natural gas. In the world.

It's allowed us, it's allowed us to have cheaper natural gas prices today than we had at the start of the conflict in the Middle East. I mean, could you imagine? So I could compare that to AI today. If we cede our leadership in artificial intelligence to other countries like China, we will look back 5 to 10 years from now, it'll be a real shame. There's no reason why America cannot both lead in AI and reindustrialize the United States.

And lower energy costs for the American people at the same time. So workforce, a headache, a good headache to have, but just the sheer demand and the ramp-up we're doing puts a lot of pressure. So just, you know, the grid business over the last 2 years, we hired 6,000 people globally. We're going to hire another 6,000, 1,500 here in the US. And how do you tackle tackle that.

I mean, we do complex engineering, we do complex manufacturing, we do, you know, complex project execution. One is we're really looking at expanding existing facilities. Just putting a greenfield in, hiring 600, 700 people on a greenfield, we don't believe that's really feasible. So we're using the existing facilities and doubling or, you know, building a second factory really close by. And of course, we're not alone.

You know, our customers hire, so we're in Charlotte. I mean, it's, you know, everybody tries to draw on the same resources. So it's really essential early on going to the community colleges, working with universities, getting co-ops in, and start people early on into the business. I was with Alex on AI is going to do a big part. So there is efficiencies, but at the end, we need people really on the ground who are, you know, winding a transformer, who are putting shovels in the ground and building substations.

And that's where we really look at how do we really early on get engaged and get the people and experience. So That is one of the areas. I think what we also have to keep in mind with this tremendous growth, at one point, and that's probably 3, 4 years out, I'm going to have one experienced employee with one new employee. And just in terms of culture, safety in the industry, it's, it's another additional challenge. How do you really make sure in an industry that's built on knowledge, on people who are decades in the business, how do you transfer that to the new employees?

So that's one of the other challenges we are facing and we're addressing currently. Okay, we're out of time, so I'm going to ask you both to be very brief in your last comments. I'll just say, how fantastic is it that we're talking about having so many new jobs that we're having a hard time staffing it because of the, the AI revolution? I know there's a been a lot of concern about the disruption that AI might cause to the, the job market. We're creating new jobs, really good jobs, and to have a shortage here where we need more employees is a good place to be in.

And then I'll just say that AI actually, I think, is probably the most effective technology for reskilling and upskilling that we've ever seen. It's so fundamentally democratizing that if you want to upskill or reskill, use it. AI is going to be the enabler, probably better than any other technology, to help you make make that pivot when you need to? Yeah, I think for us, the primary focus is right people, right skills, right? We have a massive growth capital plan that I talked about.

To be able to execute against that with some sort of certainty and reduction of risk is really important. So when we think about the specific skills that aren't going to be AI-enabled, like linemen— we've partnered with 22 colleges across all of our service territories to have a Mineman certification, so we, you know, early get them exposure to that. And just last year, our foundation put $1.8 billion against every other kind of skill. So think welding, electrical, all the other things where you're going to need to have hands-on. I think it's incredibly important for us to continue to fund those and support those programs.

So where AI won't have an impact in efficiency and effective— effects efficiency of the job you're doing, that you have the people and the right skills with the right people in place to support it. Please join me in thanking our excellent panel this afternoon.

To chair this segment on the Caribbean at the crossroads of energy and trade, please welcome founding chair Caribbean Energy Chamber and board director Atlantic Council, Menlini Chen.

Good afternoon and welcome to the session on Caribbean Leadership at the Crossroads of Security and Development. The Caribbean is geographically at the crossroads of important transit routes from North and South America and Europe. The Caribbean also has an energy paradox. On one hand, There are Southern Caribbean countries like Suriname, which are prolific in oil and gas resources. And on the other side, we have island member states which have some of the highest energy prices globally.

However, these Caribbean SIDS have punched above their weight in financial innovation to improve resilience, especially Barbados. This is the first time we have Caribbean leadership at the Global Energy Forum. And I'm very pleased to introduce His Excellency Kerry Simmons, Minister of Energy, Business Development and Commerce and Senior Minister Coordinating the Productive Sector of Barbados, who will speak first. He'll be followed by His Excellency Patrick Brunnings, Minister of Oil, Gas and Environment of the Republic of Suriname. Please give them a warm welcome.

Thank you so much, Melanie. It is a pleasure to be able to address the Atlantic Council. Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. Perhaps I should say to you that the theme of the day, the Caribbean at a Crossroads of Security and Development, Perhaps I could add to that, in the context of a global energy crisis, is really a very important and relevant one. And perhaps I should begin by giving you a little bit of context.

For an island like Barbados, we are effectively a net energy importer, and approximately 90% of all the electrical generation that we are able to do is as a result of the importation of fossil fuels. And the vagaries of the international market therefore mean that we are subjected to the— what you might call the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. And as there may be crises in the Persian Gulf or even, for argument's sake, in recent times in the Ukraine, the consequences for our importation bill were astronomical. And again, let me just give you a little bit of context. In the average— on average, we would import, uh, petroleum products into Barbados at a cost of $400 million per year.

And when the Ukraine war started and there was the disruption of supply, we were at a stage where for a year or two we were spending $1.3 billion. United States currency. And so therefore, you get an understanding of the way in which the ability to plan your economy and contain cost of living, etc., can be negatively affected. So this is not just an energy issue, but it is, in fact, a very structural barrier to development. And we face high and volatile energy costs directly as a result of the sort circumstances related to our need to import, and they in turn erode our competitiveness, our vital economic engines, from our tourism through to our hospitality, through to our shipping ports, emerging efforts in industry and digital and financial services, etc.

So that for us, energy security is not a theoretical milestone, but it is in effect a matter of economic survival. Let me pause there to make another point abundantly clear. We are not, and I am not certainly, making a case for the region to be seen as a charitable case. The reality is that the region of the Caribbean is a high-value, high-return market, potentially, and it is characterized by extremely high energy costs. On average from 29 cents to 40 cents per kilowatt-hour, as compared to an average of 15 cents per kilowatt-hour here in the United States of America.

But equally, we are characterized by very aggressive renewable energy targets, and therefore, for investors, that makes us a sure bet because of the fact that we have the accelerated rate of return potentially, and equally, we are are steadfastly committed to ending fossil fuel reliance in the region. Our challenge, therefore, lies in our dependence on the import fuel for generation of 90% or so of our electricity needs in Barbados, and global volatility is imported directly into our grid through mechanisms, for example, the fuel adjustment clause, which goes through to every electric bill in the country. Ladies and gentlemen, I think I could characterize the situation for Barbados very succinctly. First of all, it is characterized by energy insecurity. Secondly, price volatility.

Thirdly, surging and escalating cost of living and cost of doing business as a result of the price volatility. And equally, a very aggressive renewable energy ambition, which would see us get into net zero by the year 2035. But there is a solution which we are trying to evolve, and we believe that we have to be mindful, as should all Small Island Developing States, that the International Energy Agency's Climate Roadmap envisages a 20% residual usage of fossil fuels by the year 2050. And so therefore, where countries like Barbados identify prospectivity with regard to hydrocarbons, the opportunity exists between now and 2050 to exploit and explore those hydrocarbons in the context of being able to finance our way to the renewable energy commitments which we have made. And so therefore, our challenge is really then a matter of finding the markets.

And in countries like the United States of America, where there is an apparent rededication to that oil and gas, then we have a potential off-taker. The context for us is that we must do that refinancing in that way because there is no agreement on what would be or should be the just transition. And so therefore, the issue for us largely then becomes a matter of ensuring that we are able to utilize decarbonizing technology, prioritize partnerships with companies that are able to demonstrate proven capacity in the use of the decarbonizing technology and management of methane so as to reduce the impact on the climate. I want to say that in addition to that, and the Caribbean island states more broadly reflect that an additional reality is that we are caught in the fiscal cycle that actively penalizes climate vulnerability. You don't have to look back several decades to see this.

In fact, as recently as last year, when Hurricane Melissa passed through the region and struck Jamaica last October, the official assessments revealed a sobering structural reality. Total damage and losses from Melissa reached a staggering $12.2 billion— with a "B"— United States dollars, but in Jamaica's case, it instantaneously wiped out over 56% of Jamaica's annual economic output from that single climatic event. Multilateral reports now show that despite leveraging highly advanced disaster risk financing mechanisms, including the triggering of catastrophe bonds, —bonds, parametric insurance payouts, and prearranged contingent credit lines, the sheer scale of the climate shock has left an unmitigated multi-billion-dollar funding gap for reconstruction. And it is at this point that the structural argument has to be looked at. When visiting, or when analyzing the existing international financial architecture, Even when utilized to its absolute maximum capacity, we still see that there are many instances in which developing nations are left with an untenable multi-billion-dollar gap from a single ecological shock.

It is conclusive proof that individual state readiness is no longer enough, and that the problem at this stage is not the fiscal discipline of individual nations in and of themselves, but rather that the problem is an inadequacy of design of the global financial architecture. Caribbean nations cannot be expected to navigate the 21st century climate volatility using a fragmented system of emergency credit. We need systemic global liquidity, and we need to have it built directly into the international financial fabric. The bottleneck that we face is not that we do not have enough sunshine, or that we do not have enough wind, or that we do not have enough waves on the ocean. Rather, the true obstacle is rooted in the architecture of global finance.

And without a mechanism to correct this, there is virtually no fiscal space available to fund the capital-intensive projects like grid modernization and utility-scale solar deployment and the renewable energy effort as a whole. Which must be financed. This structural reality is really what has driven the Bridgetown Initiative. We are proposing through that initiative to have concrete systemic reforms to the global financial framework to unlock capital equity. At its core, it is an initiative which is designed to alter the rules of international finance so that vulnerable nations can access emergency liquidity during crises and see secure affordable long-term capital for development.

It therefore moves us from a situation where we are dependent on ad hoc aid and move rather in a direction of architectural reconstruction and institutional equity. First, we have to require the systemic integration of climate-resilient debt clauses into all sovereign loan agreements if we are going to achieve this. That particular mechanism is fairly straightforward. Forward. In the event of a catastrophe, a very— or a verifiable natural disaster, debt servicing is automatically paused for 2 years, and this immediately frees up international liquidity to focus on recovery and on reconstruction, preventing an environmental crisis from becoming an insolvency crisis.

Secondly, we are aiming to bridge the cost of capital gap. And in doing so, we need multilateral development banks to scale up third-party risk guarantees, and also to scale up blended finance structures and foreign exchange hedging mechanisms. And by absorbing macro-level risk, we can therefore lower the entry barriers for private capital and allow institutional investors to partner with Caribbean nations on bankable grid infrastructure. Ladies and gentlemen, we are therefore no longer speaking theoretically about mechanisms in isolation or merely as pilot plans and pilot projects. At COP28, the global community formally acknowledged this reality through the launch of a global declaration on debt-for-nature swaps.

That declaration, in case you do not recall, targeted the double bind of high national debt and also extreme Extreme climate vulnerability at one and the same time. And through that milestone declaration, we have underscored what we have in the Caribbean been saying and knowing and experiencing as a lived reality for a very long time, and it is simply this: you cannot achieve climate resilience when sovereign balance sheets are being suffocated by historic levels of debt servicing. Through these mechanisms, high-interest sovereign debt is structured into lower-cost and long-term credit. The critical policy distinction here, and the blueprint we are advancing, is that the resulting fiscal savings do not disappear into general expenditure. They are rather legally ring-fenced and channeled directly into dedicated resilience funds.

This capital is then deployed exclusively to finance concrete transition assets— upgrading transmission corridors, reinforcing coastal protection, and investing in utility-scale battery storage technology and other technologies required to stabilize our changing national grids. Ladies and gentlemen, the global energy transition is fundamentally an allocation of— a question of allocation challenge. The capital exists. What is required, however, is institutional modernization in order to direct that capital where it can achieve or to deploy places where it can achieve its greatest structural impact. I want to submit in closing that the Caribbean possesses the regulatory frameworks and the political stability necessary for this transition, and we want to use this opportunity to invite the global energy and financial communities to engage with us and to partner with us, not as passive observers, but rather as active partners in the effort to re-engineer The Economics of Energy Resilience.

Thank you so much. Thank you. Excellencies, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, it's a true honor for Suriname to be part of this forum, and we thank the Atlantic Council and the Global Energy Forum team. Uh, for its hospitality and commend the organization for also including the topic regarding the Caribbean region. Through history, strategic fuels and energy security has been in the center of power, starting with wood, where kingdoms regulated forest use to ensure supply for construction, heating, and wars.

Then with coal, Nations with large coal reserves gained energy security besides economic and military advantages. Coal-rich nations like Britain gained global dominance, and this energy became directly tied to their industrial and military supremacy. The first commercial oil discovery back in 1859 in Pennsylvania marked the birth of the modern petroleum industry, making this new energy cheap, affordable, unaccessible. Oil surpassed coal as a strategic fuel, especially for merchandising, mechanized warfare, and automobiles. Energy became a weapon of influence, with supply disruptions used to pressure rivals, something that we see nowadays also.

Now, most of you are familiar with the energy trilemma, the three competing priorities every country must balance energy security on one side, energy equity in the form of affordability and access, and environmental sustainability. The challenge is that improving one often undermines another, forcing governments into trade-offs. Around the turn of this century, less and less countries were willing to sacrifice environment. This was especially headed by Europe, who wanted to transition away from fossil fuels as quickly as possible, but basically replace— by basically replacing dirty fossil fuels with new clean energies like solar, wind and geothermal energies. This gave relief to the Small Island Development States, the SIDS, in the Caribbean, who are directly feeling the effects from climate change and large-scale pollutions in terms of sea level rise, intensity in external extreme rainfalls, droughts, and severe major storms.

This was supposed to be the moment that further escalations of climate change would halt and average global temperatures would stay below 2°C. Funding would become available from predominantly polluters that cause climate change. Investments were now expected into resilient infrastructures, grid systems, protection against high-level sea sea, uh, high sea levels, extreme storms, and etc. We are again at another crossroad due to the recent global developments putting pressure again on environmental sustainability. The world is realizing that additional energy for the exponential growth of AI cannot be supplied by renewable energy alone.

This has been said throughout this, uh, summit. Transition has become addition. On top of that, the recent wars in Ukraine and Middle East have demonstrated how many countries are still vulnerable when it comes to energy security, and most countries have realized that they now should invest in new energy mixes and to secure, to secure their own energy. The low-lying coastal islands in the Caribbean have counted on financial support from major emitters to support adaptation and resilience efforts. Yet the recent geopolitical and economic shifts just described now threaten to cut off that support.

Donor countries are turning inwards, prioritizing their own energy security, grid modernization, and domestic investment in renewables. This can lead to a critical time window before investments will return to the Caribbean region again. In effect, the Caribbean region faces a tightening trilemma: rising climate impacts, shrinking adaptation finance, and a global energy system under pressure, all converging at the moment when resilience is most urgent needed. And then there are oil-producing countries in the Caribbean region, namely Trinidad, Guyana, and Suriname. And Suriname is that strange country located on the north coast of South America.

Suriname is one of the only 3 countries in the world where Dutch is the official language, but even more important, Suriname is one of the only 3 countries in the world that is carbon negative. This is due to the almost 93% coverage of pristine rainforest and an equal percentage of mangrove coverage along the coast. In 2 years' time, Suriname will be also one of the 3 countries in the Caribbean to produce significant amounts of oil. Banking on a number of offshore discoveries starting back in 2019. Onshore production will soar from 16,000 barrels oil per day to 220,000 barrels oil per day by 2028, up to 400,000 or even 500,000 barrels oil per day in 2031.

Gas will reach a production of 150 million cubic feet per day by 2023, uh, 2030. This is huge for a country with a population of only 600,000 people. Suriname, Guyana, and Trinidad can and should work out with other Caribbean countries how to resolve this critical time window that was described and how to go about. Collaboration should result in delivering cheap oil and gas to the non-oil-producing SIDS countries during this critical time window, and prefinancing in technologies for these countries to become energy sufficient. This will not be based on charity, but on strong collaborations and partnerships.

The Caribbean region should work as one where each country can contribute in its own special way. Suriname has taken the position that although we will continue to develop our rich offshore hydrocarbon resources, we will maintain our negative carbon sink and thus continue to contribute to the world in fighting climate change. Not many countries can say this. Maintaining this negative status will require investments, and we will do so by making use of trading our high-value carbon credits, or ITMOs, and using the oil and gas revenues. These revenues will also be used to create a new Suriname and invest in poverty reduction, new education systems, new green industries to develop a diversified economy, and a lean and mean government We will call this Suriname a Suriname 3.0, a strong Suriname that can support the region and become energy self-sufficient.

In the transition towards a Suriname 3.0, gas will be extremely important since gas can be regarded as a transition fuel and even as a destination fuel and will be the backbone of the energy mixes for many countries around the world. This gas can buy Suriname and the region time while developing new clean energies to basically fill in this critical time window. For that reason, there's heavy focus on gas exploration from the government. Almost 50% of the offshore acreage of Suriname is still available, is still open, and we call this the open acreage. Last year in November, Suriname has stepped away from the traditional bid rounds and launched an open-door offering in the open acreage where any company can submit a bid over an area with associated work program.

Counter-proposals over that exact area can be submitted, where the original submitter has a right of first refusal. With gas, Suriname and the region can become the safe haven of reliable supplier of energy for the region and even to the world, since gas again will be the backbone for many countries in the energy mix. To conclude, Suriname will also endeavor— sorry, looking forward and inwards, decision will be made this summer which renewables Suriname will invest, looking at solar, wind turbines, but also into hydro turbines since we have a constant east-west Gulf Stream. Geothermal and small modular reactors are also of interest And this is why we need collaborations and partnerships. Suriname will also look into more out-of-the-box technologies like white hydrogen, this sort of so-called geological hydrogen, and even helium-3 occurrences in our basin.

And this is on the more— in the onshore, where in the old shield. Suriname stands committed in being a carbon-negative nation with vast forests and mangroves. An emerging oil and gas producer with regional significance, a country committed to balancing energy security, equity, and sustainability. This is Suriname's pledge. This is embedded in the Suriname 3.0 Plan, a plan to become a strong, sustainable Suriname that can support the region.

Together, we can ensure that energy security is not achieved at the expense of environmental sustainability, but in harmony with it. This is Suriname's invitation to the Caribbean community, the audience sitting in this room, and the world to join us in building a resilient energy future. Thank you. Thank you, ministers. You've both spoken about the current situation of the Caribbean and the Caribbean SIDS, which is that, you know, they have quite difficult trade and operating environments, especially in the recent months with the Middle Eastern conflict.

So what does that mean for the regional energy agenda? And does that also improve, you know, Caribbean collaboration? And how can we do that? Please, Minister Simmons, first. Well, first of all, let me say that the consequences of the trade situation now with respect to traditional fossil fuels has been a significant disruption.

In the context of inflation, we are genuinely feeling the pinch.

The National Energy Company in Barbados is being used because it is through the National Energy Company that we do our importation. So that is being used as the point at which we try to shield the consumer. But if I were to be candid with you, today the price at the pump should really be closer to $3.70 for a gallon of gas— sorry, $4.70 for a gallon of gas, and we are today paying $4.01, so that for every vehicle on the road, there is a subsidy being applied. And obviously, that cannot continue indefinitely. So that becomes a major difficulty.

I think the other lesson to be learned from it is that it hastens the need for us to turn away from this reliance on the importation of fossil fuel and to accelerate our renewable energy effort. Obviously, that is not going to be the immediate solution for the problem that we now But as we go forward, I think that it is necessary for us to have more electric vehicles, for example, on the road. It is necessary for us to be able to fuel our businesses, etc., via the renewable energy effort, simply because for an island like Barbados, we genuinely at this point have not gotten the, the, the resources other than to be able to import them. Let me say that recently, and I think last week I would have made the announcement, we have indicated to the world that we have some significant prospectivity, but again, it is going to take a little bit of time for that to be developed. And even as we develop it, we maintain a posture that it is really the natural gas which is our primary interest because that is the cleanest of the hydrocarbons and that is the is the bridge that will take us into the new generation of electrical supply.

But there are other countries in the world who may want to have other things, and we'd be happy to provide if that is where they wish to go. But we remain very committed to the fact that for domestic purposes, we have to fight the— curb the inflation. We have to curb the peaks and troughs which make it impossible to plan any economy of our size. And equally, we have to give ourselves a little bit of energy independence by way of doing the exploration of the prospectivity which we may have. Great.

Minister Brunning, so, you know, what's changed for Suriname and does that affect regional energy? And what do you think about more collaboration among the Caribbean? Yes. So we are slightly in similar situation, of course, as a small country. We do— are reliant on some import of our energy, but we're also an exporter and we produce our own fuels and energy.

So in that term, we also have a net benefit from the whole situation. So that balances out. And of course, we have to subsidize our domestic energy, but we're in a slightly better position. And of course, we are looking towards our first development offshore, but that is not now, it's only in 2028. But in that sense, we are on our path to become really energy sufficient, self-sufficient, for just this reason, to be very to secure our own energy.

So we're on the right path, but it's only how do we survive, you know, this period. And our biggest hope is that this will not drag on because we expect that pretty soon, you know, all the strategic reserves will run dry, and then we will really have to deal with extremely high prices. And for small countries like ours, it will be extremely challenging. So let's circle back. So because we're small countries, is there benefits in us trying to collaborate together?

What— how can we do it? I would say yes. And I think I could itemize the areas. First, the first area of collaboration perhaps should be our ability to make sure that those of us who have some energy capacity in the context of drilling offshore and so on, that we share. And you and I come from the region and we know that there are some mysteries in our region.

We have long had petro giants in the region, but I don't think collectively we've learned a lot because we haven't shared a lot. Collaboration is important. Secondly, I think sharing in the context of our procurement effort, especially in the renewable energy effort, I think it is vitally important. We simply bring costs down by going to scale. And if we can scale up a procurement effort, then we make it easier for us all.

All of our consumers collectively benefit if we go into the market for several hundred megawatts of battery storage, for example, as opposed to little bits and pieces here, which really make it very difficult for the consumer ultimately. And finally, I think a key area of collaboration really has to be with regard to our regulatory effort because it is important to have a regulatory system that is region-wide. I think it gives you greater efficiency, greater specialties, and it is far more difficult to do it country by country because we have small populations and it is very difficult to find the skill sets to properly do the regulatory— build your regulatory capacity when you have a very small skill set or pool. Pool to draw from. And Mr. Bruddings, what do you think the region should be doing in terms of more collaboration?

Yes, I think we should identify which country is a champion in a certain field, whether it's energy, agriculture, and work together as one. I mean, the Caribbean should be seen as one region, and by identifying these champions, you know, we as a especially small countries, should not concentrate on the whole portfolio. So that's one. Second, indeed, start to prepare for the next crisis and I think, you know, we were just talking about one way of collaborating. For instance, Barbados is looking maybe to, you know, to get better familiarized with offshore technology.

We're in that phase now so I would love to have some people from Barbados helping us out because we will need resources and, you know, bringing them on board. And when they start to develop their own offshore, they will have skilled workforce for that area. So there we have to also think ahead, basically for the next crisis. That's how I see it. Great.

Well, you've both alluded to it, so maybe you want to go, you know, there's opportunities in the Caribbean, significant opportunities, and not everybody knows about them. So maybe would you like to outline, you know, you mentioned that you have a drilling program that has just gone out in Barbados and then one for the wider Caribbean and one for Suriname, just to make people more aware of the opportunities that exist. Well, in terms of the fossil fuel aspect of energy, yes, we've just begun the process of direct negotiations. So we invite in— we are inviting companies which would have to be prequalified. And again, the prequalification Phase is important because it allows us to identify partners who are suitable, and the criteria which they must meet is very similar to what I outlined at the podium.

We are, we are prioritizing experience and capacity with regard to methane management, with regard to the use of decarbonizing technologies. And of course, given Barbados' prospectivity, then there has to be some capacity capacity in the ultra-deep water, because that is invariably where the benefit, if it is going to be found at commercial scale, is going to be realized. But let me say to you equally that I think in terms of the renewable energy effort, there is an abundance of opportunity. I described it as a high-value and a high-return type of investment. We need battery energy storage..

And it is not just Barbados. I think the rest of the region is also moving lock and step in a direction of the need for acquiring battery energy storage, and therefore investment in battery energy storage, I think, is a glorious opportunity for potential investors. And similarly, we are now about to launch a 30-megawatt, 30 to 50-megawatt utility-scale wind, wind project in Barbados. It will be the first onshore wind project at utility scale. I do think, again, that this is an opportunity where capital can be brought into the country in order to enable us to meet that and other potential similar investments because we do want to have wind as a key part of our energy mix.

Great. Minister Bunings, opportunities? Yes, Teresita, I think I said it in my speech For us, gas is extremely important. We have discovered gas and our first gas development will be finalized by 2030. But what's interesting is that for those who know the region there, we talk about the Golden Lane from Guyana extending to Suriname, which is the old province.

But this gas that we just recently found is from a different source rock. And we think that the source rock is abundant in the rest of our offshore area. And so we're heavily focusing on exploring that and we welcome everybody to explore with us for this gas because it can mean a lot to the country but also for the region. And then there's the other aspect. I'm the Minister of Oil, Gas and Environment.

And somebody said this morning that they have the best job in the world, but I think I have the best job in the world.

The interior is extremely high forested. It contains a lot of opportunities for ecotourism. It's pristine forest. It's full of rivers. We have indigenous and tribal communities.

So this is another opportunity for the country but also for the region. And again, we can combine with other countries that are small island development states that they offer more, let's say, beaches, and in the same package we offer ecotourism. And that's also a way of, you know, as a region offering something unique. Oh, so looking at sort of cross-fertilization of different types of tourism packaging. Yes.

Barbados has the beaches, Suriname has the ecotourism. You heard this first. This is what is going to happen. This is theoretically sound. So as we have just a couple of minutes left, let's just go and let's just touch back on this theme of resilient and sustainable development.

So on one hand, you know, you're further along the line. Guyana is definitely much further. Trinidad further in terms of the development of their oil and gas resources. Barbados has the potential, but at the same time, we have renewable energy, which is a large part of our agenda. You're carbon negative.

So how are we going to navigate that? Are we going to have a hybrid energy security model and, you know, will you champion that? Maybe you want to go first, Minister Bruning. Yes, definitely. So you see that everywhere in the world that has been discussed, the transition movement has gradually gone over to the addition movement.

So that means that every country is really looking into their energy mix and in the energy mix there are sustainable factors but there's also the the base load in terms of hydrocarbons. So we definitely believe in that. We as a country in this Suriname 3.0 concept, at the end of the day, do want to move towards a totally sustainable energy economy, and we think we can do that. It will take time, but again, I think the gas will buy us the time to go through everything and prepare us for the, let's say, for the end game, where we are totally green. At the same time, we will still be exporting, exporting to the world.

The world still needs energy. Energy is life. So we have this two-course actually methodology to go forward. So concentrate inwards, ultimately become green while we still export our oil and predominantly, hopefully, the gas. And the gas, you're looking to also export it to some of the other islands?

Exactly. Yes, smaller LNG to help them. Exactly. And maybe Minister Simmons, we have a couple more minutes left. No, I agree 100% with Patrick.

In Barbados, we are calling it a multi-energy strategy. We remain firmly committed to the stewardship of the environment, the protection of the climate. But at the same time, there is a reality that if you are sitting on a prospectivity that can enable you to finance your way to some of these very expensive technologies. And may I say, I mean, you know, the wind project I just alluded to is likely to cost multiple hundreds of millions of dollars. The fact of the matter is that it is very difficult to finance it without using this type of approach.

And so therefore, what we would want to do is to be able to continue our commitment towards the greening of the country domestically, but equally put ourselves in a position where, especially if we can locate natural gas, use natural gas as that bridging fuel that takes us to the next destination. And that is perhaps the cleanest way of going about the transition. Well, ministers, I think we're slowly out of time, but let me summarize what I I think you've come out at is that the Caribbean, the Caribbean is at the crossroads of security and development. We have the Southern Caribbean, which does have a large natural hydrocarbon potential, and we want to see how that coexists with our renewable strategy to make the region more resilient. And it sounds like Suriname definitely has really has that because you have incumbent hydro.

Barbados is on the other side, has renewables and potentially will have maybe some, you know, hydrocarbon resources. And so we're looking for an energy security strategy that marries both together to make our region much more resilient and secure. But we thank you both for your time because, you know, you're very busy and we look forward to seeing how the collaboration works together, especially on the tourism. And we look forward to looking at developing this master plan on energy security. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Melanne. Thank you. Thank you.

To chair the leadership conversation on the Western Hemisphere's energy renaissance, a new era of production and partnership, please welcome President of Goldwyn Global Strategies and non-resident senior fellow and chairman Energy Advisory Group Global Energy Center Atlantic Council, David Goldwyn. Greetings, everyone. We're going to talk about Western Hemisphere and energy today, and we could not have a better candidate to talk to us about this than Assistant Secretary Caleb Orr. You've got a big portfolio. You've got— you're Assistant Secretary for Economics, Energy, and Business..

And I know you've been with Secretary Rubio for, you know, for many years. So tell me a little bit about, you know, how you're managing your portfolio and what you're spending your time on these days. Thanks, David. It's great to be here at the Atlantic Council. And some great panels before talking all about the Western Hemisphere and the great production that we're seeing throughout the hemisphere.

And really, it's a transformative opportunity here in the Trump administration to work with our partners and allies throughout the region to generate energy security that advances our national security strategy. I've worked for Secretary Rubio for many years, first starting when he was a senator and then came over where I'm now honored to serve President Trump and Secretary Rubio at the State Department. And President Trump's national security strategy really gives us the lodestar for how we think about energy security in the hemisphere, which is that the Western Hemisphere really should be a source of strength for the United States. For too many years, you know, we have neglected the region and we've allowed a lot of problems to fester. That manifests itself mostly in security matters, you know, drugs and illegal migration.

But really, we're focused on fixing those But ultimately, we want the region to be a source of strength for the United States and really for broad-based prosperity throughout the region. The United States really can benefit from growing energy production throughout the region, and we think that our partners in the region also can benefit from increasing and diversifying their sources of revenue and ultimately creating more affordable energy to power the nearshoring that the Trump administration is executing. That's great. Well, let's, let's dig down on Western Hemisphere because certainly Canada, Brazil, you know, Guyana have been big sources of production. But is it really the strategy of the administration to promote investment in these other countries and to grow it?

And how does that fit with the energy dominance agenda, which we heard this morning is also focused on growing U.S. Production? Absolutely. Well, the Western Hemisphere doesn't become as critical of a region as it has become for energy without the United States leading the way. And truly, there's nothing like the energy miracle that we have seen under President Trump in the United States.

And frankly, like with many policy areas, the United States is a model for countries throughout the region. And other countries, you know, look to us and how we do our energy production to see, you know, how they can also follow. And so President Trump unleashing the United States' energy dominance really leads the way for the region to to follow. But, you know, in total, you know, the United States produces roughly half of the total oil in the region as a whole. And the rest of the region is also growing.

And I think in a lot of countries where production has been stagnant for too long, you're now seeing some very rapid gains. And this is really a part of the broader shift in the region that President Trump has inaugurated with the Trump core corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, where we are really leaning into working with our partners and really starting from a presumption that the region should be aligned with the energy policies of the United States. And so because of the aligned political leadership in other countries like Argentina, for example, you're starting to see some immense investments in upstream production. And even in countries like Brazil, you're seeing, you know, really significant increases in production, because I think countries throughout the region have seen how the United States has led the way and understand that they can also benefit from, from really investing in their upstream. And so we really are excited to see the increased numbers throughout the region.

I was just looking at it, you know, at the time of the Arab oil embargo in the 1970s, the Arab states producing oil produced about 36% of total global production. And here today, the Western Hemisphere is sitting at 32% and growing every year. And so really, when you look at the, the new geography of energy production, the Western Hemisphere is one of the key theaters. And precisely because of the increased political support and the very close coordination that the United States has with our allies in the region, we have the ability to work with them and to coordinate what we're doing when it comes to production and investment to really drive the future of energy trends and the destinations of where this energy is headed. So let's talk about some of the areas where you see significant growth.

Maybe let's start with Guyana. I know you're spending some time on Guyana. What's the outlook there and how is the U.S. engaging to support Guyana and its development as an oil producer? It's been amazing to see the production increases in Guyana. Our Undersecretary Jacob Helberg was just in to Georgetown.

Secretary Rubio has been to Georgetown. We've given Guyana a lot of attention and we expect we will continue to do so because we view Guyana as a key partner not only for increasing energy production in the region, but showing how energy can be a cornerstone of beneficial growth and broad-based prosperity. So we're working with Guyana to continue to increase the production. I mean, sitting right now I think at 930,000 barrels a day and is headed, you know, north of a million very soon. Guyana really is one of the brightest stars in the world when it comes to where new production is coming online.

But they also stand to benefit from this and we're working closely with them to ensure that the revenues that they're generating, you know, are going to purposes that will, you know, help their economy grow and ultimately make Guyana into a full-fledged economic partner of the United States, you know, in areas spanning energy production but also other industrial areas. And some of the other, you know, the North American powerhouses, both Canada and Mexico, can you talk a little bit about our engagement there? And are we as sort of enthusiastic about investment and production in those countries as we are in Guyana and Argentina? Yeah, that's a great question. You know, Canada and Mexico are obviously key parts of our energy agenda as well.

You know, we are currently in the process of reviewing the USMCA agreement with Canada and Mexico. Security matters take the forefront, you know, of those relationships, especially in places like Mexico. But the energy component is really critical as well. With Canada and Mexico, You know, the pipelines and the transmission infrastructure become very important as well. You know, not only do you have the upstream component, but you have the pipelines, and the amount of energy that we import, you know, from Canada is a very important component.

You know, we've had some significant trade disputes with Canada recently, but at the end of the day, you know, we still see very significant energy transmissions, and President Trump has been very forward-leaning on approving new new infrastructure construction across the Canadian border, and so we expect that will continue to occur. You know, we no longer have the days where pipelines will be held up, you know, in interminable reviews, because at the end of the day, in order to be energy dominant, we need to tap the resources wherever they are, including in Canada and Mexico. And so, you know, we think that energy infrastructure and pipeline infrastructure is a key part of both our relationships in energy with Canada and Mexico. And we want to— you know, there's some exciting projects on the Mexican border as well to expand the amount of energy that we are sending to Mexico. I think that one of the underappreciated components of the current energy market moment is just how geographically distributed, you know, for example, natural gas prices are.

And so the Western Hemisphere really stands to benefit from its geographic proximity to the United States. And that's something that the National Security Strategy of the administration also recognizes, which is that, you know, you can't wish away geography. And in a lot of ways, geography is destiny. And we want to— we want to make that a reality in our energy markets as well, because at the end of the day, we are really supporting a lot of nearshoring, you know, to the Western Hemisphere to bring critical supply chains closer to home, to make for more resilient critical supply chains.. And in order to have industrial production at scale, you need cheap energy.

You need affordable energy. And so increasing Mexico in particular's access to affordable U.S. energy, and frankly other places in Central America that have, you know, existing LNG capacity, is very important to our reshoring agenda. That's great. Well, I think it's going to be good, good news for a lot of the folks in the audience who are spending a lot of time talking about USMCA. TDA hoping that, you know, energy trade remains tariff-free.

Mexico, our primary destination for both natural gas and for products. So it's encouraging to hear the State Department perspective on that. Hopefully your friends at USTR are picking up on that as well. Venezuela has certainly been in the news and I know a huge area of focus for you and of course the rest of the administration. A lot of talk about what a big opportunity it is, but also some of the near-term challenges.

So people talked about inflation, access to capital, the ability of the existing investors to get their debts paid, getting the regulations clarified, international arbitration, things like that. There's a long list of issues. So what's the perspective of the administration on the current framework, and what are some of the tools you all are using to try and help Venezuela become competitive? That's a fantastic question, and, uh, Venezuela really stands out as one of the great foreign policy successes of the Trump administration. And President Trump, you know, took decisive action to stabilize Venezuela and really make Venezuela into the partner of the United States that by all rights, by geography, by culture, by economic ties that it should be of the United States.

And we're now just over 5 months since January 3rd, and we're making a lot of progress. I think we are helping Venezuela recover not only its oil sector, but its really— its entire economy after its suffering through over 20 years of socialism. So we are on the right track. We are fully engaging with Venezuela. We have a delegation actually right down in Caracas right now from the State Department and the other partners in the interagency.

And we are helping Venezuela really get back connected into the Western economy. And that's true in all respects, not only in the oil sector, you know, in terms of getting our companies and other companies back into the upstream, but also when it comes to modernizing regulations, to get back up to speed for, you know, where the modern regulatory climate is, but also in the financial sector. You know, Venezuela has a lot of natural strengths. It has a fantastic people, and they've got a lot of history of being a major oil producer and, frankly, a very wealthy country. And we are really working closely with them to get them back to where they should be by all rights.

And President Trump has really set us in a solid position to do so. That's great. And I guess the new regulations come out, new comments come out, there's a little bit of an iterative process. If you can take us behind the curtain a little bit, how, how sort of hands-on is the U.S. government in helping the Venezuelans understand that some of the details of these terms like arbitration or, you know, too much flexibility for ministry— are you all really digging deep on framework or is this more at the 50,000-foot level? Look, the Venezuelan government and the interim authorities there, you know, they understand exactly, you know, what is in their interest, which is to expand oil production, to get Venezuela back to being the real powerhouse when it comes to oil and gas production that it historically has been.

And so the government there deserves a lot of credit for being so forward-leaning. And for really, you know, taking a very forward-looking and far-sighted approach to introducing new reforms in their legislation and their regulations. So we're in constant contact with them and with our industry to make sure that, you know, the process is going in a way that works both for Venezuela's interests, because at the end of the day, you know, we want this to be a productive partnership. You know, we want the message to be that when you partner with the United States, you benefit, you prosper, your people prosper, but also, you know, is one that works for our companies and can really drive a lot of progress on the ground. So to answer your question, you know, yes, we're very much in the details, but it's, you know, it's definitely a collaborative relationship.

And we really have enjoyed a very close working relationship with the senior leadership of the Venezuelan government to really— to push progress. And I think you're seeing some of the results. I mean, the estimated GDP growth statistics are really tremendous. I mean, you're— we're looking at double-digit growth this year by— at the low end of the estimate. I mean, some private industry estimates have it significantly higher.

We're seeing inflation decline in Venezuela. You know, the previous, you know, year-over-year inflation was 500 or 600%. You're now seeing inflation fall to 10% and below month over month. Um, and so you're, you're really seeing the kind of progress, uh, that I think if you had scripted it up after January 3rd and you said, you know, where, where will you be 5 months from now, I think we're meeting those metrics, uh, at the right pace, and we're seeing a lot of progress. That's great.

I mean, people focus on the oil, but natural gas is really important, and it's really important to Trinidad. I don't know if say a word about the licensing that you all have supported to develop gas development for helping Trinidad? I really can't say enough positive about Trinidad. I mean, they have been a truly excellent partner in all matters, and we're really thrilled to continue working with them. I think there's some great opportunities coming forward, and as we have gone on this path of normalizing with Venezuela, I think Trinidad will continue to be a close partner going forward.

Great. Critical minerals, I know, is an important part of your portfolio. You have the critical minerals ministerial. Can you paint a picture for us? What are— what's the strategy on critical minerals?

And is it, is it too early to tell where we think growth will come from in terms of actual new supply of these minerals to the United States? Critical minerals is another foundational component of the administration's energy security strategy. We were in a situation last year where we were reliant on, you know, one country for over 90% of critical components. And so the administration has really taken an all-of-the-above approach to looking at critical minerals. And really, it's the full supply chain.

You know, just like how oil and gas really plays a key role in our diplomacy because so much of the reserves are located abroad, In a similar manner, the reserves of many of the minerals on our critical minerals list are also located abroad. But really, the geographies that Latin America contains contain, you know, many of the minerals that we need. And so an approach to critical minerals that focuses on hemispheric sovereignty can really go a long way to establishing the resilient supply chains that we want to see in critical minerals. And so you've got a, you know, in a lot of countries you've got a long legacy of sort some very fantastic mining operations, um, you know, especially when it comes to copper and gold mining. But we want to see not only, you know, greater U.S. interest and U.S. ownership in, in the upstream sector, but also in, in processing and refining, which is where a lot of the bottleneck is in the current critical minerals markets.

So I think critical minerals is one where— it's another area where you've seen this, this, you know, this narrative play out over time where the United States has for too long neglected the Western Hemisphere. And so you've seen other actors come into the Western Hemisphere and start to dominate some of its very rich natural resources. And with President Trump and the Trump administration and our national security strategy, we're really taking a fresh approach and saying, no, the United States really should be involved. This is something that, you know, is our— is in our interest that this development happen. In a way that is, you know, sustainable from a growth perspective and benefits, you know, the people of the countries in Latin America.

And so we're taking that fresh look, but we're also saying, how can they move up the value chain? You know, we recognize that for— there's, you know, so many critical minerals where we are currently reliant on other countries outside of our hemisphere that in order to meet the needs that we have in the timeframe that we're operating on, you know, which is this administration, you know, we don't have the benefit of, you know, picking— handpicking, you know, the perfect locations for all of this capacity. And so we want to do something that's pro-market. We want to do something that works economically. And so that's going to look like, you know, having a lot of processing and refining facilities located throughout the region, you know, in the United States, of course.

And there's some promising developments here, but, you know, in Mexico, in Chile, in Brazil, in Argentina, you know, all of these are countries that are moving forward very aggressively on critical minerals processing in a way that we think will be very helpful. So just to understand that a little bit more, the US traditionally hasn't had a lot of big mining companies that are interested in going overseas. So is most of our comparative advantage here sort of on the financing side to help US and other companies build processing facilities so they stand them up quicker? Yeah, that's, that's right. You know, we— Australia, the UK, Canada, the Toronto Stock Exchange has many of these mining companies that have been very successful.

I think two things. So number one, you know, I work at the State Department, we do foreign policy. You know, we like working with our allies and partners. In the UK and elsewhere. And so we're very happy to work with those mining companies.

And, you know, the DFC— Ben Black spoke earlier today, I know— the DFC has been very active too where, you know, we'll work with a, you know, an ally or a partner country or one of their companies and secure, you know, the U.S. governance rights through the DFC. And so the DFC has been a really critical partner in taking the existing, you know, market institutions of the companies and converting it into something that, you know, has more U.S. governance. At the same time, I think you're seeing a lot of exciting mining startups who, you know, recognize the market realities and, you know, the current supercycle that we are in and recognize, you know, a very profitable opportunity with respect to startups. And so I think you're going to see, you know, more U.S. companies coming online over time. And then finally, there are some legacy Latin American companies that are fantastic to work with as well and who really want to work with the U.S. and welcome, you know, components like DFC financing.

So yes, I think to answer your question, the financing is, you know, probably where you start, but we're seeing a lot of interesting progress in developing our own operational capacity as well. Fantastic. Trade is, you know, trade is a responsibility, sort of USTR, but the foreign policy interest in a free open trading system, you know, is something the State Department cares a lot about. And then we've also got the affordability agenda. People are really concerned about the price of everything.

So, you know, there's been some back and forth, I guess, over the last couple of years as to whether or not there are going to be tariffs on things like commodities. So far the answer's seems to be no. Commodities are pretty open. But then the components may be subject to tariffs, which are the things— the pipes and everything else, compressors, transformers that people need. How is the administration thinking about balancing these two agendas over the next— over the rest of the term, especially as we're starting to see some of these trade agreements come up for renewal?

Look, I think it really depends on the kind of commodity. And what the market analysis is for what we produce in the United States. I mean, President Trump is America first, and we are driving domestic production as much as we possibly can. At the same time, you know, there are critical components and commodities where, you know, you have a truly global market and you have, you know, so much production outside the United States. And when it's in countries that, you know, work with us on all sorts of other matters, you know, it makes a lot of sense to to really prioritize those countries and make them stable sources of supply.

So I think it really depends on the commodity, and you've certainly seen that with, you know, the Section 232 process on various components and commodities. The other thing I would add, just to keep the conversation on critical minerals, is that USTR is currently running a process that Ambassador Grier announced at the critical minerals ministerial that Secretary Rubio hosted in February to create a price floor for critical minerals to help drive healthier markets in critical minerals. Because the problem that we've seen, because of China's dominance of the critical minerals marketplace, is that you have a totally upside-down market where, for example, in copper, you know, you have basically negative cost rates, you know, where refiners are basically paying the suppliers to to take their product and refine it for them. You know, that's not a market in which you can expect to have, in a capitalist system, a healthy rate of return. And so you're not going to see investment in the processing and refining.

And so what USTR is negotiating, you know, with some key allies and partners is a trade agreement that imposes a price floor for critical minerals so that, you know, we don't have this kind of upside-down subsidized market, and you can actually have, you know, Western investment in the critical minerals processing and refining. And so it's not only a question of, um, you know, keeping, you know, certain key commodities, uh, tariff-free in order to, you know, maintain our, our access. Um, it's also about, you know, for some of these critical minerals that are essential to our defense supply chain and industrial supply chain, you know, keeping a a pro-market and pro-investment tariff that can really drive investment. And, you know, if you're an upstream producer and right now, you know, you're selling to China, you're going to get a windfall if you sell into the United States with a price floor because you'll have a much bigger price. And if you're a processor, you know, you're going to be able to rest assured that you're competing on a market that's, you know, set at a healthy level and not going to be, you know, competing against subsidized competition.

Great. We've only got a couple of minutes left. I was going to ask you about the Caribbean. We just had a panel on the Caribbean, and the Atlantic Council has a soft spot for the Caribbean, and people thought about it as certainly as a region that uses a lot of fuel oil and diesel, a potential for natural gas, relatively small markets, but we've got floating, you know, floating storage and, you know, and floating platforms that can sort of provide that accessibility. Does the administration see the Caribbean as a strategic area you know, one where there's Chinese competition to be supported?

And are there any programs or plans to sort of engage the Caribbean in their energy security? Absolutely. The Caribbean is a key national security theater, and we think it is an asset for the United States that is just waiting to be developed. Secretary Rubio was in Saint Kitts earlier this year. Again, I think Secretary Rubio is setting travel records for the region for Secretaries of State going to the region.

And we want to make the Caribbean a major focus. We think that their economies really could benefit from cheaper energy that the United States stands ready to provide. And so LNG is a great— you know, a great resource for them. I was just in Honduras and El Salvador where we're working on expanding the LNG capacity capacity for imports there. But that's, you know, true throughout the region.

And really, when you look at it just as a matter— again, as a matter of geography, it's a region that the United States really stands to benefit from. It's a region that's, you know, suffered from a lot of security challenges. But again, President Trump taking the security challenges seriously and taking the steps to really clean up and make for a safer and more secure environment is the table stakes for creating a more prosperous economy. And so once we've taken care of these security matters, you know, we have the ability to really make— to help companies make the kind of long-term investments they need to make to drive a more prosperous Caribbean. And, you know, a lot of the islands in the Caribbean, you know, they may have unexplored resources that can be on oil and gas.

You know, frankly, we're seeing more and more because of the interest critical minerals. We're hearing about deposits and reserves in countries that previously had never really explored it because the pricing— again, you know, you're looking at copper and gold prices, it's, you know, at or above all-time highs. And so a lot of these Caribbean countries, you know, really stand to benefit, and they have— if they were able to develop these resources, would really generate new revenue streams that could help their economies grow and invest in some creative new industries. Great. Thank you.

But we're out of time. Let's have a hand for Assistant Secretary Caleb Orr. Thanks for a great conversation.

To chair the fireside chat, From the North Slope to the Global Markets: Alaska's Role in the Next Era of US Energy Dominance, please welcome co-chair Talriden Group and former United States Secretary of Energy, the Honorable Dan Bryut.

Guys, I'm going to sit here because of the— Great. Thanks, Governor. We're good. Well, thank you. Thank you all.

What a fantastic crowd we have this evening, or this afternoon, I should say. I want to start by just thanking the Atlantic Council for putting on what has been so far a fantastic forum. Absolutely fantastic forum. So thanks to Fred Kemp. Thanks to Landon Derrance and his entire staff.

Let's give them a round of applause.

We have a great— a great little panel here, and I'm looking forward to the conversation we're about to have. But I want to start with a few opening comments to kind of give some pretext and some context to the conversation we're about to have. Regarding opportunities around the world and very specifically Alaska. So I went through the papers today and I, I had to remind myself about this forum in particular because 10 years ago I remember being here and we opened the conversation and we were talking then about energy transition. Today we're talking about energy security and in certain cases developing countries in particular, we're talking about survival.

We're talking about energy access and we're talking about survival. So let's just take a step back really quickly. I know you've heard a lot of this already, but I'm going to repeat some of it. So let's just start with the market. In April, we saw the Brent hit $138 a barrel, the highest in more than 15 years.

It sits in the mid-90s, I think, today. I checked just before we came in. The reason is obviously one little stretch of water, Hormuz Strait. Roughly a fifth of the world's oil passes through that strait. But importantly, there are straits around the world that also become choke points to the production or to the transport of oil.

Roughly 40% of the world's transport today of oil has to go through one of those choke points. Think about that for a second. 40%. Iran has threatened to close that strait for many, many years and they never did. Well, this year they did.

And the strait's been effectively shut since February. And the war that closed it has not lessened their control of it. That's an important point. Now let's turn to the globe. On January 3rd, the United States removed Nicolás Maduro.

The sanctions on Venezuelan crude are gone, John. A country pumping a million barrels a day has been told to grow by 18%. The UAE has walked out of OPEC and is now free free to pump at will. So the forward market, if you look at the futures curve, is bracing for a glut even while today's market is short. That's the world we're operating in today— a war premium on one side and a coming flood on the other, up and down at the same time.

Now, I think here's the lesson: it's not about price. Price is noise. In today's market. It's about location, and that's the conversation we're going to have today. The barrel that never touches Hormuz, the molecule that never crosses the strait, somebody can mine.

That's the premium that survives both the spike and the glut, which brings us to Alaska. 3 Weeks ago, on a single pad in the North Slope, oil flowed at Pika. Congratulations. The largest new oil development in Alaska in more than 20 years. And from Alaska, a cargo of gas reaches northern Japan in about 7 days.

5 Of those days are in American waters. For the first time in a long time, the most secure molecule on Earth may be the American one. This panel owns both ends of that bet. So let's begin. I want to welcome the CEO of Repsol, John Amaz.

John, thanks for being here. Thank you. Give him a round of applause. Flew in from a long way away. I also want to welcome Governor Dunleavy from Alaska.

Everybody in this room knows Governor Dunleavy because he has preached his gospel for the last few years to every single one of us as many times as you would possibly listen.. But I want to start— give him a round of applause. John, I want to start with you. I mean, Repsol operates across, what, a dozen countries, perhaps even more at this point? Yeah, practically.

I'm a little bit dated. So you see this from a vantage point that most of us do not, you know, as a CEO running a multinational company. As you weigh where to commit capital for the next several decades, because these are multi-decade investments that we make, How is this latest run of shocks— the Middle East, China, you name it, sanctions from the United States— how has it changed your thinking, if at all, about what makes a supply source genuinely secure? So first of all, thank you for inviting us. And thank you, Mr.

Governor, for allowing us to be in your great state of Alaska, investing there. And starting these days the production of oil in Alaska. I mean, former Secretary Dan, I'm going to give you a very short answer. Today, Repsol, a Spanish-European company, we are investing the 80% of our total CapEx as a company in the EMP business in the United States. 80%.

80%, Yeah. Why? First, Because what we are looking for is a legal, safe framework to invest, stability in the decisions you take as in your public institutions, because we have also a good pipeline and resources in the States. We have talented people in our EMP organization in the US. And on top of that, we have an aim and an ambition to grow here.

We are already producing 220,000 barrels a day today in the US, gas and oil equivalent. And after the ramp-up of Alaska, we will be producing a figure close to 260,000 barrels a day at the end of the year in the US. That's for our dimension. Is important. And as you said, geopolitical risks are always going to be there.

In my own life, I have experienced since I was a child, the Yom Kippur, the Iran-Iraq War, the first Iraqi and Kuwait invasion, the crisis with Iraq. 4 Years ago, the European crisis after the invasion of Ukraine. Now this one. So betting in favor of political legal stability is important. And as you mentioned, in the US you also have an openness to the open and blue ocean.

And in the case of Alaska, Alaska is a very good place to go and to transport your product in an open way, either to the US western coast, California, or to the open Pacific Ocean. Wow. So you, you invested in Alaska, what, 15 years ago, maybe longer? 15 Years ago. So you saw something the market didn't see at that time.

Take us back to that day. What did you see back then? And I'm assuming, because you've been successful, the investment thesis still holds. But take us back to that day. What were you looking at specifically at Alaska?

Why, why was that of interest So first, we had and we still have a very performant exploration team. So when you have a good exploration team, you have to go to places where you think that the resources could be there. So sometimes they are frontier areas. In the case of Alaska, there was an infrastructure there, the TAP and so on. So there's infrastructure there.

Yeah, the infrastructure was there. We have and we had a very supportive administration in the area. Yeah. And going to this risky exploration game, we were lucky after, of course, investing a lot of money there. And in 2013, we discovered the Nanosuk play.

And from the very beginning, we noticed that we had something large and big in our hands. And after years of investing, the risking and so on, I mean, now we are happy seeing that the first flow is coming. And what we have seen in Alaska is something more. I mean, Pika, that is the current production, arrived. Probably, I mean, we are preparing the ground to take the FID of Pika to the second part probably next year.

And on top of that, we are seeing new prospects, new areas like Kwoka. Where we could have new equivalents of PICA. On top of that, we are betting also exploring in the area, either in the state lands. And some weeks ago, we were awarded with our partner Shell, operated by Repsol, with 42 new leases in the NPR area. So we are in some way building the future of our company maker case for Repsol, for our dimension.

In Alaska. So there's follow-on opportunities in addition to PICO, right? Yeah, I think that— I mean, if we could be at the end of this year after the ramp-up of the project with our partner Santos, 51-49, right, producing 80,000 barrels of oil, crude oil gross, I foresee a company, IJB, producing a figure close to 140,000-150,000 barrels a day by 2032 in Alaska with Pika, Pika 2, and Cuoca. What is more important, with resources that could in some way guarantee that this production is going to stay there for a while. That's amazing.

That's a heck of a risk. I know people in this room understand it, but the governor's probably going to speak to this a little bit as well. For those of you who have followed the oil production in the United States, for many, many years Alaska, it was our resource. It was our foundation. Prudhoe Bay, I mean, those things really mattered.

That was our national reserve, was really Alaska. I know we have one down in my part of the world in Louisiana and Houston, but Alaska really was our strategic petroleum reserve for many, many years. And then the economics of shale changed with technologies like fracking. Folks, you know, candidly began to look elsewhere other than Alaska. But you chose to go to Alaska even in the middle of some of this, which is an amazing risk that you took.

And I know those are going to pay off well for you. But Governor, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about, you know, the things that you have done to create that regulatory certainty, that investment certainty that CEOs like John need, in my view, to make these multi-decadal investments. Yeah, it's a great question. So I mean, a sovereign like Alaska, we're a little different than Texas. We're a little bit bigger, but our population is only about 740,000.

It's the population of a county at the top of the world. And our constitution at statehood in 1959, to a great degree, was formed through a Cold War lens. We're only 2.5 miles from Russia. And people, a lot of people don't realize that. At the same time, the federal government was not going to allow us to become a state unless we agreed to collectivize all of our resources under the sovereign.

So in Alaska, you only have about 5, quote, "landmen"— if you see that show "Landmen." In Texas, they have 5.2 million landowners, private landowners. So in Alaska, I'm the landman for 105 million acres, and so that resource is on our state lands. Doug Burgum is the landman for 222 million federal acres. So that's why we have to have a close partnership with the federal government, because of that reason. But long story short is we've been doing oil since the '50s, first in Cook Inlet.

We were the first to pioneer LNG export in the world on a consistent basis to Tokyo starting in 1969. We had shipments going 50 straight years uninterrupted. And that's kind of the lesson for today. They were uninterrupted. You could rely on them.

You could be assured those shipments were coming. So we proved that we could build big projects. The Trans-Alaska Oil Pipeline, obviously, 18 billion barrels with a B have gone through that pipeline. There were tens of— anticipating billions and billions and billions more. This pipeline will be around probably for 100 years plus.

But you have to build up a tax regime system around that to make that work. So folks want to invest and be assured that their investment is going be— it's worth investing in Alaska, but also your permitting process as well. So we have, I think, a highly developed permitting process. The customers would be better to answer that particular question because they're on the receiving end of our services. But from what we've seen in the recent NPR lease sales, we're seeing a lot of interest, I think, for a whole host of reasons.

And I would just add that I think what makes Alaska unique is really what's what's going to be needed for the future so that there is, quote, "assurity" on your shipments of oil or gas. And that is, it's got oil. It's got a lot of oil. A lot of oil left. It's got a lot of gas.

It's got the facilities. Our pipeline facility, including the export terminal of Valdez, was constructed for 2 million barrels of oil per day. So it's really about a quarter filled right now. So that large pipeline could take a lot more oil, get us back up to 2 million if that was possible. We are at 2 million barrels a day, I should say.

We are, we are heading towards a million barrels with the help of outfits like Repsol. The Willow project that's going to come online soon is 180,000 additional barrels per day. There's Quokka, there's Horseshoe. There's a whole host of other satellite fields that have a lot of conventional oil. But I would say we have the oil.

We have the facilities. We are America. We're the largest— we're the second largest discontinuous piece of a country up in the northwest part of the world. Greenland is the other large piece over the other side of North America, but we're our own— in a way our own sovereign to an extent, and our location is huge. As I was mentioning to some of the folks earlier, Alaska is your northernmost state, but it's also your westernmost state, your easternmost state, most state.

We don't need to talk about that. But it's 1,000 miles closer to Australia than California is. That's what gives us an advantage with our Asian allies. As was mentioned, 7 to 8 days from Alaska to Tokyo, uncontested waters shadowed by the 7th Fleet in the south and the 3rd Fleet in the north. It's basically an American lake, the North Pacific.

So if you're looking for shipments, if you're looking to invest, If you're looking for oil, you're looking for shipments, and you're wondering as a customer, can you rely on Alaska to get your shipments? Historically, history has proved, you know, yes. And I think what we're seeing today is also, yes, no canal to go through, no strait to go through, no issue to go through, straight sailing to our Asian allies. Yeah, that's amazing. I think that is going to become the conversation over the course of the next few years.

Like I said earlier, The price is the noise. Now we're talking about location, and that's an advantage that you have. So let's shift a little bit to gas because you're building a pipeline, I'm told. At least I saw one or two news stories about a pipeline. I think it's in Alaska.

Yeah, talk about that, because I come from the natural gas business. I ran an LNG exporting company out of Houston, Texas, and I told the governor this privately, and I'll tell you publicly, I was a little afraid that he might actually build this pipeline because it'd be quite a competitor. To us trying to get gas out of the Gulf of America, around the Panama Canal, over to our Asian allies. But tell us the latest there. What's going on?

Yeah. So this project has been, quote, talked about for 40 years. And it's really— it's changed dramatically under the Trump administration. In 2020, we got all of our permits. We have our right of ways.

We know exactly how much gas is in Prudhoe Bay because we've recycled it out of these conventional fields. Every day, all the time, nonstop. We don't flare the gas as a matter of practice. So we know we have the gas, we have the permits, we have the right-of-ways, we know where the pipeline would go. And all of these discussions really start— this really take place after 2020, before the big data farm conversations really exploded, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine took off, before the Persian Gulf took off.

We were moving this concept forward. It's probably going to be the largest non-recourse-funded project on the planet, in the history of the world, most likely. It's massive, with a conditioning plant on the slope, liquefaction plant down in Nikiski, where the old liquefaction plant was, and an 800-mile pipe. And the pipe has always been somewhat of the issue, you know, cost overruns and so forth. But I think there's a lot that have been learned through experiences in places like Australia and Canada, Canada that we hope not to replicate in Alaska.

And that is, don't burn money waiting for permits to come. Don't burn money waiting to ensure you got right-of-ways. Don't burn money in unnecessary ways, which will jack up the cost of your project. So right now we're in a special session, our legislature, I think in the next week or so. We're optimistic that we're going to get a little change in our property tax that'll make the pipeline even more economical.

But also keep in mind, Alaska is the only state to get an executive order, I think, by any president in the history of the country on President Trump's first day in office in his second term. That was one of the first things he issued was that executive order for Alaska to unleash Alaska's opportunity potential. And Doug Burgum, Chris Wright, Lee Zeldin, the whole gang have been nothing but tremendous for the state of Alaska. We went from basically— we were dead in the water under the Biden administration. To being the— as Forbes said, I think it was, or one of them said— the hottest, hottest play in the world right now for oil and for gas.

Estimated 200 trillion cubic feet of gas, enough gas to go through a 42-inch pipeline for decades and decades and decades to our Asian allies. And I can't think of a more opportune time to have a gas pipeline built in Alaska as a result of what's happening in the world today. That's amazing. I was looking across the room and I see a friend of mine is in the audience, the former assistant secretary, acting assistant secretary of fossil energy, who actually lifted the LNG pause for the US government. So talk about the difference between administrations and how policy can be whipsaw.

Oh yeah, whipsaw the industry back and forth. Amazing. Thank you, Tala, for the good work that you did. Elections matter. Elections matter.

People matter. Elections matter. So let me just, let me just ask a different question. I mean, as we think about the big picture here from a policy standpoint, but also from an investor standpoint, because there's many people in the audience who are going to invest in your company, John, who are going to invest in Alaska, who could be partners in the development of not only the infrastructure but the production that we're trying to bring to market. I'm going to ask you a very pointed question, and I hope you answer it very directly.

If you could look Washington in the eye, if there was a proverbial Washington that we could look in the eye, what's the one thing that you would say you have to do this and you have to do this right now? What would that be? I mean, I was listening this morning Secretary Wright's speech and I fully agree with what he stated here. First, He's making— and the American administration is making the US the right place to invest in safe, affordable, and reliable energy. That is very important.

It's very important what the governor said, to have a reliable and a stable fiscal and regulatory policies, because we are not investing for 2 years, we are investing for 10, 15, 20 years. And on top of that, I think that you are doing here the right thing in terms of energy policy. You are combining in a good way the concept of security of supply, affordability, competitiveness for your industries, and doing that in a sustainable way. So I am European and proud of being European, but I'm not particularly happy with the European energy policies because, I mean, we forgot the concept of security of supply. And we built dependence on Russia.

And at the end of the road in 2022, the American gas, the American fracking that we were blaming every environmental problem, saved— Dirty gas. —Saved Europe in that crisis. Right. And now in the crisis of the Strait of Hormuz, we are increasing more and more and more the imports of kerosene and diesel from the States. Not in the Spanish case because fortunately in Spain we have a solid refining— refineries, probably the most competitive European refining system because we invest in the hard time of the cycle.

But what you have here is a very balanced view of energy policy. I think that that is important to attract investment, to secure available energy supply and to have low prices as you have. I mean, we are paying, for instance, in Europe, 4 times your gas price and twice your power price. And because these policies, we are losing industries, we are losing industrial activities and industrial jobs in many European countries. And I think that we have to redress a bit this balance of the energy trilemma.

So that will be my main message and my main, main ambition, not only looking at Washington, also looking at Brussels. Yeah, that's, that's amazing. I'm still struck by your comment earlier, 80% of your CapEx. Yeah, for, for our EMP business, right? We are downstreamers in Spain and Portugal where we invest the main part of our downstream activity in our refining chemical business.

And of course, in all the customer base we have there. But we need oil and we need gas. And in many European countries, it's even banned by law to produce and to explore hydrocarbons. So we are not unique. You have also your little Europes here in the States.

I mean, look at California, look at New York and some other places. So, but I think that these policies are not right because we need hydrocarbons. The 97% of the European transport system relies on hydrocarbon. We need products, so we invest in the place— in places where first we are welcome. You have resources, you have stable, reliable, and solid policies.

And for this reason, we are very grateful and happy investing the 80% of our E&P CapEx here in the States. And in the last years, an important part, $3 billion over the last years in the great state of Alaska. That's amazing. As we say in America, you put your money where your mouth is. That's amazing.

Congratulations. And welcome. We look forward to working with you very closely. Thank you. And I mean, an honor being here.

And I have to do thanks to the American society and the American institutions to give us the opportunity to invest here. And to take— to be part of this reliable energy future. That's fantastic. Governor, turning to you. You're not only a big man, you have a big voice.

It's—. So look Washington in the eye and tell them you must do this right now. It's permitting and lawfare reform. It's absolutely permitting and lawfare reform. I'll give you an example, and this was done by the Supreme Court.

So the Supreme Court dealt with Chevron for— to some extent, the Chevron— Chevron case, yeah. Yep, as well as Sackett. Sackett. Sackett was a wetlands case that happened out in Idaho. Well, Alaska is 60-some percent wetlands.

And prior to this new administration, this great administration, you could literally have a puddle on your driveway— this is what happened with Sackett in Idaho, it was a driveway issue, it was a puddle basically— it was considered to be a water of the U.S., which means you couldn't have done anything with it. Well, in Alaska, that means you're going to shut off 60% of the state. A lot of those bodies of water are not They don't have a nexus with a river that would become a water of the US. So those two court cases really helped Alaska put things back in balance. But Congress needs to deal with lawfare reform, where you don't use the law to slow a project down.

You know, you use the law if there's really a harm done to the public. If there's not a harm done to the public, they should not be allowed to use lawfare. And yeah, lawfare. And so that needs to be dealt with by Congress, but also permitting reform. Those two things will create an environment in America, in Alaska, for decades to come for investors.

In some cases, a mine, for example, you know, in America takes 20-some years to develop from the moment you get your lease, you do your work on it, to the moment your product is being shipped out for the first time. 20-Some years. You can go to other places, and that's why we do, unfortunately, places like China and others that don't have don't have the same issues we have when it comes to environmental standards, when it comes to permitting, etc. That's done in a more expeditious manner in some of those countries. But if Congress could do us all a favor, both sides of the aisle join together on permitting reform.

And yes, permitting reform for, for example, transmission lines, permitting reform for environmental standards, permitting reform for everything. If we can get the permitting reform, the law, law lawfare reform down, this will be the place to invest for the next 50, 100 years. There's no doubt about it. That's well said. That's well said.

Thank you for that. And I couldn't agree more. Lawfare here in the United States, in my personal opinion, is getting a little bit out of control, with all due respect to the lawyers in the room. We do need to let these projects go forward. Lawyers.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I bumbled. It was the lawyers. But anyway, no. But thank you for that.

I think that's well said. And John, thank you for your comments as well. That's well said. We're nearing the end of this panel, and I want to— I want to ask everyone to give a big round of applause to these two panelists for their leadership.

Great. Thank you both. Thank you both.

Thank you, Governor.

To chair the fireside chat, Crisis and Change: Energy After the Shock, please welcome back Landon Derrance.

It's great to be here. It's great to be back on stage, and for the devoted few, it's good to see you here as we take a moment to engage on crisis and change energy after the shock. For those familiar with the Global Energy Forum in Abu Dhabi, we used to do a night owl, and the night owl was we'd come back after our long dinners and maybe a glass of wine, get a glass of bourbon and chat. And this is my version, as close as I can get, and maybe I'll bring back night owls in the future. Is there bourbon?

I was going to say. I might be able to pull Well, you guys know my two guests here. I'm really excited to be joined by Jigar Shah, host of Energy Empire and Open Circuit, and of course Bob McNally, founder and president of Rapidan Energy. Also both friends and longtime advisors and thinkers on energy. And what's special about this discussion is it's really— we're calling it the Bob McNally on, on change, right?

We get—. It's like, uh, we get your band up here, we'll get this going. That's right. Uh, and, and the reality is we want to deep dive some of the theses about the impacts that you've heard about so consistently throughout the day. And, uh, and starting off this morning with Sheikh Nawaf and debating, uh, you know, how big is this global crisis and what's happening in the Strait of Hormuz, uh, we've experienced quite a disruptive energy security environment over the last 5 years.

You know, you think about COVID in one direction, uh, Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and then of course now this war in Iran causing quite massive chaos. But is it really, Bob, is it really the scalable, uh, you know, biggest crisis since World War II? Well, first of all, congratulations, uh, Landon, for a fantastic conference, and thank you all sticking it out at the very end here. No, I think it's undeniably the largest disruption in energy history since World War II, or any time for which we have records. Interestingly, in terms of percentage of oil disrupted, the biggest disruption before this was actually the Suez Crisis of 1956-57, and one reason we don't remember that or talk about that as a traumatic energy event is, uh, back then when we lost about 10% of global supply, it was a much smaller market.

The United States, which was OPEC back then, the Texas Railroad Commission, had about a third of global oil production in spare, and it was all outside the Suez Crisis. Well, not only do we have now a bigger disruption, 15% or so of of oil, 20% of LNG, but all of the spare capacity, that mother of all shock absorbers, if you will, is inside the Gulf, as Sheikh Nawaf knows so well, and therefore unavailable. So biggest disruption, no spare, compared to the last one, which was biggest disruption with lots of spare. But I think more importantly than the volume lost is, I think, a— unfortunately, a, a load-bearing assumption in energy and even broader economics has been toppled as a result of this. And it's specifically that the United States would allow an adversary to effectively shut down the flow of commodities from moose for more than a couple days, let alone 3 months.

That idea was not just a low-probability, high-impact idea. I would argue that with very scant exceptions, nobody had even remotely questioned the idea that the United States would guarantee the free flow of carbons. The Carter Doctrine, really the Reagan corollary, stood firm just like the dollar-gold peg. From the early '30s until 1971, or the idea that the Federal Reserve would not allow a systemically important bank to fail until 2008. An idea so foundational to ordering of our understanding of energy flows and industry, it wasn't even questioned.

It was literally unthinkable. And that is gone, and that will not come back, and that is a lot of toothpaste to squeeze back into— Bob, translate that into—. Yeah. Plain English for me. What does that translate to?

If we're giving up the Carter Doctrine, does that mean this is a long-term, uh, new structural reality for the Strait of Hormuz? Iran— it's not just the Strait of Hormuz, you know, and that's not just about building pipelines on the Strait of Hormuz. It's about, you know, the industry talks about below-ground risks, technology risks, and above-ground risks, policy and geopolitics. The Carter Doctrine and its Reagan corollary stood as sort of a factor that almost prevented investors and industry from perceiving a structural risk to energy production of flows in that region. And the U.S. backstopped it.

We had two wars, one in a matter of days. During the tanker war, they never shut Hormuz. And when the last time we shot at the Iranians, Operation Praying Mantis, we sank a third of their navy in an afternoon. So we demonstrated there's no need to be worried about— not the Strait of Hormuz— regional production and flows. That is gone.

That means that investors in— for especially in hydrocarbons— are going to look at that region and see a structural security risk they never imagined before. Well, it's not just investors, Jigar. You know, when you and I were talking about this early on in the conflict. It was actually where, where the genesis of this idea came of getting us all on stage, because you were talking about off-takers having real-world consequences and immediate change in terms of their thinking and their acquisitions and procurement of energy. There's congruence here that we know everybody wants to have energy access and affordable, reliable supply.

The question is, where are they getting it from? And, and what are you seeing on the ground? One, do you agree with Bob's thesis that this is a structural reality in terms of the area, the region of the Middle East is more vulnerable and susceptible? And two, is that going to lead to long-term change in terms of how off-takers are dealing with their energy security? Well, I mean, my doctrine is never to disagree with Bob, so I will always agree with Bob.

We'll push throughout the series and see if that works. Always works. Let's get the bourbon out here. Look, I think that, you know, as somebody who has worked his entire career around taking energy technology, right, a lot of which Bob was centrally involved in, you know, the energy, you know, uh, plans that Dick Cheney put together and that, you know, George W. Bush put together, etc. And then we spent the last 25-plus years implementing a lot of those plans, right?

Those technologies now ready for prime time. Whether it's like nuclear, electric vehicles, or solar and wind, or battery storage, or all those other things, right? And what we were waiting for was an offtake, right? Because a lot of these countries were basically saying, do I need to do this? I don't know, like oil prices might fall, natural gas prices might fall, I might have this, I might have that, I'll do this.

Today we're signing up contracts like every minute of every day. Right? Every single minister of energy in the entire world that is in charge of importing fossil fuels is now saying that my job is to reduce the importation of fossil fuels. Right? That that money, that hard currency, that the fact that we have to use our US dollars or our euros or whatever it is to like actually buy that stuff, right, is our investment pool., right?

If I can figure out a way to license nuclear power and build it in-country, I will. If I can figure out how to, like, do geothermal, I will. If I can figure out how to do electric vehicles, I will. Now, not all of it can be done, right? Plastics, right?

Like, there's all these things that oil and gas, like, do, and particularly on the chemical side. But I would suggest to you that in Asia, where I work extensively, there's not a single person looking at LNG for power. Every single person now who is thinking about LNG for power has canceled that contract and is now saying, "We're going to burn more coal," or, "We're going to do electric, we're going to do solar, wind." You said somewhere around 60 countries? Yeah, about 60 countries are very large energy importers, and every one of them is trading notes now around how to do this, what is the contract structure using, what about that Oh, you know, that IFC best practices document we ignored from 7 years ago. Let's pull that out and see if we can write that up again.

And so, as a result, you're in a place where people are actually transacting in a way that I've literally never seen before, right? I mean, just the amount of transactions that are occurring. And then on top of that, what you find is that while China has a lot of equipment, right? And they manufacture a lot of equipment. They have very little know-how, and they don't want to share any know-how they might have in these 60 countries.

So all the integration work, all of the work around software for electric utility companies, all of the work around, you know, figuring out how to build a microgrid, maximize revenue streams, all of that is American and some European firms. So, Bob, I guess a question on this one, and a mistake I think a lot of policy policymakers is they don't think about the temporal element. And so I'll ask you a question about the thesis Jigar has, but broadly, you know, how long do we live in this pressure point? Because the longer this lasts, the more that reality becomes effectively built in. And so a question about demand destruction: are we seeing the oil market decline, or is this going to be flat and placid?

Yeah, there's a fascinating debate that has popped up as a result of this war and the price spike, and it sort of goes along the lines, will the biggest disruption in history and the spike in oil and gas prices do, let's say, what the Paris Agreement and associated subsidies and mandates maybe can't do or wouldn't do, is to accelerate transportation?— the electrification of transportation to achieve, and we use our words very carefully, demand destruction, the permanent, long-term destruction of demand, in this case oil in transportation. And I think the way to think about that is to think about the last time we saw that and what caused it. The last time we saw demand destruction was in the 1970s. Back in the early 1970s, over 40% of OECD oil demand was fuel oil, heavy, gunky residual fuel we were using for electricity generation, space heating, industrial uses. And then two things happened in the 1970s that don't exist now.

One is oil prices quint— quadrupled permanently. People talk about the Arab oil embargo in 1973. Nothing burger. The loss of supply, short-lived. What really happened in the fourth quarter of 1973 is OPEC came in, and back then we were just fixing oil prices or posting them, there wasn't market determined.

They came in at $3 a barrel, and by Christmas it was $12 a barrel, and it was permanent. Imagine our demand curve for EVs if we all knew with certainty the price of gasoline was going to be $12 a gallon for the foreseeable future. I'd be, Jigar and I'd be happy. So when does it allay though? Well, no, so, so that's the first thing is, is everybody saw it.

And the second thing, and this is, these are both necessary, you need the price increase that's permanent. And then we had scalable alternatives to fuel oil that weren't controlled by the Chinese or posed other geopolitical risks, coal, gas, nuclear, even renewables. And so we quickly swapped that heavy fuel oil out of electricity. Electricity generation, and found cheaper, safer, better ways to generate electricity. And fuel oil demand, I think, is about 3 or 4% of OECD demand.

That's demand destruction. Here, I don't believe EVs, Chinese-dominated cheap EV supply chains, are to gasoline and diesel what coal, gas, nuclear, and renewables were to fuel oil back then, and I'm certain we're not going to get a permanent—. Because they're not drop-in, because it takes time. Takes time. It's incremental.

Takes time. And it can't be forced, I think, by government policies. I think revolutions in energy are driven by innovation, technological innovation. The private sector— the government sector has often very little to do with it. There's exceptions, like France after World War II said, "We're going nuclear." There are exceptions, but they're to the rule.

So in private meetings, though, I have a lot of conversations where people are like, oh yeah, it's $95 a Brent TI, but in real life it's $160 delivered, right? And if you think about where we started in the— let's just call it the new year, we're at $55, $60 oil. We're nearly— we're pushing a 3x, we're a 3x in price in terms of a barrel on the real delivered price and value, right? It's not 4, okay, fine. But like, if that is enduring, if we have an enduring price What are we going to see the price go to, and how long is that going to last?

Well, that's the question. And I think, you know, we've been on Space Mountain roller coaster ride here for 2 decades. This is not our first oil price boom. And I think investors and oil companies certainly see this in the shale patch, where you see a reticence to go run and hire expensive workers and rigs and start drilling, because they know now what goes up can go down. Booms are often often undone by busts.

They engender their own undoing by hurting demand, hurting economic growth, and encouraging alternative supply. So I think most now the oil companies have learned that we may go to $100, we may go to $150, we may go to $175, but we don't stay there. More likely you'll see an echo of 2008, where the oil price spiked, and I think one thing— this is a rare thing,— and usually oil analysts are a fractious bunch with vibrant debates about where things are going. I've never seen in 35 years where it's just about every oil analyst I know is predicting a catastrophe. I see some in the audience here— this summer.

And if we're right, oil prices will go nonlinear, and as they have in the past, sort of detonate fragilities elsewhere in the macroeconomy and financial system, and that ends poorly, often with recessions, and then the oil price collapses. So, Landon, I just don't think we're going to see a permanently higher oil price. But the argument that we're making here is different, right? I feel like we've gotten off on a tangent, because we're talking about something that's on the demand-supply curve. That's not what I'm arguing, right?

What I'm arguing is that every single energy minister's job is not only to achieve the lowest possible energy costs for their economy. Their job is national security, energy security, diversification, all of those things, right? The reason why Ethiopia has banned the importation of gasoline and diesel is that they were using hard currency they didn't think they had to afford to buy gasoline and diesel. And so they were like, we're just gonna, you know, ban the importation of internal combustion engine cars. And this was beforehand, just because they had all the extra hydropower, and they were like, "This is great.

We're going to move to electric vehicles," right? So my point is less about that piece, and I think Bob's exactly right. Like, the notion that we're going to, like, within a very short period of time, get rid of 80% of gasoline demand is ridiculous. But the point is, is that those 60 energy ministers, they are now, like, forever scarred by this in the way Bob was suggesting with the Carter Doctrine, right? And the Reagan Corollary.

I think they are all in every one of their scenario planning situations are going, "I remember 2026. I remember how this thing worked. And now, if I'm going to have to spend $20 billion to build an entire natural gas pipeline infrastructure to take LNG imports and actually pump it all the way into the center of the country, I'm not going to do that because that's a 55-year investment. And I'm going to instead do this, this, and this." And so I just think that on the margins— and those margins are very large. I mean, just to put them in perspective for you, last year, right, 100% of all electricity load growth in the entire world was solar, wind, nuclear, right?

That all the new coal plants that we built, all the new natural gas plants we built were fully offset by retiring coal plants and natural gas plants. And so— and we expect that to be the case this year, even with the Strait of Hormuz, and next year, and the year after that, right? And so I think when you think about what we've done to destabilize the dominant position of these companies and their fuels, right, in the minds of these energy ministers, you now have a really easy way of giving this presentation and getting your next contract. So the policymakers' primary driver is energy security. I think it should be.

I mean, he's the man who's actually done that work, not me. How are you defining energy security? You're advising a minister of said country, let's just call it in Central Asia or South Asia. Yeah. What does energy security look like?

Well, in a word, diversity. Diversity, diversity, diversity. And it could be within fuels where you have fuel switching. You say, whoops, LNG was made— if you're in Asia, maybe a bad bet. We just lost one of the two 20% suppliers in Ras Laffan, and that's a hard one to fix.

Unless that region turns into a West Europe post-World War II and it's shiny happy people holding hands, otherwise that is a dangerous region without a Carter Doctrine. I'm going to look to alternatives, whether it's renewables, coal, or hydrocarbons in the Americas. I do think wherever your Asian demand curve was for American North and South hydrocarbons on February 27th. It has now shifted, you know, far to the right after this, and I think Asia is going to come to Canada and Alaska and the US and the Caribbean with a renewed willingness and open checkbook to invest in projects, but diversity. So choke— choke Chokepoint the supply lines.

Non— that's right, chokepoint. And again, we talk about chokepoint is reason ex Middle East. The chokepoint, you know, you can hit Yambou. The chokepoint workarounds can be hit by these precision-guided weapons and missiles. It's the presence of a hostile Iran.

I think it really all boils down to the Iranian regime. If decapitated as it is, if it survives intact and we're dealing with a battered and bruised but dug-in, defiant, and arguably victorious Iranian regime with Israel and the GCC there having proven they're able and willing, often with low-cost options, to bring the world's energy and urea and industrial inputs jugular to a, to a close, and the U.S. couldn't stop it. Chigurh, I think that you probably have a different definition of energy security in this case. Like, we're agreeing that energy security is a priority, or should be a priority. I don't know that I have a different definition as much as I would suggest that there's a different dimension to diversity than, you know, what Bob mentioned, right?

The other dimension to diversity is the onshoring and reshoring into the United States of America, right? When you think about about the fact that, like, we're moving into an AI robots world. So there's no, like, worry about the cost of, like, human labor, the cost of all these other things, right? What you care about is input cost, and the lowest input costs in the world right now are the United States of America, right? And so my sense is, is that you're going to see— I'm going to the Reindustrialize conference June 16th and 17th, and all of my friends that are there are investing heavily into the United States of America.

We're getting so much additional industrial capacity being built here that in the past we were thinking we were just going to— Not because of cheap gas. Not just because of cheap gas, but also because of the fact that all of this technology was invented here. And we were told, here's my guy in Shanghai, go there and he'll set you up and do this thing, da da da, whatever else. And now they're like, I don't know if I want to go with the guy in Shanghai. I want to go here.

And maybe it's like 5% more expensive right now. I mean, this is why there's a little bit of frustration with the fact that it's not easy to get a loan out of the loan program's office anymore. It's not easy to navigate all of the rules to get a contract with the Department of War, or this or that, or whatever else. But I think that'll get resolved at some point. But I think one of the other areas of diversification is that a lot of these countries who thought that American technology was just going to go hunting for sites in Malaysia or Vietnam or Cambodia or the places, you know, they may not be.

They might actually be doing stuff right here. We've spent a little bit of time talking about net importers of energy, but let's talk about energy security from a net exporter's perspective. Bob, you spent a lot of time in the Middle East. I'm sure that you and I will run into each other at a conference in the region at some point soon. And, you know, they have a different thesis here, right?

They're saying we're going to have to— it is existential that I produce. I produce these hydrocarbons, get them to market. What does it mean under your new framework for the volatility of the region for these countries to have energy security? Yeah, well, again, they have their work cut out for them. In my view, it fundamentally comes down to a need to create geopolitical stability in that region.

Region. And I don't know how to do it. I have my colleague here, Scott Modell, who's a former CIA field officer and Iran expert and a Farsi speaker. He's forgotten anything— everything I'll know, more than I'll know about the region. But a good set of skills to have in this moment.

Well, that's what you need. You know, if you think about just stepping back, World War II— I mean, World War II was the third in a series of devastating wars that centered around the problem of sort of incorporating a unified Germany, which is into Europe with other great powers there. It should— now, the Middle East is very different, but you had to have the Franco-Prussian War, the First World War, the Second World War, done. That was destructive enough, and Europe said, we've got to solve our problems, you know, uh, peacefully. And I think the Middle East has to get there.

Otherwise, again, with the weapons we have, with the failure of the United States to uphold the Carter Doctrine and Reagan Corollary and questions about our long-term commitment to stabilize that region. I think energy security, a fundamental requirement is geopolitical stability and that requires dealing with the regime in Iran. Can I just add one more thing on this? Please. Is that I think one of the things that I find fascinating about these conversations is that we talk about these things in macro terms, but, you know, like, my life is based on working with the thousands of changemakers who are the ones who are taking an enormous amount of risk, right?

They're the ones who've bet their fortunes, bet their houses, bet whatever it is they have to, like, you know, make their dreams come true. And the amount of energy on that side of the ledger right now is way higher than the side of the ledger that's trying to reduce risk that Bob's talking about, right? Like, the folks who are coming to Detroit are all billion-dollar companies, right? And they are all like betting the farm, even as billion-dollar companies, to figure out how to bring energy into Kenya, to figure out how to bring energy into Nigeria, even knowing that there is like diesel mafia bosses all over the place. They're like, screw it, we're going in and we're going to try to figure it out.

Right? When you think about the amount of just like raw, just like, I don't know, confidence and stupidity, right, that's on this side of the ledger, they're doing it. They're going to all these countries and they're not going to get stopped. That would exist irrespective of the current crisis. Right, but now they're getting contracts faster.

It used to be they had to go like 20 times to convince the energy minister to give them a contract. Now, on the third trip, The contract's getting signed, right? Because they're like, you're going to invest how much money into our country? And what do we have to do for that? Okay, we'll give you an electricity permit and we're going to get that done in a way that you couldn't get before.

So let me build on your prior role at LPO, Loan Programs Office at DOE, and thinking about capital flows in the current environment. Are you seeing a structural change in in terms of how dollars are going to be allocated now, or is it just going to increase the speed and scale in which they're deployed? It's not a structural change, right? Because remember, the oil and gas industry broadly has moved away from dedicated dollars a long time ago, right? Like, so, so that was true like when you had the fracking boom in 2009 to 2012, but today all of that has been absorbed into the majors.

Right? And so their money is Wall Street money. It's like people who invest in equity, people invest in the S&P 500, people have said things— I own, I'm sure, a lot of oil company stock, right? And then they get debt from people who invest in an investment-grade credit off-taker, right? And so, so in general, that money, like, it's not like the venture capital that we're going at.

Like, if you go after Mark Andreessen at a16z, Z, he's not really investing in the oil and gas, like, startups that I can tell. There's a couple of companies over here like Main Spring or Bloom Energy or some of those folks who might use a little bit of fossil fuels as input. But like, when you look at all the most extraordinary pockets of money and what they're investing in, they're investing on this side of the ledger, right? I mean, all of them, right? Whether it's renewable natural gas or whether it's like the next generation of clean cement or clean steel or whatever it is, like all of that new chemistry that they're doing, you know, like I just looked at the InventWood plant up in Frederick, Maryland, which won the ARPA-E award for wood stronger than steel, right?

So their wood is like 10 times stronger than steel and it costs half as much to make, and it's like the next generation of sort of, you know, carbon, you know, it's amazing, right? Like all of that money is going on this side of ledger, right? And so the hard part in the past was getting contracts from those 60 energy ministers, and, you know, even within the country as well. And that has become way easier because of this crisis. Bob, capital flows on your side as well, just thinking about, you know, you talked about the geographies.

Are you predominantly seeing this as a Western Hemis story now? I'm probably seeing it as what? Western Hemisphere? Yes, but I think I think, yes, certainly more towards the Western Hemisphere, but I think there was another structural shift that was gathering pace, and here I'm going to maybe get controversial. We have to bring out the bourbon for Jigar and I.

So I think just before the Iran War ushered in this toppling of a load-bearing assumption and just made us think, and it always will, about the Middle East differently, I think another not quite long-lived load-bearing assumption, maybe a retaining wall that had been built 5 or 6 years ago, collapsed. It was starting to collapse. And that is the, I would assert, consensus view that climate policy, specifically EV mandates and subsidies, were going to so rapidly electrify transportation, destroy, like, cause an immediate collapse in gasoline and diesel demand in the OECD now, such that global liquids demand would stop growing in 2030 and then either plateau or fall. Same thing with gas. Again, I assert, go back in the last 5 or 6 years, look at the IEA or just about anybody's oil and gas forecast, and that was what everybody expected.

That hadn't been the case for decades before. We normally would assume that a growing, more prosperous, prosperous world, even in a more efficient economy, the economy would need more oil and gas. But for the last 5 years, 6 years, this idea took hold. A whole nother issue. But with the IEA returning to publishing the— a more realistic, I think, sort of a base case.

And I think investors were starting to look at politics since the Russian invasion of Ukraine and say, wow, looks like EV subsidies and mandates are falling in Europe, in China, in Canada, in the United States. Looks like they're not coming on as fast. Looks like energy security. So as a result of that, I think, Landon, everyone would agree that we were not investing, we had not been investing enough in oil and gas to supply a world for which demand would continue to grow after 2030. We were groovy with that as long as we believed demand would peak.

But as we realized, as we started to do, I think, at the end of last year, that demand's gonna peak, you started to see everybody from BP to investment houses start to shift back from renewables and electrification of transportation back to good old hydrocarbons. And so it's a shift between fuels that now will have this regional component. If you will, two dots. Imagine two structural dots. One, what I call peak, peak demand.

The idea that demand will peak itself peaked. The second is the Middle East has a no-kidding security problem nobody thought about at all. It's not a low-probability, high-impact event. It was a zero, I've never thought about it. Though, connect those two dots, put an arrowhead on the end of that line that you've made, and it points to North America, South America, Africa and other places for hydrocarbons.

Let's close this conversation out about policy. I think one of the challenges for industry and for actual policymakers, sitting government officials, is the lack of ability to fully be candid about the best policy that you'd prescribe today. And so, you know, we're— look down to 1600 Penn. What is the best, most consequential energy security policy that the White House could pursue today?

I mean, stop doing dumb things. That'd be a good policy. Let's be prescriptive. You can tell them to back off of a policy. I think that's acceptable.

Like, do less of this or more. Look, I think the Biden administration I think, brought back into vogue this concept of industrial policy. And when the Inflation Reduction Act passed, it sent shockwaves around the world and everyone realized that they needed to do the same thing. Right. And, you know, they took their time, but they needed to do the same thing.

When you look at the O-Triple-B-A, the O-Triple-B-A basically left all of the Biden industrial policy pieces in place, right? It took— we got rid of residential subsidies, right? So electric vehicle subsidies or heat pump subsidies, and it phased out solar and wind tax credits, but it left in place 45X. It left in place all of those mechanisms that we need to really be able to get America building again, right? And so, so I think that the level of policy, you know, like you know, sort of stability between those two administrations around onshoring and reshoring has actually been quite good.

And you see battery manufacturing and lots of other stuff happening in the United States as a result. I think the bigger problem is that when you think about the most gnarly issues that we have on the supply chain side, whether it's, uh, critical minerals or whether it's building new nuclear in the United States, etc., there is a level of precision required between government policy and the private sector in those areas that does not exist today. If I was to take those comments and put them into ChatGPT and say, like, summarize this in 3 words, are you saying decarbonize the US energy system? Decarbonize US manufacturing? Well, I remember, like, I mean, if you just ChatGPT everything I said, while I was during a Biden—.

We'll write this piece up. While I was in the Biden administration, I don't think I ever used the word climate or decarbonization. My phrase was always like, "Help America do big things again." And I think that that has always been what's driven me, right? As I think we have the best entrepreneurs and R&D and all that stuff in the world, and we squandered it for years because we gave them the business card of your guy in Shanghai, and said, go over there and build it, right? Today we're saying, no, do it here.

But when you think about the fact that, like, the graphite processing in Louisiana comes from Mozambique, right, that requires coordination with the U.S. State Department, right? It requires all of these pieces to go into place to be able to get the contracts that you need to do to get this done on the other side, right? And that today is not being done. There's just a lot of There's this excess masculine energy being put into the world through press releases and this and that, but that does not make precision public-private partnerships. All right, Bob, we bought you a little time, so you're on the policy spot now.

Yeah. Well, I will start with the observation. I learned this in the White House. I don't know if you encountered it in government that— and I had no idea, but half at least, of good policymaking is avoiding bad policymaking. Stopping stupid ideas— You can do it on this.

—Is something—. I told you, the doctrine is never disagree with Bob. And there's—. So that's number one. The second thing I would say, to end on a high and bipartisan note, I think by far the best example of successful bipartisan energy policy we've seen was the decision by President Obama and the Republican Congress to remove the biggest policy threat to the shale oil and shale gas boom, which is paying us so much dividends right now, and that is by getting rid of the export ban.

So if we connect those two ideas, we should resist— both parties will be tempted to undo that progress and resort to export restrictions. It could be because of a horrific price spike in gasoline and diesel later this year. It could be because a Democratic administration comes back and says monkey see, monkey do, energy climate emergency. Until we, you know, have this or that investment in renewables, we are going to restrict LNG exports, what have you. So I'm concerned that in the Biden administration toward the end, and although I know the Secretary of Energy was here and I know they— he understands this is deeply unwise.

I know there are folks who understand it's deeply unwise, but there will be a temptation if oil prices spike to restrict exports by some. And so I hope both parties resist that, both parties maintain that progress that we made so many years ago. And I'll draw on a final observation from both of your comments was the need for continuity and consistency in policymaking across parties. So I appreciate both of you. I think we should make this an annual outing, and I will serve bourbon to everybody here next time.

Gentlemen, I also want to thank the audience. You went a little bit long, but I took the liberty of it being my forum and the fact that it's the end of the day. This is, in fact, the last of day one of the Global Energy Forum. Thank you, Bob. Thank you, Jigar, for joining us, and thank you all in the audience for sticking it out.

We look forward to seeing you back here tomorrow for another full day of Conversations. Have a great day. Great day. Thank you.