DOHA: Father Emir H H Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani and H E Abdullah bin Hamad Al Attiyah, Qatar’s former Minister of Energy and Industry and Deputy Prime Minister, jointly launched The Abdullah bin Hamad Al Attiyah Foundation for Energy and Sustainable Development yesterday.
The first think-tank of its kind in the Middle East was launched in the presence of the industry captains and policy makers. The Foundation hosted 400 distinguished national and international guests from industry, academia and government at the launch ceremony. Earlier, the foundation, in a statement urged the governments of the region to tackle soaring domestic energy consumption trends at its inauguration ceremony yesterday.
“We want people to knock on our door with questions which we will aim to answer based on our vast experience,” the statement quoted Al Attiyah as saying.
“I would like to see the foundation become the leading think-tank in the region and one of the leading institutions in the world in the areas of energy and sustainable development,” he said.
The foundation is the Middle East’s first institution committed to the creation of knowledge and solutions critical to the future of the regional and international energy system.
Al Attiyah is joined on the board of the Foundation by a group of distinguished individuals from the past and present leadership of Qatar Petroleum, including Saad Al Kaabi, President and CEO of Qatar Petroleum, Dr Ibrahim Ibrahim, Economic Advisor to
Emir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, Abdulaziz Al Malki, Qatar’s ambassador to Italy, Nasser Al Jaidah and Hamad Rashid Al Mohannadi, both board members of Qatar Petroleum.
“As the rest of the world is gradually turning towards greater energy efficiency in economic terms, much of the GCC is going the other way, using ever more energy to produce a unit of economic growth and becoming less competitive in the process,” Dr Ibrahim told the audience of industry and government officials in his keynote speech.
“If these long-term consumption trends continue, the Gulf States are forecast to be just a few decades away from relinquishing their long-held position as global energy suppliers,” he said.
In 1973, oil consumption in Arabia was less than one percent of global demand. Forty years later, the Gulf States, with just 0.5 percent of the world’s population, consumed 5 percent of its oil. Primary energy consumption in the past decade has grown more than twice as fast as the world average of 2.5 percent per year. The Gulf’s 2001 consumption of 220 million tonnes of oil equivalent nearly doubled by 2010 and is expected to nearly double again by 2020.
The Peninsula
