Imagine if Sundar Pichai, Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg was to stand on a stage and lament that the world wasn’t building enough data centers.
Meeting our ever-growing demand for cloud storage (they might say) will require more and more racks of web servers; if we fail to produce them, the electronic systems on which modern society depends might break down. It’s hard to believe such a warning would be taken seriously if Alphabet Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Meta Platforms Inc. weren’t spending the money to avert such a catastrophe. As some of the biggest players in the cloud, with the balance sheets to match, they should be treating the coming crisis as an opportunity.
That makes recent complaints from the Chief Executive Officer of Saudi Arabian Oil Co. a little baffling. “ESG-driven policies” and proponents of an energy transition away from fossil fuels are contributing to underinvestment in oil and gas, Amin Nasser told a forum in Riyadh on Feb. 12. That “will have serious implications. For the global economy. For energy affordability. And for energy security,” he added.
It’s a complaint Saudi Aramco has made before. Annual spending on oil and gas production is falling roughly $150 billion or so short of where it would need to be to meet levels of current and future demand, according to charts presented at half-year results last August:
No comments:
Post a Comment