Egypt’s hosting of the COP27 climate conference next year, and the UAE’s hosting of COP28 in 2023, are good opportunities to collaborate and develop initiatives that will assist the world in navigating the energy transition and climate change, according to Egypt’s Minister of Petroleum Tarek El Molla.

Molla was presenting at ADIPEC 2021, a global oil, gas, and energy summit held in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. The event occurs as the oil and gas industry is thrown into disarray by the COVID-19 epidemic, and governments continue to push through with plans to phase out fossil fuels.

He said: “We as Egypt hosting the COP next year, with my brothers from the Emirates the following year, I think we have good opportunity to work together with the world in order to make sure we have good initiatives and realistic ones that could be implemented, and could reach us to safe shores in the coming few years.”

Molla remarked that Egypt was “in a bad situation” three years ago and that the government had to import its gas needs through liquefied natural gas imports (LNG). The country presently exports a large amount of LNG.

He said: “Thanks god we were able with the cooperation of our partners, major partners, strategic partners, international oil and gas organizations, to reach the self-sufficiency through the big discovery of Zohr.”

“This is significantly important as we need to have such revenues in order to make sure that we can invest them into renewables and into this transition period.”

“Our responsibility will be into continuously having such responsible manner of managing our oil and gas industry globally definitely and to transit with technology with having lower emissions and so forth,” he concluded.