ExxonMobil will be expanding fossil fuels deep into the future to meet demand it claims will "not materially change" through 2050.
The Houston-based Texas oil giant is not concerned with "chasing the story of the week" but will spend on oil and gas projects that it expects will be needed over the next few decades, said Dan Ammann, president of the company's upstream unit, at the BloombergNEF Barrel of Tomorrow in the Age of AI conference in Houston Thursday. Exxon is looking to double its sales of liquefied natural gas by 2030 and is investing heavily in oil expansion in Guyana and the Permian.
"We invest with a long-term perspective on the fundamentals, and we act on that, Ammann said. "Our long-term view of the global energy balance is that the demand for energy is going to continue rising."
Exxon has not digressed from its fossil fuel focused strategy despite international climate goals. Ammann showed that such a strategy has worked for it ahead of other oil companies that went into renewable energy prior to returning to oil and gas when the returns were low.
"Many of the oil and gas producers, seven, eight, nine years ago promised to reduce 40% of their production by 2030," he said. "There literally was no mathematics you could perform to indicate that was a good proposition."
Exxon expects oil and gas staying at 55% of the global energy mix in 2050 as much as radically increasing from low carbon sources, mainly due to tremendous growth in aggregate consumption. Demand for oil will flatline around 2030 but gas will play a role in filling the gap, the company said in its Energy Outlook published last month.
"We see material growth on the gas side," Ammann said.
Exxon is ready to put its Golden Pass LNG venture, a joint project with QatarEnergy on the Texas Gulf Coast, into production in the next few months and plans to finalize investment in its giant projects in Mozambique and Papua New Guinea by the end of next year.