AI’s huge power needs give oil majors incentive to invest in renewables, says Adnoc boss

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The rapid rise of artificial intelligence gives the world’s largest oil companies a major incentive to increase their investments in renewable energy, according to Sultan al-Jaber, the chief executive of Abu Dhabi’s national oil company.

“The size of this opportunity only became very apparent about 18 months ago when ChatGPT took off,” said Jaber in an interview with the Financial Times.

He spoke as the chief executives of oil groups Shell, BP and TotalEnergies met tech companies including Microsoft, financiers including Mark Carney, the chair of Brookfield Asset Management, and the heads of power suppliers RWE and EDF in Abu Dhabi to discuss how to meet the growing energy needs of AI and how the technology could be applied across the energy sector.

Both Shell and BP have pulled back from renewables in the past two years to refocus on their core oil and gas businesses. But Jaber said the huge growth of AI would prompt oil groups to look again at their renewables businesses. The big tech companies have pledged to use green energy for their AI data centres to meet their net zero targets.

“This specific topic was very much discussed,” he said. “We need a model that will integrate all forms of energy together. We will need more renewable energy and we need to advance battery storage technology to turn renewables from intermittent power to baseload. We need gas as a bridge and we will need, in some locations, nuclear power.” 

Jonathan Ross, chief executive of AI chip company Groq, said he had met the heads of BP and Shell and that renewable energy had been “a huge topic”.

“Because AI is going to require huge amounts of energy we need to get ahead of this,” he said, adding that he hoped to provide more computing power for energy companies going forward.

Adnoc, one of the world’s largest oil companies, is also planning to roll out the next iteration of generative AI, so-called AI agents designed to act autonomously, across all of its operations.

In a speech on Monday, Jaber said Adnoc’s technology arm, AIQ, had worked with Microsoft and the United Arab Emirates’ AI group G42 to develop software called EnergyAI. He said it would be the first time that a major energy company had integrated AI agents across its entire value chain.

“It is the first of its kind,” said Jaber. “It will analyse petabytes of data. It will proactively and autonomously identify operational improvements.”

Adnoc said its software could autonomously produce seismic analysis or detailed models of underground reservoirs to decide whether they could be suitable for trapping and storing carbon dioxide emissions.

Jaber said Adnoc had allocated $23bn to develop low-carbon technology using AI and that he was “very optimistic” the company could achieve its carbon reduction targets ahead of schedule because of the new technology.

Adnoc has said it wants to reduce its emissions per barrel by 25 per cent by 2030. It also has a target to be net zero by 2045 for scope-one emissions from sources the organisation owns or controls and for scope-two emissions that the company causes indirectly, but not for scope three, other emissions not covered in the categories.

“We reduced our emissions by 1mn tonnes between 2022 and 2023 and that was through the application of AI on top of the advanced digital infrastructure we have been investing in across our operations,” he said.