Top energy chief executives say oil demand will recover next year, but they expect volatility to remain elevated, as the industry emerges from the reckoning of the coronavirus pandemic.
“We face a lot of uncertainty,”Total CEO Patrick Pouyanne told an invitation-only gathering of more than 30 senior oil and gas executives, who met virtually on Wednesday for the Abu Dhabi CEO Roundtable.
“We all hope that demand will recover as quickly as possible,”Pouyanne said.“Nobody knows exactly how long it will take to get out of the pandemic, when we’ll have this vaccine, and how long it will take to reopen the global economy,”he added.
A source familiar with the discussions said the mood among the executives was more upbeat than the last meeting held in June, with news of a potential vaccine giving executives a boost of confidence. Leaders expressed a cautious optimism about the global economic recovery and discussed the need to focus on cost reductions and technology gains.
“We should have optimism, and we should have a sense of reality,”BP CEO Bernard Looney told the gathered executives.
“We don’t control the price of our product, but we do control our cost structure, our investment levels, and the efficiency of that,”Looney added.“The fundamentals that we all learned as we were growing up in this industry will serve us well in the long run.”
The International Energy Agency (IEA) has previously said that this year’s global energy demand decline will be seven times larger than the fall following the 2008/2009 financial crisis. Most analysts expect global oil demand will take several years to recover to pre-crisis levels of 100 million barrels per day.
