It’s CERAWeek, the sprawling Texas power convention, and Sultan al-Jaber, who runs the Abu Dhabi Nationwide Oil Firm (Adnoc), one of many world’s largest oil corporations, is in excessive demand.
Interviews with Jaber are vanishingly uncommon. He has been media-shy since he was named by the UAE because the president of COP28 after which flamed for holding two seemingly contradictory roles: oil boss and chief of world local weather change negotiations.
And it’s a good time to fulfill. Huge Oil has bought its swagger again within the Trump period. “We will all really feel the winds of historical past in our business’s sails once more,” says Amin Nasser, head of Saudi Aramco, the world’s greatest oil firm, on stage on the occasion.
As we sit down, the imposing 6ft 3in Jaber, wearing a western swimsuit and tie, with a big lapel badge of Sheikh Zayed, the founding father of the UAE, smiles broadly. “It has been an incredible day, an incredible nice day,” he says.
Just a few hours earlier, the brand new US power secretary, Chris Wright, a former fracking tycoon, is greeted with cheers on stage as he trashes “irrational, quasi-religious” local weather insurance policies for making no dent on international warming and proclaims that “power is life”.
I meet some European executives afterwards who fret over the ever widening hole between them and the US, however Jaber, who has at all times mentioned that the world have to be extra real looking and fewer ideological about the way forward for oil and gasoline, feels vindicated.
“Power has at all times been the spinal wire of our international economic system. Irrespective of how we have a look at it, power will at all times be important to every part we do.”
With Wright’s speech, he says, “I began seeing what we’ve got really been making an attempt to place: power realism.” As an alternative of making an attempt to curb power consumption, world leaders ought to recognise the best of growing nations to reasonably priced power that may assist them attain western ranges of wealth.
This, he says, is why he signed up for the trial by hearth of main the COP28 talks. The UAE volunteered as a result of after greater than 1 / 4 of a century, the talks had made little progress. Oil and gasoline corporations, whose behaviour will likely be important in lowering the world’s carbon emissions, weren’t on the desk, he continues.
“It [COP] wanted a course correction as a result of folks had been being unrealistic,” he says. “And plus there was no actual progress taking place. Every part was stepping into circles.” As an alternative, Jaber says, he wished to make use of his relationships within the oil business to make “the power enterprise a part of the answer”.
Now that his yr as COP president is over, Jaber is eager for the world to get to know him higher.
Within the UAE, whose whole economic system is constructed on its enormous reserves of fossil fuels, describing Jaber as a mere oil boss understates his stature. Working Adnoc is likely one of the strongest jobs in Abu Dhabi. Jaber sits on the wellhead of the nation’s wealth, ensuring that the cash retains gushing, and he additionally directs the stream downstream, into a spread of sectors that he oversees, corresponding to renewables and AI.
He’s the business minister, the chair of the nation’s improvement financial institution, and, since COP28, one of many best-known faces of the UAE, alongside Khaldoon Al Mubarak, the top of the funding fund Mubadala and chair of UAE-owned Manchester Metropolis.
Jaber, who says he’s proud to be center class, says his father was in actual property and commerce and served within the UAE parliament, whereas his mom taught Arabic after which was a college administrator. He’s the eldest of 5 excessive achievers; his two brothers are the UAE’s ambassadors to Russia and Bulgaria, considered one of his sisters is a health care provider who manages Imperial Faculty’s diabetes centre in Abu Dhabi, and the opposite works for Tawazun, which helps handle the UAE’s defence sector.
Jaber’s staff name him Dr Sultan, as a result of he has a doctorate in enterprise and economics from Coventry college within the UK, the place he did a distant course within the mid-2000s.
I ask how he discovered the climate and the meals whereas visiting Coventry and he laughs, earlier than conceding that he loved the native curry. He additionally admits to having been to see Coventry Metropolis, enjoying within the second tier of English soccer, just a few occasions.
This raises the intriguing chance that the UAE, which bought Manchester Metropolis in 2008, might need purchased a distinct group, who additionally play in sky blue. “To be sincere with you, I wasn’t a giant fan,” says Jaber, laughing as I counsel that if historical past had taken a distinct flip, it might be the Midlands membership enjoying within the Champions League yearly.
He wrote his PhD on how the UAE may entice international funding, and says it nonetheless holds up. I ask him if he may have imagined again then how shortly the tables would flip, with the UK now eagerly courting the UAE for funding.
“Did I anticipate that? Not on this kind,” he says, earlier than easily including that the UAE is at all times open to relationships and constructing bridges. “That’s what has helped the UAE, it’s the artwork of the partnership,” he says. “We’re a really outgoing society.”
Whereas he was doing his PhD he wed his spouse, and in the present day they’ve 4 youngsters aged 9 to 17. He additionally began researching the world of renewable power.
It’s usually forgotten, or maybe brushed over, that earlier than he grew to become an enormous determine within the oil business, Jaber labored for 9 years because the founding chief govt of Masdar, initially an effort by Mubadala to recycle a few of the UAE’s oil wealth into renewable power, and in the present day one of many greatest gamers on the planet in wind and photo voltaic. Forward of COP28, Mubadala transferred practically 1 / 4 of Masdar to Adnoc, giving the oil firm arguably extra publicity to renewables than its European friends Shell and BP.
Jaber was promoted to run all of Mubadala’s power pursuits, earlier than being parachuted in because the chief govt of Adnoc 9 years in the past. Requested to rework the bureaucratic state large, he shortly gained a repute as each a workaholic and a bruiser.
“I might be seen to be robust,” he says. “I needed to reduce budgets and that may entail lowering headcount. Any step you absorb Adnoc, or any motion you’re taking, has a ripple impact in our society and our economic system. I needed to calculate every part earlier than making a choice. However I by no means allowed my feelings to get in the way in which.”
When he claims that he watches soccer matches, I ask him how he has the time for such non-essential actions. He concedes that he multitasks his manner by means of. “I do [work all the time],” he says. “However that doesn’t cease me from having my iPad subsequent to me on mute, so I can look on the display screen each now and again.”
His fondness for multitasking noticed him begin travelling the world within the years forward of COP28 “to get a deep understanding” of local weather change. “I needed to do it. I knew if we had been capable of host the world, and ship some progress, and introduce realism into this entire course of, it might at all times be remembered,” he says.
However after a lacklustre subsequent spherical of COP negotiations in Baku, I ask him if he feels the method has misplaced momentum. His response exhibits how a lot has modified in even the previous two years, because the world’s focus has shifted from coping with local weather change to creating certain that power provides are safe and reasonably priced.
Whereas he says the settlement that got here out of COP28 continues to be a great tool, Jaber now describes himself as a “local weather realist . . . I see that power is crucial and the enabler for our prosperity and financial progress”.
The issue of world warming will likely be solved, he says, not by limiting power use however with coverage, know-how and by managing behaviour. I level out that his dwelling nation, the UAE, will really feel the acute results of local weather change lengthy earlier than Europeans. “Sure, however we can not put every part on local weather, we’ve got to consider international improvement in the beginning,” he says, puzzled by the query.
The next morning, Jaber is the primary speaker in the primary ballroom. “It’s time to make power nice once more,” he says, echoing the Trump line.
Malcolm Moore is the FT’s power editor
Discover out about our newest tales first — observe FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to obtain the FT Weekend publication each Saturday morning
