Managing Director TotalEnergies EP Qatar & Country Chair Matthieu Bouyer
Doha: It has been almost a year since TotalEnergies announced its new identity as a symbol of its transformation into a broad energy company with renewable energy playing a pivotal role. Managing Director TotalEnergies EP Qatar & Country Chair Matthieu Bouyer in an exclusive conversation with The Peninsula, said that TotalEnergies is investing over $3bn per year on renewable and aims to be among the top five renewables companies in the world by 2030.
Operating in Qatar for over 85 years, TotalEnergies has actively supported QatarEnergy in the development of the oil and gas industry. Today, they are engaged in the country push for renewable energy and greener future as an active shareholder in Al Kharsaah Solar Power Project alongside QatarEnergy.
Qatar is unique for TotalEnergies as most of their businesses are deployed. “QatarEnergy and the State of Qatar have been remarkable in growing their energy industry in the past decades and in forging partnerships that have allowed companies like us to contribute to many different domains. We are active in Upstream oil, gas, LNG, and renewable electricity more recently,” explained Matthieu. “We also have downstream activities in petrochemicals, refining and marketing. It’s all linked to the added value we bring that has enabled to build trust with our counter parts in the country, QatarEnergy in particular,” he added.
Located 80 km West of Doha, the Al Kharsaah Solar PV Project is the country’s first large-scale solar power plant (800 MW) and is set to reduce Qatar’s CO2 emissions by 26 Mt during the life of the project. The project is operated by Siraj 1 SPV, a consortium jointly owned by Siraj Energy (60%), the latter being a joint venture between QatarEnergy and QEWC (Qatar Electricity & Water Co) as well as TotalEnergies & Marubeni (40%).
“We are active in two large scale renewable solar projects in Qatar. The first one is Al Kharsaah; it will start in the first semester of 2022 and is one of the largest solar projects worldwide with an installed capacity of 800 MW. This project will contribute to reducing the carbon footprint during the World Cup 2022 and will represent around 10% of the country electricity peak demand. We are also supporting QatarEnergy in the development of other large scale solar plants,” he said.
“Qatar has the ambition to grow solar energy even further as QatarEnergy announced a target of 5 GW by 2035 in its new Sustainability Strategy. We will be active in accompanying them to achieve this target.” he added.
As ‘Sustainable Development’ takes center stage in global discussion, the world is facing a challenge producing more energy but with lesser emissions.
“Last year, we officially placed the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the heart of our strategy, projects and operations.
Sustainability is not new to our activities but today, every project we launch is assessed considering its impact on the SDGs and that’s part of all investment decisions,” said Matthieu.
“As a multi-energy company, we have the challenge to produce more energy while reducing emissions. That means first to be sustainable in our operations by reducing the emissions from our existing assets, it’s a matter of credibility. Second, it is to diversify the energy mix that we are producing and selling to our customers,” he said.
“So not only do we produce oil and gas but now we are investing in new energies such as wind, solar but in hydrogen, carbon capture, biomass as well. All these types of energies are now part of our strategy although there are not all at the same level of maturity,” he added.
“Our ambition is to achieve 100 gigawatts of installed renewable power generation capacity by 2030,” he added.
He explained that in the energy transition, we should be careful about the lack of investment in the oil and gas sector as it would create imbalance between demand and supply, resulting in high prices of oil and gas.
“Today 80 percent of the energy demand is hydrocarbons- coal, gas and petrol. So, you cannot decide overnight to let go of hydrocarbons and go only green.
The transition will happen, and gas in particular has a key role to play but it is a transition, and it means that it will take time,” he said. “If we don’t consider this as a transition and stop investing, we would act on the supply quicker than on the demand and it could create some supply-demand squeeze that would eventually push the prices up,” he added.
However, this does not mean that there should be less focus on cleaner energy. “We are investing in new energies and technology. We can increase efficiency and help our clients to be more efficient as well by offering cleaner products such as biofuels and biogas. By doing so we can reduce emissions,” he added.
TotalEnergies is also focusing on generating power from hydrogen and it has set up an organization dedicated to it, said Matthieu.
“We already know hydrogen as we produce large volumes in our downstream assets. The point is to produce clean hydrogen. We are working on reducing clean hydrogen development costs from gas or renewables; we have created at corporate level a new business unit to address hydrogen projects and opportunities. We have some projects going on this front,” he said. “We are studying how to make it more efficient, how to reduce its cost and what market it will address; the potential is huge,” he added.
