Bloomberg/Cairo
Saudi Arabia, Opec’s largest crude producer, will seek to ensure climate talks starting next week in Durban, South Africa, won’t unfairly limit the exporter group’s income, the kingdom’s envoy to the negotiations said.Saudi Arabia and its Opec partners are being asked to bear too much of the burden of cutting greenhouse-gas emissions because their economies depend on oil and natural-gas revenue, Mohamed al-Sabban, said in a speech at the Energy Dialogue conference in the capital Riyadh on November 21.Climate change talks are at a stalemate because richer nations want emerging nations to be included in a global deal. Poorer countries are seeking more effort from states that have emitted the most heat-trapping gases in the past. Members of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, which supply 40% of the world’s crude, oppose emission-reduction targets that threaten oil demand, al-Sabban said in an interview.Any package adopted at Durban should include a detailed decision on how to minimise the adverse impact of climate policies on developing countries in general and Opec nations in particular, he said.Saudi Arabia hasn’t asked for compensation for the loss of income from oil sales as consumers look to obtain energy from cleaner fuels such as natural gas or renewable energy, al-Sabban said. Rather the kingdom wants technological assistance from developed countries and more direct investment to diversify its economy, he said.“It is very crucial to include provisions to this effect in any balanced comprehensive package we adopt in Durban,” said al-Sabban, who is also a senior economic adviser to the minister of petroleum.UN climate negotiators gather in South Africa on Monday for two weeks of talks aimed at agreeing a successor to the present commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol, which obliges developed countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions by about 5% below 1990 levels in the five years through 2012.“Saudi Arabia thinks that a second commitment period for the Kyoto Protocol is a must, and without having unconditional emission reduction numbers from developed countries for the period beyond 2012, it will be impossible to have any agreement in Durban,” he said.Saudi Arabia and other developing countries won’t agree to renegotiate the UN’ Framework Convention on Climate Change, known as the UNFCCC, al-Sabban said.The Gulf state wants carbon capture and storage, or CCS, to be included in the Clean Development Mechanism, the second-biggest CO2 market that was set up by the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. CCS is an experimental technology that siphons off carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and factories and pumps it underground for permanent storage.Opec’s members are Algeria, Angola, Ecuador, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Venezuela.
Iraq to sign final Shell gas deal tomorrowIraq tomorrow will sign the final $17bn deal with Royal Dutch Shell and Mitsubishi to capture flared gas despite a legal challenge from local officials, head of state-run South Gas Company said yesterday. The Shell deal is one of the largest agreements signed with a foreign energy company by Iraq as the Opec member works to rebuild its oil industry after years of sanctions and war following the 2003 invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein. The 25-year venture is expected to help Iraq make use of more than 700mn cubic feet per day of gas that is now being burned and help generate much-needed electric power. “There were some legal issues but these have been resolved,” Director General Ali Khudhier told Reuters on the sidelines of an oil and gas conference in Basra. “It is the final contract, there were no changes,” he said. The contract had been scheduled to be signed on Thursday and will go ahead tomorrow even though some members of the Basra Provincial Council say they plan to present a lawsuit because the council was not included in talks on the agreement.