Member Corner
Yesterday the GECF’s Secretary General, HE Dr. Sentyurin participated in a Plenary Session on ‘New Age Energy Policy: A Balancing Act’ on the second day of the Doha Forum.
Established in 2000, the Doha Forum is a major platform for global dialogue on critical challenges facing our world. It promotes the interchange of ideas, discourse, policy making, and action oriented recommendations built around the idea that the world is interconnected and as a consequence it requires cross-border collaboration to solve them. The highest-profile platform of its kind in Doha, The 18th Doha Forum under the title of “Shaping Policy in an Interconnected World”, was inaugurated by HH the Amir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani on Saturday December 16.
Reflecting the importance of energy in the global dialogue, the Doha Forum dedicated an entire session to the subject - ‘New Energy Policy: A Balancing Act’, hosted by HE Mr. Saad bin Sherida Al-Kaabi, Minister of State for Energy Affairs of Qatar and President and CEO of Qatar Petroleum. Dr. Sentyurin was a key panellist alongside Mr. Claudio Descalzi, CEO of ENI, as they answered questions on a.o. current energy affairs, the changing face of the global energy mix, the balance of energy supply and demand, natural gas, the security of supply, the dialogue between producers and consumers, the expansion of Qatar energy investments abroad and the importance of sustainability. HE Al-Kaabi commented that since ‘natural gas is the cleanest fossil fuel known to mankind’, and Qatar has contributed a great deal to the shift to natural gas from other, more polluting fossil fuels in numerous countries worldwide, he believed Qatar is playing its part towards sustainability.
On the same topic, Dr. Sentyurin reinforced the GECF member country’s commitment towards sustainability and its impending GECF Climate initiative, on the heels of the Forum obtaining the status of Observer to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) during COP24 in Katowice, Poland last week.