Build Resilient Energy Systems: ADIPEC 2025 Leaders Urge Action
▼ Summary
– ADIPEC 2025, the world’s largest energy conference, opened in Abu Dhabi under the theme ‘Energy. Intelligence. Impact.’ with over 205,000 attendees from 172 countries.
– Sultan Al Jaber called for policy pragmatism, embracing AI, capital investment, and infrastructure to optimize energy and meet growing demand through reinforcement, not replacement.
– Doug Burgum highlighted AI’s transformative power, describing data centers as “factories manufacturing intelligence” that can revolutionize medicine, education, and industries.
– Discussions emphasized the need for collaboration and embedding resilience into energy systems amid shifting global power dynamics and AI’s rising energy demands.
– Experts noted that the energy transition requires more energy with fewer emissions, focusing on unleashing finance and investment to enable greater energy supply, including oil, gas, and electricity.
Building resilient energy systems demands a balanced strategy that reinforces existing sources while integrating new technologies, a central theme echoing through the halls of ADIPEC 2025. The world’s premier energy gathering, hosted in Abu Dhabi under the patronage of His Highness Sheikh Mohamed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, united over 205,000 participants from 172 nations. These leaders convened under the banner ‘Energy. Intelligence. Impact.’ to address the dual challenge of meeting rising global demand and advancing the energy transition.
In his opening address, His Excellency Dr. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, UAE Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology and ADNOC CEO, championed a pragmatic and inclusive approach. He emphasized that the world needs a reinforcement of its diverse energy sources, not their outright replacement. Dr. Al Jaber called for policy pragmatism, embracing artificial intelligence (AI), capital investment and infrastructure development to optimize energy systems, attract necessary funding, and accelerate technological progress.
The transformative power of AI was a dominant topic, highlighted by Doug Burgum, the 55th U.S. Secretary of the Interior. He described a fundamental shift in how we perceive power, stating that electricity can now be directly converted into intelligence. “I’ve stopped calling them data centers,” Burgum remarked. “These are factories manufacturing intelligence. This manufactured intelligence is a general-purpose technology, capable of transforming medicine, education and every industry, including ours.”
A ministerial panel featuring energy leaders from the UAE, Qatar, and Egypt further explored national priorities and the critical importance of collaboration. His Excellency Karim Badawi, Egypt’s Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources, pointed to ADIPEC as a vital environment for fostering partnerships among policymakers, industries, and neighboring countries.
Day one discussions, framed by the theme ‘Geopolitics, Strategic Resilience & Energy Security,’ scrutinized the shifting dynamics of global power. The urgent need to embed resilience into energy infrastructure was a recurring message. Patrick Pouyanné, Chairman and CEO of TotalEnergies, provided a clear-eyed perspective during a session on redefining energy majors. “This transition is not about less energy; it is about more energy with fewer emissions,” he stated. “The planet needs more energy, full stop. And when we move from thinking in terms of oil and gas to thinking in terms of energy, that still means more oil and more gas, because they remain at the core of the system. But increasingly, the energy everybody is looking at now is electricity.”
The unprecedented opportunity presented by AI was further elaborated by Ian Bremmer, President of Eurasia Group. He noted a rare global consensus that AI holds the potential to transform every sector of society and the economy. However, Bremmer cautioned that this transformation will require vastly more energy, infrastructure, and electricity than is currently available.
Mobilizing finance emerged as another critical pillar for enabling a greater energy supply. In a session on mergers and acquisitions, financial experts discussed the current moment in energy transformation. Tom Sikorski, Founding and Managing Partner at Bluewater, highlighted the fascinating interplay between energy and data. “There’s a bit of an arms race going on with the monetisation of energy into data,” Sikorski observed. “It’s a lot cheaper to ship data than energy. And so where there’s cheap energy, you can build data centres. The industrial knock-on for that here and in the US looks very exciting to me.”
ADIPEC 2025 continues through November 6, with forthcoming sessions dedicated to hydrogen, liquefied natural gas (LNG), digitalization, and the future of energy systems. Across its four-day run, the event aims to convert dialogue into tangible action, forging the partnerships and showcasing the innovations needed to drive inclusive and sustainable progress on a global scale.
(Source: Economy Middle East)
