It is CERAWeek, the sprawling Texas energy conference, and Sultan al-Jaber, who runs the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc), one of the world’s largest oil companies, is in high demand.
Interviews with Jaber are vanishingly rare. He has been media-shy since he was named by the UAE as the president of COP28 and then flamed for holding two seemingly contradictory roles: oil boss and leader of global climate change negotiations.
And it is a good time to meet. Big Oil has got its swagger back in the Trump era. “We can all feel the winds of history in our industry’s sails again,” says Amin Nasser, head of Saudi Aramco, the world’s biggest oil company, on stage at the event.
As we sit down, the imposing 6ft 3in Jaber, dressed in a western suit and tie, with a large lapel badge of Sheikh Zayed, the founder of the UAE, smiles broadly. “It has been a great day, a great great day,” he says.
A few hours earlier, the new US energy secretary, Chris Wright, a former fracking tycoon, is greeted with cheers on stage as he trashes “irrational, quasi-religious” climate policies for making no dent on global warming and proclaims that “energy is life”.
I meet some European executives afterwards who fret over the ever widening gap between them and the US, but Jaber, who has always said that the world must be more realistic and less ideological about the future of oil and gas, feels vindicated.
“Energy has always been the spinal cord of our global economy. No matter how we look at it, energy will always be essential to everything we do.”
With Wright’s speech, he says, “I started seeing what we have actually been trying to position: energy realism.” Instead of trying to curb energy consumption, world leaders should recognise the right of developing countries to affordable energy that will help them reach western levels of wealth.
This, he says, is why he signed up for the trial by fire of leading the COP28 talks. The UAE volunteered because after more than a quarter of a century, the talks had made little progress. Oil and gas companies, whose behaviour will be essential in reducing the world’s carbon emissions, were not at the table, he continues.
“It [COP] needed a course correction because people were being unrealistic,” he says. “And plus there was no real progress happening. Everything was going in circles.” Instead, Jaber says, he wanted to use his relationships in the oil industry to make “the energy business part of the solution”.
Now that his year as COP president is over, Jaber is keen for the world to get to know him better.
In the UAE, whose entire economy is built on its huge reserves of fossil fuels, describing Jaber as a mere oil boss understates his stature. Running Adnoc is one of the most powerful jobs in Abu Dhabi. Jaber sits at the wellhead of the country’s wealth, making sure that the money keeps gushing, and he also directs the flow downstream, into a range of sectors that he oversees, such as renewables and AI.
He is the industry minister, the chair of the country’s development bank, and, since COP28, one of the best-known faces of the UAE, alongside Khaldoon Al Mubarak, the head of the investment fund Mubadala and chair of UAE-owned Manchester City.
Jaber, who says he is proud to be middle class, says his father was in real estate and trade and served in the UAE parliament, while his mother taught Arabic and then was a university administrator. He is the eldest of five high achievers; his two brothers are the UAE’s ambassadors to Russia and Bulgaria, one of his sisters is a doctor who manages Imperial College’s diabetes centre in Abu Dhabi, and the other works for Tawazun, which helps manage the UAE’s defence sector.
Jaber’s employees call him Dr Sultan, because he has a doctorate in business and economics from Coventry university in the UK, where he did a remote course in the mid-2000s.
I ask how he found the weather and the food while visiting Coventry and he laughs, before conceding that he enjoyed the local curry. He also admits to having been to see Coventry City, playing in the second tier of English football, a few times.
This raises the intriguing possibility that the UAE, which purchased Manchester City in 2008, might have bought a different team, who also play in sky blue. “To be honest with you, I wasn’t a big fan,” says Jaber, laughing as I suggest that if history had taken a different turn, it would be the Midlands club playing in the Champions League every year.
He wrote his PhD on how the UAE could attract foreign investment, and says it still holds up. I ask him if he could have imagined back then how quickly the tables would turn, with the UK now eagerly courting the UAE for investment.
“Did I expect that? Not in this form,” he says, before smoothly adding that the UAE is always open to relationships and building bridges. “That’s what has helped the UAE, it’s the art of the partnership,” he says. “We are a very outgoing society.”
While he was doing his PhD he wed his wife, and today they have four children aged nine to 17. He also started researching the world of renewable energy.
It is often forgotten, or perhaps brushed over, that before he became a huge figure in the oil industry, Jaber worked for nine years as the founding chief executive of Masdar, originally an effort by Mubadala to recycle some of the UAE’s oil wealth into renewable energy, and today one of the biggest players in the world in wind and solar. Ahead of COP28, Mubadala transferred nearly a quarter of Masdar to Adnoc, giving the oil company arguably more exposure to renewables than its European peers Shell and BP.
Jaber was promoted to run all of Mubadala’s energy interests, before being parachuted in as the chief executive of Adnoc nine years ago. Asked to transform the bureaucratic state giant, he quickly gained a reputation as both a workaholic and a bruiser.
“I can be seen to be tough,” he says. “I had to cut budgets and that would entail reducing headcount. Any step you take in Adnoc, or any action you take, has a ripple effect in our society and our economy. I had to calculate everything before making a decision. But I never allowed my emotions to get in the way.”
When he claims that he watches football matches, I ask him how he has the time for such non-essential activities. He concedes that he multitasks his way through. “I do [work all the time],” he says. “But that doesn’t stop me from having my iPad next to me on mute, so I can glance at the screen every once in a while.”
His fondness for multitasking saw him start travelling the world in the years ahead of COP28 “to get a deep understanding” of climate change. “I had to do it. I knew if we were able to host the world, and deliver some progress, and introduce realism into this whole process, it would always be remembered,” he says.
But after a lacklustre subsequent round of COP negotiations in Baku, I ask him if he feels the process has lost momentum. His response shows how much has changed in even the past two years, as the world’s focus has shifted from dealing with climate change to making sure that energy supplies are secure and affordable.
While he says the agreement that came out of COP28 is still a useful tool, Jaber now describes himself as a “climate realist . . . I see that energy is essential and the enabler for our prosperity and economic growth”.
The problem of global warming will be solved, he says, not by restricting energy use but with policy, technology and by managing behaviour. I point out that his home country, the UAE, will feel the extreme effects of climate change long before Europeans. “Yes, but we cannot put everything on climate, we have to think about global development first and foremost,” he says, puzzled by the question.
The following morning, Jaber is the first speaker in the main ballroom. “It is time to make energy great again,” he says, echoing the Trump line.
Malcolm Moore is the FT’s energy editor
Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning
