Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company, Saudi Aramco, has warned that the world could run short of crude oil if the industry doesn’t ramp up exploration and investment to develop a new supply.
Amin Nasser is the CEO of Aramco – which now owns the Valvoline brand of lubricant products, in addition to being the world’s biggest oil-producing company – was speaking to the Financial Times. He explained how there was an inevitable impact of having a decade where the industry stopped exploring. Without a correction, he said, the world will face a supply crunch.
Speaking at the 2025 Energy Intelligence Forum, Nasser said the world was facing a reality check in terms of the energy transition, and suggested that it could be better framed as an “energy addition”. He explained that in the last 10 years:
“…global primary energy demand has risen by the equivalent of around 40 million barrels of oil per day. Hydrocarbons supplied two-thirds of that growth, despite 11 trillion dollars being spent on transition. And that’s just the growth. In total, the world consumes 340 million barrels of oil equivalent daily.”
He added that hydrocarbon resources like coal, gas and oil are still providing record amounts of energy and account for about four-fifths of the world’s energy needs. Within this context, he pointed out that hydrocarbons are not just being phased out – they’re not even being phased down. He posited that without large-scale economic storage, renewables have hit a ceiling in terms of what they could provide to the grid due to the inherent intermittency issues.
