The production of green hydrogen also demands huge quantities of water. GCC countries rely heavily on desalination for their water needs, including for renewable energy production. Desalination plants are usually energy-intensive and often powered by fossil fuels. In most cases, a by-product of desalination is brine, which increases the salinity of

remains substandard, with the least efficient plants capturing only around 60 per cent of emissions. There is also a high risk of CO2 leaks contaminating aquifers. Today, the only form of large-scale, permanent, and profitable carbon sequestration is enhanced oil recovery (EOR), whereby the captured carbon is reinjected to extract more oil or gas.

European and GCC producers, transmission system operators, and distributors need new frameworks for dialogue on interconnections. This needs especially to address the prospect of linking the GCC-wide transmission grid to, for example, its European counterpart ENTSO-E. Plans for such an interconnection have gained momentum since a 2021 deal between

The UAE and other fossil fuel producers saw the scramble for energy security after the Russian invasion of Ukraine as an opportunity to argue, as Jaber has, that fossil fuels are still necessary: “[we] cannot unplug the current energy system before we have built the new one,” he said at India Energy Week in February 2023. At this year’s CERAW

to work together on nuclear energy; hydrogen; electricity interconnection; energy efficiency, storage, and smart grids; and oil and gas and their derivatives. The last of these focuses especially on carbon capture, utilisation, and storage (CCUS) technologies, which capture carbon emissions at source to sequester them underground or to transform an