OREANDA-NEWS. September 11, 2014. Speaking at this year’s Offshore Northern Seas (ONS) Conference and Exhibition, Khalid A. Al-Falih, Saudi Aramco president and CEO, addressed the challenges facing the industry and gave insights into Saudi Aramco’s strategy for turning these into opportunities.

Hosted this year by the Norwegian state-owned oil company, Statoil, ONS is one of the key industry exhibitions and conferences for the offshore oil and gas industry. The biennial event attracts more than 1,000 exhibitors and more than 50,000 visitors and provides a platform for the presentation of the political, economic and technological issues involving the international oil and gas industry, as well as showcasing the latest innovations within the industry.

In his speech, Al-Falih outlined some of the chief challenges that major producers such as Saudi Aramco face, including rising project costs, critical manpower shortages, global economic weakness and political turmoil in many oil producing regions, including Africa, the Middle East and the former Soviet Union. These challenges must be faced with “prudent caution,” Al-Falih said, focusing on long-term strategies for meeting the growing global need for energy and enhancing “our industry’s resilience to the kinds of shocks, surprises and difficulties” the industry currently faces.

The industry’s greatest challenge, Al-Falih said, is meeting its primary purpose of supplying energy to the world, where global energy demand is set to grow by more than a third from the current level. To do that, “our industry will need to add close to 40 million barrels per day of new capacity in the next two decades,” Al-Falih said. “To put that figure into perspective, that’s equivalent to approximately 30 Norways or 15 times America’s current unconventional oil production.”