The Emirati oil boss banking billions on US energy
Standing in one of Abu Dhabi's ornate palaces last month, the oil boss Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber presented President Trump with a gift: a single drop of oil from the emirate's Murban Bab oil field.
'The highest-quality oil there is on the planet, and they only gave me a drop," Trump joked at the time. 'So I'm not thrilled."
If Al Jaber's ambitions are realized, the chief executive officer of Abu Dhabi National Oil Co., Abu Dhabi's state-owned oil company, will soon have far greater offerings for Trump.
XRG, the company's international investment arm, plans to deploy billions of dollars in the U.S. It is part of the United Arab Emirates' goal to boost the value of its energy investments there to $440 billion over the next decade—about $50 billion less than Exxon Mobil's market capitalization. It aims to take stakes in U.S. oil and gas fields and chemical and gas export plants as well as power projects to support the development of artificial intelligence. Those aspirations position XRG to become one the largest foreign investors in U.S. energy.
During Trump's visit to Abu Dhabi, Al Jaber briefed the president on the plans as the pair stood before a giant screen emblazoned with the phrase 'Making Energy Great Again." Trump, who has aggressively courted foreign investment, was thrilled, said people familiar with the matter.
The investment plan puts Al Jaber at the center of the relationship between the U.S. and the U.A.E., one of Washington's closest allies in the region based on their longstanding trade and security ties. Adnoc, once a middling player on the international stage, has emerged as one of the world's most ambitious—and well-funded—energy companies under his stewardship.
Al Jaber, who rose from relative obscurity, has deftly navigated his country's palace politics to become a key adviser to the ruling emiratis. In addition to his role as Adnoc CEO and XRG executive chairman, he is the U.A.E. minister of industry and advanced technology. In March, he traveled with Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the national-security adviser, to the White House. There, the delegation announced that the U.A.E. would invest $1.4 trillion in the U.S.
'The U.A.E. has become a bridge between East and West, and we have become a global economic center," Al Jaber said in an interview. 'We sit at the crossroads of the world."
About a year ago, Adnoc purchased a 11.7% stake in a $18 billion natural-gas export terminal being built by the developer NextDecade at the Port of Brownsville in Texas. In the scorching heat last month, about 3,000 workers milled about a site roughly the size of Central Park, dotted with cranes that set up giant refrigerators to chill natural gas. The plant, which is expected to start producing liquefied natural gas in 2027, will be one of the largest in the world.
Such an investment would have been almost unthinkable for Adnoc a decade ago. Al Jaber has trained the company's eye abroad to diversify its assets and make it less dependent on producing oil domestically. He said he is particularly bullish about the U.S., which teems with fossil fuels and low-carbon energy, as well as big tech companies scrambling to find enough power for their AI ambitions.
'Investing in the U.S. will probably be the highest representation on our balance sheet going forward," he said.
The U.A.E.'s presence in international energy has long been eclipsed by that of its powerful ally—and sometimes rival—Saudi Arabia. Aramco, Saudi Arabia's national oil company, is a petrochemical powerhouse in dozens of countries. But the U.A.E. has started to catch up.
Abu Dhabi-owned companies and funds, including Adnoc and Mubadala Energy, have splurged billions of dollars on stakes in natural-gas projects and energy companies in the U.S., Mozambique, Egypt and Azerbaijan—as well as chemical ventures in Europe.
In 2022, a unit of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority acquired a 10% noncontrolling interest in Sempra Infrastructure, which is developing several LNG projects in the U.S. and Mexico. Mubadala Energy in April agreed to acquire a 24.1% interest in the private-equity firm Kimmeridge's SoTex, which owns companies that drill for shale gas in Texas and are developing an LNG project on the Gulf Coast.
Ben Dell, a managing partner of Kimmeridge, said America offers the U.A.E. low-cost energy supplies needed to develop AI capabilities. 'The U.A.E. and the U.S. are becoming natural partners," he said.
The U.A.E. has sought to build a dominant AI sector to bolster its postoil economy. During Trump's visit, Emirati officials persuaded his team to greenlight a deal to give their country access to millions of Nvidia's most-advanced chips. Al Jaber views AI as driving the next stage of evolution and said the U.A.E. is making decadeslong bets to align its economy with it.
Al Jaber's meteoric rise was perhaps unlikely. He isn't a royal, and his family comes from Umm Al Quwain, one of the smallest of the seven emirates that make up the U.A.E.
A chemical engineer by training, he earned scholarships from Adnoc and studied chemical engineering at the University of Southern California, before working his way up the rungs of his country's energy industry. Jaber has said it was his dream to work for Adnoc.
Although he has cultivated an image as a hard-charging oil CEO, the 51-year-old father has his quirks. Those who know him say he is obsessed with coconuts and has been known to show guests his coconut-bearing palms and serve coconut water or coconut cake.
Among the ruling emiratis, Al Jaber is seen as a technocrat who is unafraid of ruffling feathers. In 2016, U.A.E. President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan tapped him to restructure Adnoc. Al Jaber cut staff and courted foreign investment, causing a stir at home. He also boosted Adnoc's oil production. The company's transformation earned him the trust of the president, according to people close to the company.
Daniel Yergin, vice chairman of S&P Global and a veteran energy expert, said he first met Al Jaber in 2007, when he was tasked with building a renewable business in Abu Dhabi—a seemingly quixotic venture for the oil-producing emirate. Today, the U.A.E. is one of the world's biggest state financiers of clean energy.
'He makes things happen," Yergin said of Al Jaber. 'The role of XRG is really commensurate with the growing role of the U.A.E. and Abu Dhabi in the global economy."
Al Jaber courted controversy as the president of the United Nations' 2023 climate-change conference in Dubai. The selection of the oil boss angered environmentalists. For his part, Al Jaber was incensed over what he said were misrepresentations about his views on climate change. Ultimately, under his leadership, the summit reached a first-of-its-kind deal calling for 'transitioning away from fossil fuels," though it didn't explicitly commit to phasing them out.
Trump's unabashed support for oil and gas is refreshing, said Al Jaber. The CEO said his own record demonstrates that he supports investing in green-energy projects, but added that the global AI boom will fail to launch without energy from fossil fuels, in particular natural gas.'Energy realism is taking center stage, and that excites me…because we're no longer working around unrealistic mandates," he said.
Write to Christopher M. Matthews at christopher.matthews@wsj.com and Benoît Morenne at benoit.morenne@wsj.com
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