October 30, 2019 | UHCL Staff
The Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center hosted a dinner event at South Shore Harbour Resort ahead of the SQCC Energy and Environmental Stewardship Conference held at University of Houston-Clear Lake earlier this month. SQCC, located in Washington, D.C., initiates cultural and educational programs on behalf of the Sultanate of Oman. The dinner and the conference were attended by a delegation of Omani diplomats led by Her Excellency Hunaina S. Al Mughairy, ambassador of Oman to the United States. The evening’s keynote speaker was His Excellency Salim Bin Nasser Al Aufi, undersecretary of Oman’s Ministry of Oil and Gas.
Al Aufi said that the world was in the midst of an energy transition, and discussed some of the key challenges the international community faced, as well as Oman’s plans to address these challenges.
“The most obvious energy challenge is that there are 7.6 billion people on the planet,” Al Aufi said. “It took humanity 2000 years to get to the first billion, but in just 200 years, the population jumped to 7.6 billion. In the last 12 years, we have added one billion human beings, and we will probably keep growing at that pace, so we can imagine the energy demand that population will require.”
Additionally, Al Aufi said, we must find a way to address global warming and significantly lower our carbon footprint. “We can’t do one without the other,” he said. He explained that in Oman, they were lowering their energy demands in terms of handling the water needed to produce oil. “Before, we used to produce steam by burning natural gas, but now we are using solar steam instead,” he said. “This saves thousands of tons a year in carbon emissions.”
He said that in Oman, they were working on adding wind and other solar energy projects to help meet the world’s energy demands while remaining mindful of the need to reduce the carbon footprint. “We are contributing on a small scale in Oman, but we can all collaborate and make this transition as fast as possible for the betterment of the planet we all live on,” he said.
UHCL leaders, including President Ira K. Blake, Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost Steven Berberich, attended the event.
