Welcome to In Conversation, the regular podcast of E-Sharp magazine.

Go to eSharp.u for free access to all our podcasts to date.

This is Paul Adamson and I'm in conversation with Eric Varnas.

Eric is a senior vice president and chief economist of Equino, the energy

company, known until quite recently as stat oil. Eric, we're going to obviously talk about energy.

You're producing every year this very well-regarded and well-received annual survey of various

scenarios. What does the latest report that you've just released indicate? What are the main

trends?

Well the main trends as always when you look out the window and see where the global

energy markets are going, you get different signals depending on where you want to look.

And that's why we make different histories about the future, three different futures, because depending on the weight you put on different assumptions and drivers, you can come to very different ends by 2050, very different worlds.

And one of the main challenges that we see this year compared to, to, or what has gradually come come upon us is that some of the positive

changes regarding the possibilities for reducing CO2 emissions that we thought we saw over

the last three years. For instance, the global CO2 emissions were flat for three years in a row.

That has now reversed and CO2 emissions are on the rise again, if you look at it on a global

scale.

And why is that?

Mainly because we've had economic growth for quite a while, and then energy demand is going up.

And to satisfy that energy demand, there is still a tendency, both for coal and oil and gas demand, to grow, and then CO2 emissions come up.

CCS, carbon capture and storage is not developing, therefore when demand and use of demand for

and use of coal and oil and gas goes up and CO2 emissions tend to increase and right

now they're increasing very rapidly in China which is bad oil demand grew by

...