Dubai: The Middle East’s reputation as a global energy exporter is unlikely to be significantly impacted by the shale revolution in the United States, a regional representative from Dow Chemicals has said.
Adriano Gentilucci, Commercial Director for Dow Oil, Gas & Mining, Middle East & Africa, said over the past decade the region had shifted from a crude oil exporter into a diversified exporter of oil and gas.
“In the last ten years, the production of oil has been sufficient but from 2002 to 2012, gas production in the Middle East has doubled.
The United States, Australia and China, along with other countries, have made significant investments into shale production that has led to some nations becoming exporters in the coming years.
Gentilucci said that despite the “shale revolution”, the Middle East will continue to be a diversified energy exporter because of “the region has about 43 per cent of conventional gas resources of the world.”
“Shale gas represents an impact in the United States because the US was in the middle or at the end of the conventional gas decline … in the Middle East, the situation is quite different because there are still large fields of conventional gas to be developed,” Gentilucci said.
