Spirits are high at the world’s biggest gas industry conference, which kicked off this morning in Milan. Amid the endless rows of scale models of LNG tankers, enormous bisected turbines, and countless other bits and pieces of esoteric gas hardware for sale, there’s a tangible sense that gas is back and no longer needs to apologize for being a fossil fuel.
I spotted a few scattered references to decarbonization here at Gastech, but that’s clearly a secondary concern to urgently drilling and shipping as much as possible. “A few years ago the mood was totally different,” Brian Yoon, chief development officer of GasEntec, a midsized Korean company that builds LNG regasification equipment, told me. Then, the industry was fixated on hydrogen and other ways of turning normal gas into something more climate-friendly. Now, it’s back to business as usual: “Everyone knows we’ll actually need the traditional solutions for a long time. So we’re becoming very busy.”
That message was echoed in opening comments — following a slightly bizarre tribute by the conference organizer to late Milan hometown hero Giorgio Armani — by Ditte Juul Jørgensen, the EU Commission’s top energy official, who rushed through a few lines about Europe’s clean energy transition. She then lingered on a promise that “LNG will remain part of Europe’s energy system for decades to come,” and pledged that Europe “is open for business” for the gas industry. Doug Burgum, the US Interior Secretary, followed with a grander vision, essentially framing “drill, baby, drill” as a step in President Donald Trump’s quest for the Nobel Peace Prize: “Peace is going to be achieved around the world by all of us selling energy to our friends and allies, so they don’t have to buy from adversaries,” he said, before ducking backstage for a huddle with TotalEnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanné.