In the next two decades, the world will de­mand more LNG. This is ac­cord­ing to At­lantic LNG’s (At­lantic) CEO’s Dr Philip Mshel­bi­la. In At­lantic’s 2018 sus­tain­able re­port, Mshel­bi­la said: “The world in 20 years will like­ly be char­ac­terised by in­creased de­mand for more ef­fi­cient and clean­er en­er­gy.”

He con­tin­ued: “The chal­lenges of re­new­ables with re­spect to in­ter­mit­ten­cy, stor­age and high-in­ten­si­ty heat gen­er­a­tion mean that nat­ur­al gas (and LNG in par­tic­u­lar), as an abun­dant form of the clean­est fos­sil fu­el, will be a crit­i­cal com­po­nent of the fu­ture en­er­gy mix as a com­ple­ment to re­new­ables.” Cur­rent­ly, Mshel­bi­la de­scribed the LNG busi­ness as be­com­ing “more dy­nam­ic than ever over the last five years.”

He added that glob­al de­mand for LNG con­tin­ues to grow, as does glob­al sup­ply, but this comes with price fluc­tu­a­tions.

Af­ter be­ing es­tab­lished for 20 years, At­lantic’s CEO not­ed that the com­pa­ny will be poised to “win in the new en­er­gy world that is emerg­ing” in the next 20 years. At­lantic has al­so tak­en steps to em­ploy tech­nol­o­gy as a nec­es­sary fit in­to the com­pa­ny’s core busi­ness of liq­ue­fac­tion.

Mshel­bi­la not­ed that there will be three en­ablers to ac­com­plish the lever­ag­ing of tech­nol­o­gy, which will al­so “fu­ture-proof the busi­ness for at least the next 20 years.” First­ly, he said At­lantic has to en­sure that its peo­ple have the right ca­pa­bil­i­ty and be­hav­iours to de­liv­er suc­cess at present and in­to the fu­ture “de­spite the dy­namism and un­cer­tain­ties of the busi­ness en­vi­ron­ment.”

Sec­ond­ly, Mshel­bi­la ex­pressed that tech­nol­o­gy must be utilised to de­liv­er clear busi­ness ob­jec­tives and the com­pa­ny must al­so take ad­van­tage of “dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion where ap­pro­pri­ate to en­hance safe­ty, ef­fi­cien­cy, pro­duc­tion and val­ue.”

Fi­nal­ly, Mshel­bi­la said that At­lantic LNG is com­mit­ted to re­duc­ing its green­house gas (GHG) foot­print to be­come more en­er­gy-ef­fi­cient while con­tribut­ing to a clean­er en­er­gy fu­ture for the world. “These three things will help en­sure that our busi­ness is ro­bust against many of the chal­lenges of to­mor­row,” said Mshel­bi­la.

He con­tin­ued: “Just as through­out his­to­ry, the jour­ney of mankind was bro­ken up in­to dif­fer­ent Ages—the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, etc. To­day could well be de­scribed as the Tech­nol­o­gy Age.”

Mshel­bi­la ex­pressed that rapid tech­no­log­i­cal ad­vances and in­no­va­tion close the gap be­tween what we can be imag­ined and achieved.

He not­ed that any com­pa­ny “that is not in the process of se­ri­ous­ly re­flect­ing on the im­pli­ca­tions of these re­al­i­ties and plan­ning to do some­thing about it has al­ready been left be­hind.”