Net-Zero Transition and Employment in Saudi Arabia’s Energy Sector

The challenge: nationalizing the labour force in a transforming energy sector

Saudi Arabia has engaged in a deep transformation of its hydrocarbon-based domestic energy system. The shift is in line with the country’s Nationally Determined Contribution commitment to reduce emissions by 278 million tons below a baseline by 2030, and with its longer-term pledge to reach net zero emissions by 2060. Several initiatives were developed in this direction. The Kingdom has started deploying large capacities of solar and ambitions to install up to 130 GW of renewable by 2030147 . It has developed in NEOM, the world’s largest green hydrogen production facility, and is striving for greater achievements in the future. Saudi Arabia also launched ambitious plans to develop carbon capture with a hub able to capture 44 million tons of CO2 by 2035. The development of a civil nuclear sector is another of the country’s key priorities.

Read full report here

Olivier Durand-Lasserve

Executive Director- Energy Macro & Microeconomics Olivier is a executive director in the Energy Systems and Macroeconomics program. Previously, he was an economist at the Organisation…

Olivier is a executive director in the Energy Systems and Macroeconomics program. Previously, he was an economist at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and at the International Energy Agency (IEA) in Paris where his activities covered macroeconomic policy analysis and applied general equilibrium modeling. He contributed to various modeling studies on the assessment of the macroeconomic, environmental and distributional consequences of energy and environmental policies. He also worked on the land-water-energy nexus and on the economic consequences of air pollution. Before he joined the OECD, Olivier worked at ENGIE, in Paris, where he developed an in-house modeling framework for quantifying global long-term energy-economy scenarios. While completing his Ph.D., he was a research assistant at the Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE) in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium.

Expertise

Macroeconomic consquences of energy policies

Publications See all Olivier Durand-Lasserve’s publications