Energy Outlook 2023: The essentials in less than three minutes with Thomas-Olivier Leautier, Chief Economist at TotalEnergies

We want to share with everybody what we know about energy and what needs to be done and what's going well and not so well.

What is the “Energy Outlook”?

The Energy Outlook is a set of trajectory for all of the energies up until 2050.

And we do that for two reasons. One is to frame our strategy and second, we want to share that with the public, because we want to share with everybody what we know about energy and what needs to be done and what's going well and not so well.

What are the three most important take aways from this year’s Energy Outlook?

There are really three things that we'd like you to remember. Number one, there's good news and bad news on the energy transition.

The good news is that it has started, when you look at the GDP growth, it's much higher than the growth in energy demand. The second good piece of news is we have the powerful low-carbon technology. We have electric vehicles for mobility and we have renewables for electricity generation. The bad news is that is proceeding too slowly. Fossil fuels still represent about 80% of our energy demand. That's about the same as it did in 2000. So that's moving too slow. And if we don't accelerate, we will not be able to remain well below as per the Paris Agreement.

So the second big learning is that when we think about the energy transition, we have to understand that there are different countries and really different circumstances.

And the third big learning is there are three things we can do quickly to reduce CO₂ emissions. One is increase EV penetration. Second is get rid of coal in electricity generation. The third thing, of course, is methane emissions. Methane is exceedingly powerful as a greenhouse gas. We know how to stop it. We know how to reduce it in oil, gas and coal project production. So we need to get that pronto.

What are TotalEnergies’ priorities when it comes to accelerating the energy transition?

There are two things we are doing. The first one is, as I said, we're working on methane. And when you look at our objective by 2030, we'll further reduce our methane emissions. We also want to reduce CO₂ emissions from our own production. So we want to take care of our scope one and two and get to best in class in that level. The other thing we're doing is that we are growing renewable and electricity generation. Because of the work we do in the TotalEnergies Outlook, we are convinced that electricity, clean electricity is the future of energy and we are growing our energy business. We launched this year our Integrated Power business unit. We have committed about 4 billion of capital expenditure every year to grow clean electricity because that's where we think we can make a difference.