Huge oil and gas investments, big efficiency gains and practical use of renewables are all needed to meet rapidly rising energy demand over the next few decades, the heads of the world's largest oil companies said Tuesday. Despite concerns over energy demand because of the euro zone debt crisis, the chief executives of the biggest oil and gas companies told the World Petroleum Congress they must continue investing trillions of dollars to deliver energy in the longer term and called on governments to help. “In the current economic climate the need to make the right policy choices is critical,” said Rex Tillerson, chief executive of ExxonMobil, the world's biggest publicly traded energy company. “We must engage in long-term planning, undeterred by the episodic ups and downs of regional and global economic performance,” he added. BP CEO Bob Dudley said that, with world energy demand projected to increase by up to 40 percent by 2030, enhanced oil recovery from old fields as well as new finds from under the Arctic ice and from the deepest waters of the world's oceans will all be needed. BP expects oil demand to keep rising from roughly 85 million barrels per day today to over 100 million bpd by 2030. Tillerson said that global energy demand would be more than 30 percent higher in 2040 than today.
