Until Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber was tapped to overhaul Abu Dhabi’s national energy company, it had been content to rake in the cash from large, low-cost oil fields.
His mandate was to modernize the company, known as ADNOC, to make sure it could continue to sustain the economy and geopolitical ambitions of the United Arab Emirates.
Mr. Al Jaber, who was appointed in 2016 by Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, then the crown prince, has helped put ADNOC on the map as a global deal maker, establishing the Emirates as a brasher rival to Saudi Arabia in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. The oil giant has also given the Emirates the money and muscle to intervene in countries like Sudan and Yemen, raising tensions with neighbors like the Saudis.
“He’s totally transformed the company and the way that the oil sector is managed,” said Ben Cahill, a director at the Center for Energy and Environmental Systems Analysis at the University of Texas.
Now ADNOC, which was founded in 1971, is pushing beyond oil, a risky phase for the company. It aims for international acquisitions, especially in natural gas, where it aspires to be in the top five suppliers globally, and chemicals, renewables and other sectors.
Mr. Al Jaber said ADNOC was open to participating in the development of natural gas resources in Venezuela, where the United States is trying to drum up investment after forcibly removing the South American country’s president and taking control of its energy industry.
Through ADNOC’s acquisition arm, XRG, which Mr. Al Jaber set up in late 2024, the company is buying into a U.S. liquefied natural gas plant called Rio Grande LNG. XRG also has stakes in gas properties in countries including Azerbaijan, Egypt and Mozambique.
In other hedges against oil, ADNOC is working with OMV, an Austrian energy company that is partly owned by ADNOC, to create a global chemicals business called Borouge Group International. Mr. Al Jaber has been a supporter of Abu Dhabi’s nuclear efforts, including the construction of a four-reactor site that provides nearly a quarter of electricity in the Emirates. He helped found Masdar, a renewable energy developer part-owned by ADNOC that has plans to expand as most other oil giants, like BP and Shell, are backing away from renewables, saying such projects are not sufficiently profitable.
Some industry experts say ADNOC may be trying to do too much, too fast.
“They are trying to do a lot all at once,” said Robin Mills, chief executive of Qamar Energy, a consulting firm in Dubai that works for ADNOC.
Mr. Al Jaber, 52, is known as “the doctor” among ADNOC staff in a nod to his Ph.D. in economics from Coventry University in England. In 2023, he led the COP climate conference in the Emirates while, controversially, retaining his role as chief executive of ADNOC, one of the world’s largest oil producers. He has many other jobs, including a cabinet post as minister of industry and advanced technology.
“The main driver behind this was to transform ADNOC from a traditional, conventional, national oil company into a globally competitive energy company,” he said in an interview in his office overlooking the Persian Gulf.
While the Trump administration has pushed back against alternative energy projects like wind farms in the United States, the Emiratis do not see a conflict between oil and gas and renewable energy.
Having the financial firepower to develop wind and solar projects “is seen as part of being dominant and a way to project power, especially across emerging markets,” said Karen E. Young, a senior research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University.
That said, oil revenue continues to underpin Abu Dhabi’s economy, underwriting around 62 percent of government funding, according to Oxford Economics.
To extract more from Abu Dhabi’s resources, Mr. Al Jaber brought in new international companies like Occidental Petroleum, Italy’s Eni and EOG Resources, an American shale driller, for their expertise in natural gas and other areas. He has also invested in artificial intelligence to fine-tune ADNOC’s operations.
As fellow OPEC members like Venezuela and Nigeria have struggled to maintain production levels, the Emirates is one of the few with the money and ability to keep growing.
Increasing output has beefed up the Emirates’ clout in the OPEC Plus producers group, helping it win increases in its production quota. In talks with other producers, there is always the implicit threat that the Emirates, perhaps the most influential OPEC member after Saudi Arabia, will break ranks.
The Emirates has raised its oil output more than 10 percent in the past two years, to 3.6 million barrels a day, according to the International Energy Agency. It is now the third-largest producer in OPEC, after Saudi Arabia and Iraq.
The production has increased even as Mr. Al Jaber has reduced ADNOC’s work force, which has around 50,000 employees, 15,000 fewer than in 2016.
Wood Mackenzie, a consulting firm, estimates that over the next decade, seven of the larger Western oil companies will collectively see their production in the Emirates rise about a quarter, making it their second-largest source of oil and gas after the United States.
ADNOC has raised billions in capital from institutional investors like Global Infrastructure Partners and KKR, through deals like selling interests in its pipeline network. Dealing with Wall Street firms created a needed culture shock, company executives say. Being challenged by tough-minded financiers at board meetings “increases the professionalism of people who had never been facing institutions like that,” said Klaus Froehlich, ADNOC’s chief investment officer.
Influenced by the initial public offering of Saudi Arabia’s national oil company, Saudi Aramco, Mr. Al Jaber carved off six units of ADNOC for public markets, listing small chunks of them on the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange, starting in 2017.
“Representing a public corporation to investors and media is a novel experience for most of the chief executives,” Mr. Mills of Qamar Energy wrote in the newsletter Arabian Gulf Business Insight.
It may also turn out to be harder for Mr. Al Jaber to manage a far-flung empire than to steer a domestic firm sitting on extensive oil reserves.
With competition for oil and gas assets increasing, companies like ADNOC will have to ask themselves “why they are better placed to run facilities in other regions than other firms,” said Richard Bronze, head of geopolitics at Energy Aspects, a research firm.
Stanley Reed reports on energy, the environment and the Middle East for The Times from London. He has been a journalist for more than four decades.
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