Energy chief expects gas and electricity prices not to return to pre-invasion Ukraine levels – business live | energy industry

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Household energy bills remain above pre-invasion Ukraine levels – oil boss

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According to the head of Equinor, one of the world’s largest energy companies, household energy prices could remain higher than before the Russian invasion of Ukraine as countries pay for the costs of the green transition.

Anders OpedalEquinor CEO said there will be “more and more normal prices in a few years”.

Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022 has disrupted global energy markets and pushed up wholesale energy prices. These higher prices were quickly passed on to consumers around the world, causing inflation to accelerate and household spending to be cut. However, analysts are hoping for falling prices.

Still, Europe is undergoing a “rewiring” of its energy system, with a need for massively increased investment in renewable energy, Opedal said in an interview with ` Radio 4’s Today program on Monday. The Norwegian state-owned oil and gas company is one of the dominant players extracting polluting fossil fuels from the North Sea, but has also invested relatively little in renewable energy.

Opedal says:

We have to run the industry in a completely different way, maybe with hydrogen and so on. This is going to take a lot of investment and those investments need to be paid for, so I would assume that energy bills might be a bit higher than they have been in the past, but not as volatile and high as they are today.

We must treat energy as something that is not in abundance. It’s actually something that’s very valuable, and we’ve had a lot of cheap energy in the past. We probably wasted some of it.

It’s a fairly quiet day on the economic data front, but we’ll update you on that shortly Marks & Spencer‘s plans to hire 3,400 more employees and controversial subprime lender Friend Holdings‘ is struggling to attract new investments.