Rosman Hamzah, Secretary General of MGA, spoke at The Next Energy Frontiers webinar series: Accelerating the Energy Evolution in the Industrial Sector organised by MGA member, ENGIE, in conjunction with iGEM 2021.  Moderated by Wong Yin Kee, Managing Director of ENGIE Services Malaysia, the conversation focusing on “Accelerating the Energy Evolution in the Industrial Sector” featured fellow panellists from the energy industry including Guillaume Damayan, Head of Industry Solutions, ENGIE Southeast Asia and Suraj Radhakrishnan, Senior Technical Advisor, Jacobs Engineering Group Malaysia.

The Webinar started with an opening statement from the panellist sharing an overview and their perspective on the importance of energy evolution as part of decarbonisation efforts in the industrial sector.

Rosman started his opening statement with an introduction to MGA role as the lead advocate in the Malaysian gas industry.  Being in the energy industry for the past 27 years, he first takes the audience back to the history of the Malaysian energy industry in the early 1990s where the priorities were to provide a stable and reliable power supply at very affordable rates.  He further added that there was less concern on environmental and GHG emissions during the early days.  Fast forward today, the environmental factor has become higher in priority to ensure the energy industry is operating more sustainably.  This comes along with more stringent clean air regulations in 2014 to reduce air pollution and commitment to achieve 45% GHG emission reduction by 2030.

Further highlighting the importance of gas in the energy transition towards decarbornisation of the industrial industry, Rosman comprehensively concluded the following key takeaways:

1. With the energy reliability, affordability and sustainability remains intact, businesses today have to embrace and adopt a balanced energy evolution approach in making sustainability agenda their main priority
2. Natural gas as the cleanest burning fuel, more flexible and emits lower emissions will continue to play its critical role in ensuring a reliable energy supply for the industrial sector.  With the gas market being fully liberalised in 2022, the buyers will have more options to buy gas from multiple suppliers and further reducing the supply challenges with an extensive gas delivery supply system via CNG or LNG.
3. Going to the future, the energy industry needs a comprehensive policy to drive and achieve its sustainable goals.
4. There is no single bullet, all forms of energy are needed to accelerate a pragmatic energy transition

Watch the full recording from the session that is available at this link