How Japan’s Top Fossil Fuel Producer Sees the World

In his panoramic view, INPEX CEO is poised to ride the wave of LNG in Asia. He’s also not losing sleep over Trump 2.0

Japan’s updated climate target is coming into clearer focus and garnering a lot of well-deserved attention. I plan on writing a couple of posts about this in the coming weeks, so stay tuned for those.

But today, I’d like to highlight a fascinating interview by Ueda Takayuki, the top brass of Japan’s biggest oil and gas developer, INPEX. A well-known figure among the global energy elites, Ueda gave a comprehensive preview of how he sees the energy transition, the role of gas in the emerging economies of Asia, implications of Trump 2.0, and his own company’s strategies for staying ahead of these trends.

In all, his outlook is a good proxy of how the world’s oil and gas giants expect decarbonization to unfold and how they see their roles in that mega-trend.

In this post, I pick out some of the takeaways from Ueda’s interview and put them into their broader contexts.

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Ueda Takayuki

President and CEO of INPEX Corporation, Ueda is the face of Japan’s largest oil and gas exploration company. Born in 1956, Ueda embodies the powerful bureaucracy-industrial coalition that rebuilt post-war Japan and led the country through rapid economic growth.

For most of his career, Ueda was a civil servant, climbing his way through the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) as soon as getting his law degree from the University of Tokyo in 1980. As most Japanese bureaucrats do, Ueda rotated through different posts within METI for nearly three decades, including its Agency for Natural Resources and the Small and Medium Enterprises Agency.

Ueda Takayuki, President & CEO of INPEX Corporation (source: Nikkei Business)