Claudio Descalzi: On The Record with Hadley Gamble
📅 Nov 14, 2025The National News14 MIN457 VIEWS30 SEGMENTS · 2 SPEAKERS
Claudio Descalzi, chief executive of Italian energy company Eni, speaks to IMI chief international anchor Hadley Gamble to discuss global oil markets, the impact of sanctions on Russia, partnership plans with Malaysia's Petronas, and his concern that Europe will be left behind in the AI race.
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Questions asked in this interview
6
3:51In your mind, what's the greatest challenge there?
5:19Is Europe in danger of being behind yet again?
7:29I mean the war is still going, what's happened since 2014?
8:55Geopolitical events don't seem to move the market these days. What in your mind?
We formed a company with partners, a big business combination. It will produce initially 300,000 barrels per day, and within three years over 500,000 barrels per day, with 3 billion barrels of P1 reserves and about 10 billion barrels of contingent resources. It's a strategic company between Indonesia and Malaysia, a joint venture with state company Petronas, the first of its kind. We put together our assets; it's self-financing. This model allows right capital allocation because we discovered huge exploration reserves in Africa, Asia, and Northern Europe. Capital allocation is a critical issue: we need to invest in both transition and upstream. We are one of the few companies that continue to explore.
Yes, everybody, but as a listed company we have to be efficient in our financial KPIs, leverage, debt, and grow dividends. The equilibrium is difficult while investing in transition. This business combination will develop huge reserves and invest $15 billion over three years to develop eight new fields and drill 15 to 20 exploration wells. It's a huge company in a strategic area with existing facilities, fast time to market, producing LNG for domestic and Asian markets.
So I think that is something that is extraordinary and unique in this area and unique as a model.
One of the major themes here at the conference this year is energy transition for artificial intelligence. There's a lot of money that's going to be needed to get things moving, to grease the wheels if you will. In your mind, what's the greatest challenge there?
Artificial intelligence at the moment is growth. You have to invest a lot. The challenge is to put together growth and value. If you invest a lot and cannot get returns quickly, you can face a bubble. The first issue is energy. Hyperscale data centers and AI need a lot of energy. Energy has a cost. You have to invest in high-performance computing, data centers, power plants. It's a story of huge investment. AI can reduce energy costs, but at the moment it increases them. We have to find the right balance.
And energy as a cost. So you have to invest in high-performance computing, data centers, power plants or nuclear. It's a story of a lot of investment. Clearly there is huge potential, and we say normally that AI can reduce the cost of energy, but at the moment it increases the cost. So we have to find the right balance.
How challenging is it on the policy side? Because we're here at ADIPEC, there's a huge US delegation, the theme is energy dominance. They're very clear about the fact that they want to lead when it comes to energy investment and AI. Is Europe in danger of being behind yet again?
I think so. First of all, the US has a lot of pragmatism. They are very fast. The Chinese are fast and additionally they have energy. The US has a lot of energy, capital, and speed. China has less energy but critical minerals and very fast regulation tailored to reach targets. In Europe, we don't have energy. We are poor from that point of view. We have to buy energy, so the cost is two, three, four times higher than in the US. We base our growth on regulations. We want to understand everything so well that we don't start moving until everything is clear. By then, the race is finished and we are still analyzing.
15 more exchanges in this transcript
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Descalzi, C. (2025, November 14). Claudio Descalzi: On The Record with Hadley Gamble [Interview transcript]. The National News. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1054258/
MLA
Claudio Descalzi. "Claudio Descalzi: On The Record with Hadley Gamble." The National News, 14 Nov. 2025. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1054258/.
BibTeX
@misc{descalzi2025_1054258,
author = {Claudio Descalzi},
title = {Claudio Descalzi: On The Record with Hadley Gamble},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, The National News. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2025},
month = {nov},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1054258/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
