Businessman touts the shift to less polluting options, but crude's byproducts will remain one of the biggest drivers of his $80 billion fortune.
Along the Arabian Sea, the Indian city of Jamnagar is a money-making machine for Asia’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, processing crude oil into fuel, plastics, and chemicals. It’s also where the billionaire is making his newest bet: a $10 billion investment in green energy.
In a swath of arid land, to the city’s southwest, Ambani’s Reliance Industries Ltd. owns the world’s biggest oil refining complex. It’s a sprawling network of plants and pipelines that can process 1.4 million barrels of petroleum a day in an operation covering half the area of Manhattan. In fiscal 2021, Reliance generated about 45 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions from its own operations, which puts the company among the top such emitters in India, according to data on other companies tracked by Bloomberg. Much of that came from its Jamnagar refineries.
Next door, in a nod to a changing--and warming--world Ambani is now building factories that make more environmentally friendly products like solar panels, electrolyzers, fuel cells, and batteries.
On the face of it, the new investment is a sharp pivot for a giant conglomerate whose fortunes have been linked to oil refining for decades. Yet even as Ambani, 64, touts the shift to less polluting options, crude’s byproducts will remain one of the biggest drivers of the $80 billion fortune that’s made him the world’s 12th richest man.
Reliance gets nearly 60% of its $73 billion in annual revenue from its oil-related business, which is so lucrative that it’s attracting other investors. The Middle Eastern energy firm Saudi Aramco is in discussions for the purchase of a roughly 20% stake in Reliance’s refining and chemicals business.
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