Welcome to The Hill’s Sustainability newsletter, I’m Saul Elbein — every week we follow the latest moves in the growing battle over sustainability in the U.S. and around the world.

Heads of major oil companies took the stage at CERAWeek to offer two contradictory messages: that renewables development must continue, but that the age of oil would continue to expand indefinitely. 

Record demand for oil “strengthens the view that peak oil and gas is unlikely for some time to come, let alone 2030,” Amin Nasser, CEO of Saudi Aramco said on Monday. 

“We should abandon the fantasy of phasing out oil and gas, and instead invest in them adequately, reflecting realistic demand assumptions, as long as essential,” he said, to applause from the audience. 

Nasser was one of many oil and petrochemical company CEOs — like Exxon’s Darren Woods — to make the case that the very idea of an “energy transition” was impractical, and that customers would not agree to pay for it.  

Much of that argument hinged on the idea — which the oil and gas industry has unified around since last year’s U.N. climate conference — that it is emissions and not the burning of carbon-based fuels themselves that are the problem. 

“I think one of the challenges is the way the problem has been stated in the past, [which] is: ‘We need to get rid of fossil fuels and natural gas [and] crude [oil] and coal,'” Woods told Yahoo Finance. “And I think what we should stay focused on is: ‘We need to get rid of the emissions associated with the combustion of those things.'” 

This is a position that is controversial even within the oil industry. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), of which Saudi Arabia is a principal member, has estimated that oil demand would rise twice as fast as had been estimated by the International Energy Agency (IEA), an organization itself set up in the 1970s to maintain access to oil. 

The IEA has projected that oil demand will peak by 2030. 

Compared to OPEC, “the IEA has a very strong perception that the energy transition will move ahead at a much faster pace,” Neil Atkinson, a former head of the IEA’s Oil Markets Division, told Reuters. 

Asked about Nasser’s contention that oil demand would rise till mid-century, Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm was dismissive. “That’s one opinion,” she told Reuters. 

And Mansoor of EPRI suggested that whatever the oil and gas industry did, the electric industry should focus on cleaning up its own house — the prospects for which he argued were rosy. 

“ExxonMobil, Shell, Saudi Aramco, you know — they’re large oil and gas companies, they will have to look at their trajectory,” he said. 

“We look at the trajectory of: can we make clean electrons more efficiently and more affordably? And can we use clean electrons more effectively, more efficiently?” 

There are clear pathways, he said, “for the electric grid to be decarbonize — and for 40 to 60 percent of our energy that we use today will be electrified. So both of those are clear pathways.”