HE Abdullah bin Hamad al-Attiyah wishes to see The Abdullah Bin Hamad Al Attiyah Foundation For Energy and Sustainable Development becoming the “leading think-tank in the region and one of the leading institutions in the world” in energy and sustainable development.
“The foundation will aim to give advice and share knowledge, while specialising in research and analysis.  We will create workshops, white papers, seminars and studies about energy - How do we deal with the market, with oversupply, demand and prices?” he said during the launch of the function on Sunday night.
“I am a man who smells energy, lives energy. I cannot change! I am not a businessman and never worked in business. I decided after more than 40 years in the energy industry to create the foundation,” he said.
On the important focus areas of the foundation he said, “We will advise governments and companies on how to build their own projects, how to cut the fat in their expenses, how to avoid market shocks, how to be prepared, how to make the right calculations and how to plan ahead both in the short term and the long term.  
“We want people to knock on our door with questions which we will aim to answer based on our vast experience. The foundation will have leading experts from around the world, thinking clearly without the burdens and pressures of bureaucracy, budgets or politics.”  
Al-Attiyah said developing the energy industry in Qatar was not easy at the start.
“We had to educate ourselves, but we learned quickly. We should not deny that our foreign partners gave us a lot of technical support that helped us to develop. Now we are very proud that our energy industry is fully managed by Qataris as chief executive officers, and that we have created very successful technical and commercial teams. “We started to create scholarships for Qataris and sent hundreds to study at good universities especially in the United States, including the current Qatar Petroleum CEO Saad Sherida al-Kaabi.
Our mission was to prepare young Qataris who can face the challenges of the future. Foreigners come then leave, but citizens never leave. You cannot just build your future on foreign expertise.”
“Most of the engineering graduates came back to work in Qatar’s energy sector. Today we are also very proud that we have a lot of Qatari women working in the industry as engineers.
“The scholarship programme continues until now and we are still developing strategic links with educational institutions within Qatar to increase the number of home grown engineers and other specialists. This is not a quick fix, but it will build up the national knowledge base going into the future.”
Qatar, he said, has expanded the industry very quickly and today QP has many subsidiaries, all trying to employ more Qataris.  
“We have several strategies for ensuring that we have the human resources that we need to keep pace with our ambitious expansion programmes.
Now even our foreign partners are hiring Qataris; they also give us a lot of technical support and we use their training centres to train our nationals. That is a big change from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s when the IOCs resisted the idea of employing nationals.”