On the evening of Nov. 25^th, Dr. Tony Hayward, who is a member of Advisory Board of Tsinghua SEM and Chief Executive Officer of BP Group, visited our school, giving a speech on the topic “Delivering Energy for Sustainable Growth” at International Report Hall of Weilun Building. Almost 500 teachers and students listened to the speech, and had a face-to-face communication with Dr. Tony Hayward. The lecture was hosted by Professor Qian Yingyi, the Dean of Tsinghua SEM.

Dr. Tony Hayward’s humorous opening speech answered for the current situation. He said, “I came here in an extremely special time. During this period of time, lots of unusual things have taken place in the whole world. First of all, the oil price doesn’t develop as what people have expected; secondly, the financial crisis has globally spread from banking industry to some more economic fields; in addition, earlier this month, Obama was elected the new president of United States, which should be the biggest change of all.”

Tony Hayward, as the head of BP Group, which is one of the largest oil and petrochemical groups in the world, mainly talked about oil stuffs. In his speech, he firstly elaborated his assessment on the current global prices of crude oil. He said, “a few months ago, it forecast the oil prices would soon reach 200 U.S. dollars each barrel. However, the current price has fallen below 60 dollars.” As for the reasons, Tony Hayward believed that, the first one was that the long-term high price resulted in a drop in demand; meanwhile, the high oil price also caused OPEC to increase the crude oil production in 2008; in addition, economy decline, accompanied by the financial crisis, also accelerated the reduction of market demand. However, he also stressed that, in the long term, the supply-demand relationship was still the determining factor in price. With the fast increase of world’s population, the demand for energy would also go up. The low energy price would just a thing of the past.

As the chairman of CEO Forum on Global Climate Change, Dr. Tony Hayward also gave his own opinions on energy security and clean energy development. In his view, the best guarantee of energy supplies was a stable and open global market, low tariffs and trade barriers, and steady continuous financial policies and regulations, which should be necessary and critical. For the development of clean energy, he believed this was the necessary measure in response to the global climate change. He also introduced that BP had already worked together with several domestic universities, including Tsinghua University, to develop clean energies, and through collaboration with some schools, to strengthen Chinese students’ awareness of the environmental protection and climate change. At the end of the speech, Tony Hayward specially emphasized on the importance of win-win cooperative relations.

After the speech, Dr. Tony Hayward launched a fully interactive activity with the present teachers and students. Students put forward various issues in English, and Dr. Tony Hayward replied to those issues seriously one by one.

Dr. Tony Hayward, at his early years, studied Geography Major at University of Birmingham in England, and received a Doctor Degree at University of Edinburgh at Scotland. In 1982, he joined BP Group, beginning his career as a geologist in the oil drilling of North Sea. Since then, he successively served in the position of technology and business fields in many countries, including China. In May 2007, Dr. Tony Hayward took up the CEO of BP Group. In the same year, Dr. Hayward was the member of the Advisory Board of Tsinghua SEM. He is also the chairman of CEO Forum on Global Climate Change.