Oil industry banker urges Houston to embrace clean energy

Oil industry banker urges Houston to embrace clean energy

Houston, the epicentre of America's oil industry, needs to embrace the shift to cleaner energy to secure its economic future, one of the city's top oil bankers says.

"If Houston wants to continue to be the world's leading energy capital, then it's going to need to be a leader in the newer forms of energy," Bobby Tudor, chair of the investment bank Tudor, Pickering, Holt & Co, told the Financial Times.

Houston, the country's fourth-largest city, has been propelled by the oil and gas industry for more than a century, and saw its economy supercharged over the past decade as the shale industry took off.

Yet environmentalists and some city officials have long warned it needs to start planning for its post-oil future. Tudor is part of a growing chorus of industry insiders coming to the same conclusion as the oil boom starts to fade and growth and capital in the energy sector shifts to low-carbon technologies.

The oil industry is "highly unlikely to be contributing to Houston's growth in the next decade or two in the way that it has in the last decade or two", said Tudor. "We don't think it's going away, but it's going to be a much slower growth