Robin established Qamar Energy in 2015 to meet the need for regionally-based Middle East energy insight and project delivery. He is an expert on energy strategy and economics, described by Foreign Policy magazine as “one of the energy world’s great minds”. Prior to this, he led major consulting assignments for the EU in Iraq, and for a variety of international oil companies on Middle East business development, integrated gas and power generation and renewable energy.
Robin worked for a decade for Shell, concentrating on new business development in the UAE, Qatar, Iraq, Iran and other Middle Eastern countries, when he was described as the “Shell expert on Iran”. He subsequently worked for six years with Dubai Holding and the Emirates National Oil Company (ENOC), where he advanced business development efforts in the Middle East energy sector, including major gas import schemes for Dubai and upstream developments in Iraq, Qatar, Yemen, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Algeria and elsewhere.
He is the author of two books, The Myth of the Oil Crisis, which evaluates global long-term oil supply, and Capturing Carbon, the first comprehensive overview of carbon capture and storage for the non-specialist. He is the columnist on energy and environmental issues at The National newspaper (Abu Dhabi) and comments widely on energy issues in the media, including Foreign Policy, the Financial Times, The Atlantic, CNN, CNBC Arabiya, BBC, Al Jazeera, Bloomberg, Sky News and others.
Robin also authored a ground-breaking study Sunrise in the Desert: Solar becomes commercially viable in MENA, on solar power competitiveness in the Gulf (with PWC/Emirates Solar Industry Association) as well as Under the Mountains: Kurdish Oil and Regional Politics for the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies and Risky Routes: Energy Transit in the Middle East. He has been Non-Resident Fellow for Energy at the Brookings Institution. He holds a first-class degree in Geology from the University of Cambridge and speaks Arabic, Farsi, Dutch and Norwegian.
