Saudi Aramco,  a global energy and chemicals company, has established a $1.5 billion sustainability fund to invest in technology to support a stable and inclusive energy transition that will help to address climate change.

The fund, managed by Aramco’s venture capital arm, is among the largest sustainability-focused venture capital funds globally and is an extension of the company’s efforts to meet the world’s growing energy demand with lower greenhouse gas emissions.

“The Sustainability Fund reinforces our commitment to leverage innovative technologies that will make a difference in addressing the dual challenge of achieving greater energy security and sustainability and show how these two great imperatives can and must co-exist,” said Aramco President and CEO Amin H. Nasser.

Aramco aims to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions across its wholly-owned operating assets by 2050. The funds would be invested in technology that supports the company’s 2050 net-zero goals while helping to develop new lower-carbon fuels. It will initially focus on areas such as carbon capture and storage, greenhouse gas emissions, energy efficiency, and hydrogen.

Highlighting Aramco’s participation in the Middle East and North Africa region’s first voluntary carbon market in Saudi Arabia, Nasser said this represents a pathway towards the company’s long-term net-zero ambition and demonstrates how they can deliver a multi-prolonged approach to address the climate challenges.

In June, the company announced a set of interim targets that it aims to achieve by 2035, which are intended to reduce or mitigate net emissions by more than 50 million metric tons of CO2 emissions annually.

The company is currently developing its blue ammonia and hydrogen business, intending to produce up to 11 million metric tons of blue ammonia annually by 2030. This comes with the potential to support significant emissions reductions in hard-to-decarbonize sectors such as heavy-duty transport, heating, and industrial applications.

The company is also exploring opportunities to reduce emissions along the entire value chain of its products. It aims to implement various initiatives to support the Circular Carbon Economy framework in which CO2 emissions are reduced, reused, recycled, and removed.

In June, Aramco announced it intends to generate 12 GW of renewable energy by 2030. It aims to use the allocation of renewable energy credits from the investments to decarbonize the power supply in Aramco’s operations.

Earlier in the year, Saudi Arabia’s General Authority for Statistics said the country plans to generate 15.1 TWh of renewable energy annually in the next two years to meet the power requirements of 692,557 households.