Mahmoud Abouelnaga is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s GeoTech Center and a Federation of American Scientists impact fellow at the US Department of Energy. He is an energy engineer and climate policy expert with global work experience in clean energy technologies, environmental management, and climate policy in Africa, Europe, and North America. He focuses on decarbonization of hard-to-abate sectors, enabling large-scale durable carbon sequestration, and commercialization of disruptive technologies to mitigate climate change. Abouelnaga writes frequently on the overarching topic of climate policy and clean energy technologies.

Prior to that, Abouelnaga led the carbon management portfolio at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions where he engaged policymakers and business leaders on global policies needed to support carbon management technologies. Abouelnaga also worked for bioMérieux, a biotechnology company, at their headquarters in France. His work focused on several dimensions of climate change management: strategy, risk management, and carbon assessment—and reporting with a focus on enhancing the reporting of supply chain (Scope 3) greenhouse gas emissions. He also co-founded CAREforSeven, an initiative that promotes UN Sustainable Development goal seven—affordable and clean energy—by training students to develop solar chargers from electronic waste. His prior experience also includes working as a petroleum engineer in Egypt.

Abouelnaga’s work has been featured in different magazines and he has been quoted by various media outlets including Bloomberg, Energy Daily, EnergyWire, Nature, Enterprise, and Politica Exterior. He was selected by the Posterity Institute and the United Arab Emirates’ Ministry of Climate Change and Environment as one of the twenty young sustainability pioneers in the Middle East and North Africa. He was also selected by the World Energy Council as one of the future energy leaders who will work with the US Member Committee on advancing the energy transition on the road to the twenty-sixth World Energy Congress in Rotterdam in 2024.

Abouelnaga was part of the inaugural class of Obama scholars at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago, where he earned an MA in international development and policy and a certificate in energy and environmental policy. He also holds an MSc in sustainable energy engineering from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, an MSc in environmental management from Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, and a BS with honors in petroleum engineering from Suez University.