Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Sunday said his country was determined never to rely on a single energy supplier again and touted “progress” on gas projects during a visit to the United Arab Emirates.

The German leader is touring the Gulf in hopes of securing new energy deals to replace Russian supplies and ease the energy crisis stemming from Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

“We have made progress here on a whole series of projects in terms of the production and purchase of diesel and gas,” Scholz told journalists in the Emirati capital Abu Dhabi.

“The fact that we are dependent on a supplier and also on their decisions will certainly not happen to us again,” he added.

“With the investments that we are now making in Germany and which will become a reality step by step over the next year, we will actually have an infrastructure for gas imports for Germany, so that we will no longer be directly dependent on the respective supplier at the end of the Pipeline, as we are in a pipeline connection.”

On Saturday, Scholz met the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Jeddah, and on Sunday he was to fly to gas-rich Qatar to hold talks with Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani.

His trip to Qatar comes a day after France’s TotalEnergies signed a new $1.5 billion deal to expand natural gas production in Doha.

Scholz said such projects are “important”.

“We must ensure that the production of liquid gas in the world is pushed forward enough to meet the high demand – without having to resort to the production capacities in Russia that have been used so far,” he said.

In Abu Dhabi, Scholz visited an environmental project in a mangrove park with the UAE’s climate minister, Mariam Almheiri.

Almheiri said Sunday’s discussions would include “climate protection and economic growth” in addition to energy security.

“The UAE believes that all three pillars must go hand in hand. We can’t look at one or two of these pillars separately,” she said.

She also reiterated Abu Dhabi’s insistence on “a just transition” away from fossil fuels.

Both the UAE and Saudi Arabia have been leading critics of what they call “unrealistic” transition models, which they say have contributed to the current energy crisis.