That’s the beauty of having this younger generation... You need to be honest, you need to give them the challenge - Namita Shah

While the destination of a net zero carbon future is well defined, the pathway to this vision is still under development. The need for deep decarbonization at pace across the energy sector has precipitated a radical rethink of the traditional business models of that have dominated the hydrocarbons industry over the past several decades. Leaders from the energy majors, national oil companies and EPCs across the globe are pivoting from acting as traditional producers of oil and gas to providers of multiple forms of energy in order to lead the transition to a lower-carbon energy system and safeguard the future of their organizations.

The discussion will examine the organizational and cultural transformations underway across the industry, including how to ensure the sector is both attracting new and upskilling existing talent to prepare for the challenge ahead. The panel will also look at investment and innovation in new and existing technologies and how organizations may reassess appetite for experimenting with more unproven technologies to accelerate the identification of innovative solutions to drive the transition.

Namita Shah

TotalEnergies recently pivoted from an oil and gas company to an energy company, starting to add renewables, hydrogen and other technologies to its portfolio. One of the first big questions it tackled was how to make sure it had the right mix of people to make the transformation—and ensure that everyone in the company felt they were a meaningful part of it. “So, we put our 3,400 engineers and researchers from all of our different business units into one organization called ONEtech.” The idea is two-fold: to leverage the wealth of cross-discipline in-house expertise on every project and, just as importantly, to show people that their competencies really are transferrable to a variety of different energies. “And it has been easier for us to attract new talent,” said Shah, “it’s become definitely easier to speak to a wider variety of people.” In terms of fuel shift, Shah says they’re focusing on green hydrogen in their own localized refineries, and blue or green, whichever fits best, with its large-scale development projects.

Abdulrahman Abdulla Al Seiari

ADNOC Drilling is on a mission to provide maximum energy with minimum emissions. The company has for many years been evolving its power solutions, and can easily deliver over 200 wells from a single island. It’s latest technology journey involves electrified rigs supplied from the grid. Al Seiari says this requires a lot of collaboration. Since 2018, the company has been using a new high-efficiency field approach that reduces the number of wells needed, and reduces emissions. It’s also been introducing many incremental improvements to minimize emissions in its own operations.

ADNOC Drilling, in collaboration with Baker Hughes, created an integrated drilling services business that gives our customers a total solution while minimizing emissionsi

Felipe Bayón

After more than 70 years as an integrated oil and gas company, Ecopetrol is now very quickly transforming into a diversified energy company. The goal is to grow the company by 50% and, by 2040, to have half its total value come from low-emission businesses. “I think technology provides a very powerful catalyst to do this,” says Bayón. It recently bought a transmission company with 50,000 km of high-voltage lines serving 180 million people in Latin America. It also created a new  low‑emission business division that right now is looking at hydrogen, CCUS, wind, solar, and geothermal. It already has some large regional projects running,
with several others to be sanctioned soon. Ecopetrol produces 130,000 tons of hydrogen, mostly gray, with about 20% blue. Moving forward, it will use 60% of
that to improve the quality of its gasoline and diesel, while the other 40% will be used to create hubs with steel mills and cement companies. On the traditional
side, Ecopetrol made some very large deepwater gas discoveries last year. Using learnings from other countries, it’s quickly developing subsea to shore.

We put technology at the heart of being sustainable

Cheonhong Park

Samsung Engineering is a longstanding EPC company with aims to develop end-to-end hydrogen infrastructure supplying Korean demand from sources in the Middle East, US Gulf Coast, Southeast Asia and Australia. There’s a lot of collaboration involved with partners and clients. Korea unfortunately has no fossil fuel and very little renewable energy resources. Its power generation mix is roughly equal parts nuclear power, coal, and natural gas, with about 7% from renewable sources. With the government’s 40% target for reducing CO₂ emissions by 2030 versus 2018, Park said “it’s not enough to secure all your clean energy from overseas. We need to remove existing CO₂ emissions in Korea’s petrochemical, steelmaking, and cement industries.” So, the other value chain Samsung is developing with partners is to capture CO₂ and liquefy it for transport to other countries with abundant geological formations for storage. Korea faces a unique obstacle in that it cannot connect to other energy systems from the north, nor can it connect to China or Japan overseas. “So, the only way in an energy security perspective,” says Park, “is that we develop the projects together with overseas partners and get them to invest in the Korean domestic infrastructure so that we can create value together.” He sees Korea as a testbed for this kind of approach, and expects it will help other countries down the road.

Korea could be a testbed for these new energy systems

Robert Tikovsky

Air Products is the world’s largest producer of hydrogen. “One has to be bold and committed,” said Mr. Tikovsky about making strategic investment decisions. One
key priority is affordable and plentiful energy—renewable for green or natural gas for blue. Another factor is the project’s location—is there infrastructure, water access, a distribution network? An additional beneficial element is having the right conditions and support. He said NEOM in Saudi Arabia is a great example:
a mega-scale green ammonia/hydrogen project with ample energy (wind and sun) sources, plenty of space, sea access, and three committed partners. Air Products’ blue hydrogen project in Louisiana, US includes space to sequester the CO2, natural gas, access to infrastructure, including the company’s US Gulf Coast hydrogen network, and more. Similarly, its project in Edmonton, Canada has abundant natural gas but will deliver net-zero emissions and be part of the company’s established Alberta hydrogen pipeline system. And Air Products’ recent announcement in upstate New York—a green hydrogen project with access to renewable power, in this case, hydropower. Tikovsky said there is commitment to deliver hydrogen projects at scale to decarbonize and it is his belief that this energy transition has to take place. “The world has already passed the point of no return, but to make decarbonization happen.”

One has to be bold and committed