The Story of Energy & Innovation
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[Music] [Music] our next guest is the senior director for climate strategy and Technology at Exon Mobile he plays a key role there in guiding that company's approach to reduce green gas greenhouse gas missions and address climate change today he's going to share his strategic insights on how Innovation and energy are the vision for a sustainable future please welcome VJ [Music] suar have funy wow all right we're almost near the end and it's good to have an energy talk near the end because we're going to try to light you up with a little bit of energy and what I want to do there's been some amazing story time in so far
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today and so I'm going to tell you a story we're going to talk about the story of energy because quite frankly there's only one thing that ties everything that you've heard about today together and that is energy imagine this room without energy and none of you thought about it when you woke up this morning and you turned your lights on you didn't hope you didn't say I wonder if the lights are going to come on it's taken for granted and yet just about 150 years ago or so let me show you what energy was like so let's start the story on energy and we're going to go through this pretty quickly but 150 years ago life was just fine this was modern medicine you could do what you wanted to do burn the midnight candle you could pull an allnighter you could absolutely do what you wanted to do what life how much better can life get you had ink you had pens cameras I haven't quite figured out
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how you play music on that thing but you could take a picture you you could remember what it was like You' had modern washing and drying this wasn't that long ago let's see what else they did you could cook you had heat you could cook inside you could C outside there's biomass there's coal there's all sorts of things uh to cook we had systems and measurements we've heard a lot today about wearables and knowing what your pulse oxygen is and everything we could do systems and measurements back then we had the ability to do that we had modern communication we had telegrams we had the the uh the the printer we were able to do things and of course we had modern transportation we could move from point A to point B that horse has all weather Hooves okay so we could do those things we had an industry we had an industrial sector we had pulley we're able to take biomass
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get power turn it into things this was as good as was going to get the textile industry was taking off was not exactly dry fit but it fit and you could do what you wanted to do and we had supercomputers I don't know what these guys are talking about with all the stuff they're doing this thing right here it still amazes me that they could do all that modern math with an abacus so it is about Innovation and energy and I'll just fast forward a little bit because a couple of things happened that really changed the world one was synthetic chemistry and of course there was light and with light everything changed and now let's just fast forward about a hundred or so years and let's talk about energy today because it's not quite what it was like but the objective is the same the objective is to move
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around the objective is to have better health the objective is to have a better quality of life all underpinned by energy that's allowed populations to grow that's allowed us to live in different locations there was Florida without air conditioning wasn't nearly as much fun but you had it okay and pickle ball think about all the energy that goes into pickle ball I understand that's pretty popular around here okay let's talk about this though because today just think about all the stuff you heard about today and it's all about energy and Innovation I would argue that there is no sector out there that is more Innovative than energy and we're going to peel this onion a little bit further as we continue on our story but just look at the things that we have today that quite frankly when I started in this industry in 1987 I would not have even imagined it I mean it is unimaginable what we're doing we're in an imagination conference and I can't imagine what we were doing
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doing so we have electric vehicles we have artificial intelligence that we've heard a lot about we have a phone that the last thing you use it for is a phone when was the last time you made a call on your phone my kids don't pick up if I call them if I text them and say I'm going to call you they will answer but if I call them directly no chance no chance you got to text first I don't understand but we're able to do that and we're able to do that and take it for granted because of all the Innovations the thousands and thousands of patents the Innovations a lot of it in America a lot of American Technology in this and today we have 8 billion people on this planet amazing but let's talk about that 8 billion people and let's talk about what is still happening today so what's this energy challenge look at these pictures now did I just AI the pictures from the first set with color
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no this is today this is what a billion people still face a billion people do not have access to energy three billion people don't have access to modern living conditions that's three out of eight that's one out of eight that's a lot and yet I just showed you all the technology we have and this is still happening seems like we should do something about that and of course we can now because we have ample energy the technologies that have been developed over the last 20 30 years fracking in the US who' have ever thought the US would export the amount of energy we export Renewables lithium ion batteries the grid connectivity we know how to do this but the problem with this slide is it says the global energy challenge singular it's not singular it's a global energy dual
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challenge because while we have all that technology one of the running themes that we've heard about today is we have to reduce emissions so while we have energy we have to remember that emissions are going up and so we have a global energy dual challenge that's the next chapter of energy how do we take on this dual challenge how do we continue to provide the energy that all of you take for granted that a billion people think is Magic and how do we do the things that the previous two or three speakers just talked about which is we've got to get our hands around emissions we have to bend the curve to use the uh Anthony fouchy term we have to get the emissions down at the core this is a technology challenge yes it's going to have to integrate with policy yes it's going to have to integrate with infrastructure but the technology is what I want to talk about because that's where we got to think about how we do it and we've got to get on with doing
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it now to really understand energy the other challenge is the third dimension of this is scale so let me talk a little bit about how we do this so scale this is a picture of our Baton Rouge complex when I started back in the Dark Ages 1987 300,000 barrels a day something like that was a world scale facility that's now an expansion this scale of this industry so I'm going to talk about scale in terms of magnitude I'm also going to talk about the scale of energy in a different way and that's the integration across technology so if you want to be a pharmacist what do you study Pharmacy if you want to be a biologist what do you study you study biology if you want to be an energy scientist what do you study there's no degree in energy energy is the ultimate interdisciplinary
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industry it requires every discipline of engineering and every discipline of science working together chemical engineering mechanical engineering nuclear engineering civil engineering blah blah math physics chemistry biology throw in economics throw in policy throw in social science with the equity and the and the just transition and all of that has to come together so magnitude of scale complexity of scale integration of Technologies geographical differences other than that no problem now scale how many of you know what uh the city Energy System is 600 quadrillion BTUs how many of you know what a quadrillion BTU is no how about an Exel no no EXs either how about a terawatt Patt anything no no no it's a lot yeah
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there's probably some Engineers out there that that know this would stay with me for a minute okay because I'm going to try to put this in context so let's talk about it in something you might know let's talk about energy 45 round trips did the sun on a 747 that's how much energy we use in a year still not impressed okay how about 40,000 trillion ablea batteries no and I can never find one that works okay we would need four quadrillion no that's still not there how about 240 trillion Big Macs a day a day I know there's some students out there that's just lunch I know but 246 the size of this is amazing it it's it's always just I'm fascinated by scale I'm fascinated by scale and I'm fascinated by the ability for us to
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express scale this is going to take collaboration and Innovation at scale to reach the dimensions of scale that we need to get to that's our challenge people like to boil us down to a simple thing this is a very complicated problem which needs serious discussion and serious technology development and serious collaboration so we're going to talk a little bit about well what exactly does that collaboration look like because we know how to do I just showed you about all the Innovations we've made they've been made through tremendous collaborations universities working with industry working with National Labs working with across governments across countries that's what we need to do so we need to collaborate and innovate and if we do that let's talk about some of the technologies that are on the horizon now we've talked a lot about AI but that thing in the upper left that's actually what's got me pretty excited and that's Quantum Computing I know the previous speaker mentioned Quantum very quick quickly but
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Quantum Computing is going to allow us to understand energy and nature at levels we never have so we'll be able to model Energy Systems and move products around and design materials like we never have you hear a lot about hydrogen why do people talk about hydrogen all the time because when you burn hydrogen you get water you don't create the CO2 the question is how do you make the hydrogen so you have to comb Technologies to make the hydrogen what else can we do we can come up with um carbon capture the picture in the middle so the CO2 is made but if you capture it and then you have three choices of what to do you can either convert it into something you want you can use it as is or you can bury it okay but the first step is you have to capture and again you have to capture it it scales that just haven't been demonstrated yet
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Plastics Plastics allow food to stay fresh it is why we have blueberries 12 months a year because you can move food around but we need better Plastics to continue uh to to have food preservation have the quality light lighter weights for cars more durable some of the pictures here are these strength high strength polymers they can back out steel back out concrete to very very high energy intensive emitting uh emissions emitting sectors but if you can get a polymer to do it a plastic to do it there's no emissions associated with that now there's emissions associated with making it but not with using it so again combine a couple of pictures here take carbon capture on the back of a plant make the product you want you can start thinking about how this goes now truth be told those are things we're working on okay there's a lot of other Technologies out there let's just start listing some of them in fact there's a National Petroleum Council report that was written that encourage you to read that
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talks about the technologies that are on the horizon talks about geothermal it talks about Renewables solar wind tidle ocean currents uh biofuels biology all of these things and again what's the common theme they integrate to cross disciplines to solve a common problem because here's the one thing we know we're not going to go backwards on energy we only go forward the evolution of energy is always improved that's what's fascinated me for 30 plus years and it's going to fascinate me for a long long time still so let's talk about this now and look Randy does this this is an amazing conference and one of the things I like about this conference is the range of people we have kids from sixth grade seventh grade eighth grade and then we have energy Titans here so we all know that when you work together Innovation happens imagine McCartney and lennin not together okay Innovation
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happens look at patents patents always have co-authors there's Innovation Works together so if we can Inspire the kids today to think about it to raise their hand to step up and say I think I have an idea let's work it let's get them in the stem programs because everything's going to be needed as I said we need all of these disciplines uh to come together and then you get these guys who get the guy in the middle he wins right his light went off first but let's fast forward a little bit because we're just coming off of one of the most consequential collaboration events ever and this was cop 28 in Dubai I had the honor of going there and spending the better part of a week there where you had industry and government startups everyone coming together this is a problem that needs inclusion it needs people working together it needs collaborations at Scales that we just haven't
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seen that's what we're here for that's why we do these conferences to drive the discussion forward to understand the problem to put the capabilities behind the problem and then as it says there this is an Innovation Challenge this is an imagination challenge this is an Innovation Challenge and if there's one word that you take away from this talk it's got to be scale we have got to do this at scale and and so we've got to understand how we go from Lab to scale and we're beginning to see things happening you see the US Ira which is which is enabling deployments of Technologies projects are moving forward you see people starting to think about this you've seen some talks today challenging paradigms on how you you know manu's talk is a perfect example of that those are all low energy low energy consumption ideas but they serve the purpose so there's nothing we can do we can't do if we put our minds together
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and we work together and that's the core of the speech we have got to innovate innovate innovate because if we do it all comes together okay yesterday's Abacus is today's generative AI is tomorrow's Quantum Computing the horse became the car is going to become the electric car we're going to go to the grid we're going to do all these types of things because if we imagine we'll able to swipe right and we'll able to walk ourselves into the future imagine that thank you very [Applause] [Music] much
Imagine Solutions and the 501(c)(3) Searching for Solutions Institute were founded in 2008 with the mission to bring leading-edge speakers and thinkers to engaged audiences of change-makers, addressing matters of societal importance related to science, medicine and healthcare, business, social entrepreneurship, nonprofit, social sciences, the arts, conservation and the environment, exploration and discovery, and more, and the vision of generating real conversations and the space for impact, influence, and connection.