Collaboration among leading industry associations is helping members and companies share technical knowledge and meet the world’s energy needs in a safe and environmentally responsible manner. One such agreement is between the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) and the International Association of Oil and Gas Producer (IOGP), who are actively engaged in a memorandum of understanding.
The executive director of the IOGP, Iman Hill, shared her views on the future of oil and gas recently with SPE. She has more than 30 years of oil and gas experience and has served across companies such as BP and Shell. Hill has held positions in offices around the world, ranging from onshore to ultradeep water. Here is an excerpt from her interview. Watch the full interview here.
What is IOGP?
One of our key objectives is to enhance the understanding of the contribution that oil and gas makes to everyday life and to fulfilling global energy demand, as well as the critical role the industry plays in the transition to a lower carbon future. From three offices in London, Brussels, and Houston, we serve our 70-plus global members driving and catalyzing step changes in safety, sound environmental management, standardization in engineering to reduce cost and scheduling capital projects. And to enable the supply chain to be more efficient. We publish up to 40 good-practice and guidance documents per year, working with almost 2,000 industry experts from our member companies in 11 committees and about 80 subgroups.
What main challenges is the industry facing right now?
Without any doubt, fighting climate change and achieving a lower carbon future remains a top priority for both industry and society. And the current pandemic has brought this into sharp focus.
I think there are two fundamental facts that need to be understood by the broader public. One is that transitioning to a lower-carbon world is a decade’s long journey and one that cannot be made without the partnership of the only source of reliable and affordable energy available to the world right now. And that’s oil and gas. And then, the second thing is that there are different paths to achieving a lower-carbon future. Each region, each country has a unique and diverse energy system as its starting point with different energy resources, demand dynamics, different amount of capital for investment, technologies, geographies, and culture. And the same is true for us in the oil and gas industry.
We contribute to a lower-carbon future in a number of ways: reducing emissions in our own operations, including reducing flaring; supporting the coal-to gas-switch, particularly as a starting point in developing countries; investment in renewables, including biofuels; carbon capture, utilization, and storage; and clean hydrogen.
Do you have some tangible examples of this?
According to the IEA (International Energy Agency), [CCUS] is key to reducing emissions from heavy industries that account for almost 20% of global CO2 emissions. It is the most cost-effective approach in many regions to curb emissions in iron, steel, and chemicals manufacturing. The technology can also be retrofitted to existing power and industrial plants that could otherwise emit around 600 billion tonnes of CO2 over the next 50 years.
IOGP are supporting this with advocacy and engagement with all stakeholders to make sure that there is sufficient political support and enabling policies to bring these projects forward. There is so much progress being made in the energy-transition space and the journeys of our members. This is just the tip of the iceberg. We would need a good couple of hours for me to be able to share everything that our members are doing. Let me start with some of the facts.
ExxonMobil. So, on carbon capture and storage, I wonder how many of our listeners know that ExxonMobil, for example, have captured 120 million tons of CO2 since 1970. Just to put that in perspective, that’s the equivalent of taking 25 million cars off the road for 1 year. And the company continues to capture 9 million tonnes of CO2 per year through investment in that technology.
BP. If I move on to BP, and we talk about hydrogen, for example. The UK has largest hydrogen project proposed in Teesside, and it would be the largest in the UK, producing up to 1 GW of blue hydrogen, or 20% of the UK’s hydrogen target by 2030.
Shell. Shell expects its 10-MW green hydrogen electrolyzer in Germany to start production in the summer of this year. In Ireland, the company is a 51% shareholder in the 300-MW Emerald floating wind farm in the early stage of development.
Total. One last example for you. We’ve all heard, very recently, Total’s intent to become a world leader in renewables in line with its strategy to transition into an increasingly broader energy company by 2030. And, you know, since 2016, Total’s invested $8 billion in renewable power, increasing its gross renewable capacity to about 7 GW.
A lot is going on, and I like that we find ourselves speaking about these real-life examples of our support and our industry’s investment in the energy transition to a low-carbon future.
What is IOGP’s role in the energy transition?
Supporting our members on their journeys towards the lower-carbon future is a core area of our work in IOGP and one that is increasingly important. We’re working on an extensive low-carbon agenda for our members, developing a portfolio of deliverables related to electrification, flaring and venting, carbon capture and storage, and energy efficiency. We’ve also been a supporting organization to the methane guiding principles since 2018. And we’re contributing with a range of good-practice guidance, including guidelines for methane emissions, target setting, as well as for detection, quantification, and reporting.
We must remember, when we talk about greenhouse-gas emissions, we also have to include methane in there, which molecule-for-molecule is 26 times more warming than CO2. And, although it doesn’t last in the atmosphere for so long, it actually decays to become CO2. So, when we talk about emissions, we must include both.
We’ve also had IOGP endorsed the European Union’s Green Deal, which aims to achieve climate neutrality by 2050. In our Brussels office in Europe, our agenda is focused on three main axes: reducing our carbon footprint, supplying cleaner energy, and developing long-term solutions. Those are the three axes with which we engage for our members with policymakers, etc.
And then one last example. We’re working [with OGCI and Ipieca] on recommended practices for methane emissions detection. We’re also going to complete a flaring-management guideline with the World Bank’s global gas flaring reduction partnership. And this will be relevant for governments, regulatory bodies, as well as for the oil and gas industry. So those are some of the things that we do. Again, not everything, but to give you a flavor.
What has been your experience of cultural diversity? And how has that framed your approach to business?
What a great question. We see, read, and hear a lot about diversity, equality, and inclusivity. I’ve personally been involved in work around this topic since the late ’80s. I celebrate the progress that has been made. My honest personal belief is that more progress would have been made, and will be made, if we’d collectively agree that inclusivity is the area that needs work. Because diversity doesn’t mean gender, skin color, or ethnicity. Well, it does, but only on the surface. And I want to give you a very close-to-home example. I’m going to talk about our HSE director at IOGP, Olav Skår. You take him and me. He’s a tall, broad Norwegian man with blond hair and blue eyes, and I’m a small Egyptian/Palestinian woman with dark hair and dark eyes. With the superficial definition of diversity, we are diverse. But the facts are that we have a very similar set of values and the same people-centric approach. It is very likely that we make decisions based on a similar personal reference set and have a similar communication and leadership style. So, in that sense, we may not be diverse.
I look at inclusivity as the recognition, acceptance, and respect for differences. It’s a mindset and an inner conviction that manifests itself in the way that we behave. It’s a difficult thing to teach and to have policies for. How do you make someone be genuinely inclusive? I’ve lived all over the world, and my children have lived all over the world. They are truly global. But if it isn’t part of who you are, or you don’t believe in the benefit, or you might even find the benefit potentially threatening, then how do you teach someone or make rules for inclusivity? If we could get to the core of what makes inclusivity happen, I think we’d have a lot faster and wider progress on the whole agenda of diversity, equality, and inclusion.
Our ability has been less structured in being able to tackle something that is much softer, and much less, something you can’t touch and feel, which is a mindset, or an inner conviction about how you want to be in the world. And finally, on this point, if you haven’t seen them yet, I encourage you to watch the IOGP Women in Energy series of interviews. This is a great idea by one of our staff in the Brussels office, Matilde Mattei. She thought it up, she planned it, and she’s made it happen. And I just wanted to broadly acknowledge her for this and to welcome you to have a look and see, because you’ll see lots of different views about what it's like to work in our industry.
