According to Susan Dio, chairman and president of BP America, meeting the world's rising demand for energy is a "dual challenge."
"To enable human prosperity for most of the world, we need more energy, but we need fewer emissions," she said.
This dual challenge, Dio said, is the "defining issue of our time."
"It's an issue that sparks passion, anger and frustration," she said, speaking at the Texas Oil and Gas Association's Lone Star Energy Forum held recently in Austin, Texas. "But we don't believe that reducing carbon emissions means the end of oil and gas. We believe it means innovating and leveraging our technology to meet the purpose of advancing energy to improve people's lives."
Dio said BP is taking a three-pronged approach to emissions reduction.
"We're focusing on reducing emissions in our operations, and we're well on our way to meeting our target reduction of 3.5 million tons by 2025," she said. "We're also focused on improved efficiency products and creating low-carbon businesses."
There is no single answer to the emissions challenge, Dio admitted.
"How we decarbonize in the United States requires a different answer than how they decarbonize in Beijing or Mumbai," she said. "It's a complex picture, and we need every tool at our disposal to solve this issue."
Companies are leveraging technology to address these challenges across the industry, she said.
Sharing some of BP's technological advances, Dio cited the company's implementation of Return to Scene (R2S) technology.
"It's a technology that was first developed for crime-scene investigation in Scotland," she said. "It performs 360-degree photographic imaging of a facility to create a digital twin, and it lets our in-office engineers inspect sites remotely and more thoroughly. [They] can go back and look at it again. It's faster, safer and more efficient."
BP is also applying drone technology for worldwide, continuous monitoring of methane emissions, as well as increasing the accuracy of well surveys using optimal gas imagery.
"It's sort of like laser technology," Dio explained. "Field technicians receive automatic work orders with well site images and videos before they arrive."
Thanks to that technology, BPX Energy drones can inspect 1,500 wells in just 30 days.
"And as drone technology improves, these 1,500 wells could be surveyed in half that time," she said. "This one technology has made a step-change improvement in methane emissions."
Dio noted the industry as a whole is making operations in oil and gas cleaner and better, but technology alone is not going to solve the emissions problem.
"We must innovate and we must collaborate in order to meet this global challenge," she said. "Across the spectrum, we're testing new ideas like carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) that can revolutionize how we source, use and track energy."
Industry-wide, the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative (OGCI) is investing $1 billion in innovative startups to lower the industry's carbon footprint, Dio said.
"But we have to continue to challenge how emerging technology such as [digitalization] and electrification play a role in this solution. Technology is going to play a huge part, but innovation is going to drive the solutions," she said.
Dio reminded listeners of the oil and gas industry's staggering global impact.
"What we do matters. We heat homes, and we power schools, hospitals and industries. We provide raw materials for products that make our daily lives better," she concluded. "And because we matter, we continue to share responsibility to meet the dual challenge together as an industry.
"We must produce our energy products in a much cleaner way. We're proud to be part of that solution."
