Whether small family operations or multi-billion-dollar energy titans, companies participating in the new energy innovation cycle need "a little help from their friends."
jim gable
Jim Gable, president of Chevron Technology Ventures and VP of Innovation
That’s where corporate ventures come in, playing a particularly essential role in achieving lower emissions, carbon capture and other forms of sustainable energy.
Discussing the advantages of collaboration at CERAWeek by S&P Global in Houston, Arindam Bhattacharya, managing director of SLB Ventures said that corporate ventures have been particularly important to his company in the last 16 or 17 years, but "it’s always been a strategic mandate for us."
"Obviously, everyone wants to make a bit of money, while being strategic. What that means has changed over the last few years, as the strategy of the company has changed," Bhattacharya said. "When looking at emerging technologies for our core business over the last four or five years, as we have created and incubated our new energy businesses, the shift of corporate ventures has really headed toward supporting these new businesses as we have created them."
That shift has moved SLB’s strategic mandate to become "a value proposition," Bhattacharya said.
"Besides the equity dollars that go into these companies to use our strengths in scaling and deploying technology, what we do very well in the oil and gas world seems to be transferring into the expanded new energy world," he said.
This shift has helped scale up some of these technologies in two dimensions, Bhattacharya said. The first addresses technological advancements, ensuring that these projects become ready for field deployment more quickly.
"The second thing is from a market aspect point of view — getting the benefit of our geographical footprint and opening markets that would be difficult — so we provide our operational platform to these companies," he said. "That is our strategic contribution. This is why we do that and that is a huge benefit for our own business."
Jim Gable, president of Chevron Technology Ventures and VP of Innovation, pointed to the company’s Chevron New Energies as an example of the spirit of collaboration, having been designed "to help lower carbon businesses deliver low carbon solutions to the marketplace."
"We always need to be faster and match the speed of the entrepreneurial ecosystem, but at the same time, different companies have so much to add in how we get to the size and scale of what we need to achieve. That is a very powerful combination to bring those two together," Gable said.
Chevron is spending $8 billion in lower carbon solutions by 2028, and Chevron New Energies is a big part of that, he added. Founded in 2021, Chevron New Energies focuses on hydrogen, as well as CCUS and offsets.
"The problem is so significant in what we’re trying to achieve, and the aspirations of where we need to go is so large. How can we leverage incumbents to help folks scale?" Gable said. "And how can we involve incumbents in our engineering expertise, experience, capabilities, brand and distribution systems earlier in the process?"
Often, Gable noted, various technologies "will get to us at the B stage or the C stage but, by then, it’s already plain that the technology is not feasibly scalable. The jump from zero to 60 is a nine-figured number with way too much market risk, and way too much technology risk and execution risk."
So, Gable reasoned, if there are ways to collaborate earlier in the process with companies that are more experienced in modularity, centralization and other fields of expertise, "that’s the real power" of collaboration.
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